How Bilinguals Switch Between Languages

Individuals who learn two languages at an early age seem to switch back and forth between separate "sound systems" for each language, according to new research conducted at the University of Arizona.

"A lot of research has shown that bilinguals are pretty good at accommodating speech variation across languages, but there's been a debate as to how," 

"There are two views: One is that bilinguals have different processing modes for their two languages -- they have a mode for processing speech in one language and then a mode for processing speech in the other language. Another view is that bilinguals just adjust to speech variation by recalibrating to the unique acoustic properties of each language."

The study looked at 32 Spanish-English early bilinguals, who had learned their second language before age 8. Participants were presented with a series of pseudo-words beginning with a 'pa' or a 'ba' sound and asked to identify which of the two sounds they heard.

While 'pa' and 'ba' sounds exist in both English and Spanish, how those sounds are produced and perceived in the two languages varies subtly. In the case of 'ba,' for example, English speakers typically begin to vibrate their vocal chords the moment they open their lips, while Spanish speakers begin vocal chord vibration slightly before they open their lips and produce 'pa' in a manner similar to English 'ba.' As a result of those subtle differences, English-only speakers might, in some cases, confuse the 'ba' and 'pa' sounds they hear in Spanish, explains co-author Andrew Lotto, associate professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at the University of Arizona.

"When most people think about differences