THE INFLUENCE OF A FOREIGN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN EARLY CHILDHOOD ON THE COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PERSONALITY

Abstract

This article examines how memories that are acquired by learning a foreign/second language during early childhood are latently retrieved in adult age and influence the further cognitive development. It describes a study of adult learners who had spoken a foreign/second language besides their native language before the age of five, at basic level only, and who resumed learning that language after the age of eighteen or even later. The findings of this research show that these persons outperformed in a short period of time those who started the study of another language in adulthood both in terms of grammar and vocabulary. The conclusions point out the fact that early language acquisition can be accessed in adulthood upon a re-learning phenomenon and also influences other cognitive skill acquisitions.

Headnote

Abstract: This article examines how memories that are acquired by learning a foreign/second language during early childhood are latently retrieved in adult age and influence the further cognitive development. It describes a study of adult learners who had spoken a foreign/second language besides their native language before the age of five, at basic level only, and who resumed learning that language after the age of eighteen or even later. The findings of this research show that these persons outperformed in a short period of time those who started the study of another language in adulthood both in terms of grammar and vocabulary. The conclusions point out the fact that early language acquisition can be accessed in adulthood upon a re-learning phenomenon and also influences other cognitive skill acquisitions.

Keywords: foreign/second language, cognitive development, early childhood, language acquisition, re-learning.

Introduction

The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between early language learning and cognitive development and show the extent to which this assumption relates to language learning and also to Romanian learners who have been submitted to the influence of a foreign language since early childhood. We can start from the fact that the language acquisition implies the child's exposure to some linguistic data and many specialists argue that the language is learnt by the strength of the context generalization. The Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) believes that "all language items are essentially interlinked."1 He argues that "language was like a game of chess, a system in which each item is defined by its relationship to all the others...language is a carefully built structure of interwoven elements."2

Foreign language teachers have long been facing a string of psycholinguistic theories. One approach is the traditional method to second/foreign language teaching and learning. This comprises both the grammar translation method which developed at the end of the eighteenth century and the direct method that developed in the late nineteenth century as a reaction against the grammar-translation method. Prior to the time of Chomsky, "little was known about the process of second language acquisition, and thus (traditional approaches) were grounded in the linguistic, psychological, and pedagogical theories of their day."3 The communicative approach of our days has laid the emphasis on learning a new language as a means of communication and has started to take into account the learners' interests and life experience. That is why we consider speaking and listening as integrative skills, we can no longer take them separately. The impact of the cultural environment on the relationship between language and thought

The language used by a person determines his/her perception of the world, the representation of space, time and emotions. Thus, the grammatical and semantic categories of each language are not just tools to communicate thoughts, but give form to our ideas and shape our mental activity. There are many researchers and specialists who equate thought with language, as a superior assertion level of the special quality of human intelligence. Language, as support of thought, develops, is valued and becomes a determining factor in the learning process. That is why people with different mother tongues can have different thinking perspectives, different ways of understanding and decoding the world around them. The language reflects the specificity of the cognitive cultural environment of different peoples and social realities, providing "labels" in order to memorize and store this information. Every language comprises things that are handed down from one generation to another, and this reflects the way of thinking of a certain people, what they think it is right. For example, the Britons were people who preferred working on vast areas and the fact that they lived on an island and they had to resist foreign invasions made them a community which was, probably, closer than others, more self-centered, which gave rise to a special set of skills and behaviors, to a certain outlook on life. And this is also reflected in their language, which abounds in verbs, different from French, for instance, which abounds in nouns.

When we are required to specify certain information in our mother tongue, we are implicitly receptive to certain details and experiences which are irrelevant for the speakers of another language. If these linguistic peculiarities are cultivated from an early age, they significantly influence our experiences, perceptions, feelings and memories, and the way in which we make associations and interpret our life environment. For example, the language of the Hopi Indians of North America does not contain any grammatical forms, words or special verbal constructions to express the time. This aspect points out the fact that Indians have a different perception of time than we (Europeans). Likewise, their language contains no distinct words for insect, plane and pilot - and we can conclude that they do not differentiate these words. The Eskimos have lots of words for snow, giving different names to the one which most suitable for the construction of an igloo or for sledding. Worf4 argues that this demonstrates the complexity of their thinking about snow compared to ours. Equally, the speakers of a language which has several distinct colours can remember better and more accurately the names of the colours than speakers who do not have so many words to define colors. Another relevant example could be the fact the children of Navajo Indians develop, typically, the ability to recognize objects in the following order: size, color, and only after that form. If Whorf and Sapir's theory5 is true, we can assume that Navajo children (who speak Navajo) will recognize the shape of objects at younger ages than children living in other cultural environments. We are speaking here about linguistic deter-minism - the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thinking processes such as categorization, memory, and perception. The term implies that people of different languages have different thinking processes.

In fact, one can easily see it in art. For example, it is not difficult to see that, most of the time, German artists give 'Death' the appearance of a man because the German word "death" is masculine. The fact that even for the smallest things like objects gender or the lack of words to describe several shades of the same colors we are influenced by the way in which we perceive the world shows that language plays a basic role in shaping human experience. Similarly, grammatical categories (like verb tenses, gender, etc.) affect significantly the perception and significance of the environment. Not only do languages such as Spanish, French, German, Russian and Romanian force us to think of a person gender when we talk about him/her, but also of the objects gender. By assigning genders to all the objects around us, we begin to personify them and talk about them as if they were people.

The difficulty of the linguistic relativity theory resides precisely in the fact that it fails to argue what has the decisive role - the language or the environment. Whorf and Sapir6 support language as a priority factor in perceiving the environment. But the other view may also be valid - as the multitude of words for 'camel' in Arabic or the 92 words used by the tribe Hanuxoo in the Philippines to name 'rice' etc., may reflect the specificity of the environment in which they live. An important aspect to note is that of the flexibility of language. Language is not a static category, but a dynamic one, which is continuously enriched with new words corresponding to scientific and technical progress. Language flexibility acts positively on the creativity factors and hence on the thinking operations which, in their turn, influence the level of language development.

Thus, the cognitive processes are influenced differently by distinct languages; this does not occur because the language induces our way of thinking, but it "constrains" us what to think of. What we can notice is the significant impact of this process on the significance memory that develops and nuances depending on the specific cultural context. Children do not simply learn a language, but appropriate the whole cultural context in which they operate.

The importance of learning a foreign/second language in early childhood

Recent specialized research illustrated that the child understands the language in context and then begins to distinguish and understand the words in a message. Learning a language takes place in a social context, through interaction with other speakers of that language, and by exploring and experiencing different forms of communication. Thus, the adults who update the linguistic knowledge acquired in childhood also remember the names of objects, people and the whole environment of their first years of life. The importance of acquiring basic language structures in early childhood is revealed by Chomsky7 in his theory on the initial stage of learning to speak a language as a previous experience to any linguistic acquisitions made later in life.

The research on updating the information acquired in early childhood is insufficiently valued in terms of the learning process. For example, the study of a language that was learnt in early childhood enables the adult to reactivate the knowledge acquired at that stage of development. If there are measurable differences from a cognitive point of view between those who update their knowledge and those who learn for the first time, then we can say that early childhood acquisitions influence long-term cognitive development.

The process of learning a foreign language affects particularly the memory development - the superior cognitive mental process that enables imprinting, fixing and updating the information. The children who learnt a foreign language concurrently/simultaneously with their mother tongue by the age of five and then resumed learning it in adulthood, remember the knowledge acquired in their early childhood and reach a higher level than who have never studied the respective language. Similarly, the persons who resume learning a language they spoke in infancy have a fast progress and, in a short time, they are able to reach a very good level of knowledge of the foreign language studied previously.

Experts in the field claim that the memories of the child until the age of three years are beginning to erase from their memory around the age of seven. Young children tend to forget more quickly than adults because "they lack these strong neural processes necessary to assemble all the information that reach the complex autobiographical memory," explains P. Bauer.

This process of erasing the memory related to experiences lived up to age of three is called "infantile amnesia" and could be associated with the process of neurogenesis at the level of the hippocampus, where neurons are generated (according to researchers at the Children's Hospital in Toronto.) In this respect it is very difficult to assess whether these early childhood memories are authentic or images based on the accounts given by the other family members.

There are, however, specialized studies stating that adults can recall events occurred as early as the age of 2-3. Thus, Lucy8 described the experience of a child who was born in Sweden and spoke Swedish. When he was 5 years old, his parents divorced, and he emigrated with his mother in the U.S., where he spoke only English. Around the age of 18, he said he could not remember even one word in Swedish. When regressed under hypnosis at the age of 5, he responded to questions in Swedish, was able to count to 10, to name a few items and say some simple sentences. He also remembered a lullaby that his grandmother used to sing for him before going to sleep. This study demonstrates that language acquisitions in early childhood can last for many years, even if for their recovery is required a drastic intervention, such as hypnosis. This kind of studies have been challenged under the ground that were reported by psychoanalysts who were particular interested in demonstrating that early childhood memory remains intact and can be reactivated under hypnosis.

Another series of studies have revealed that information from early childhood can be "accessed" without resorting to hypnosis. A good example in this respect is the case of some children from Transylvania coming from mixed families who spoke German with their grandparents until the age of 5 years. Separated from the extended family environment, after moving to other regions, these children lost contact with the German language, but resumed it at different ages and under different circumstances.

For example, one of them, as a result of an immersion opportunity in the context of the German language found in a very short time (only a few weeks) that he could not only understands what they said around him, but that he was even able to use complex linguistic constructions. Another began studying German as a new foreign language regularly and soon found out that he was progressing much faster than his peers who had never had any contact with this language.

These studies, together with those concerning linguistic deprivation, are designed to reveal the importance of early childhood learning. Learning a foreign language simultaneously with the mother language in early childhood means the interaction with diverse linguistic structures, enabling the transfer of processes and enhancing the imaginative resources necessary to solve particular problems, stimulating the development of thought, imagination and creativity, thus improving the cognitive side of the human personality development.

The process of learning a foreign language (which was taught in early childhood) opens new perspectives on the relationship between language and the cognitive development of the personality.

Concluding remarks

Research into the re-learning of long-disused childhood languages has much to offer. It provides relatively objective evidence for access to early childhood memory in adulthood. It complements linguistic deprivation research to highlight the special status of childhood language experience. It suggests a strategy to salvage seemingly forgotten childhood languages, which are often also heritage languages. Re-learning childhood languages may well open a window into how language affects cognitive development not only during, but also well beyond, the childhood years.

Footnote

1 Aitchison, J., Linguistics, Hodder Headline, London, 1992, (p.24).

2 Ibid.

3 Pica, T.P. Communicative Language Teaching: "An aid to second language acquisition? Some insights from classroom research." English Quarterly, Vol.21, No.2, 1988, (p.70).

4 Lee, Penny, "The Logic and Development of the Linguistic Relativity Principle", The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction, John Benjamins Publishing, 1996.

5 Sapir, Edward, David G. Mandelbaum, ed., Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality, University of California Press, 1983.

6 Ibid.

7 Chomsky, N., Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.

8 Lucy, John A., "Linguistic Relativity", Annual Review of Anthropology, 1997.

References

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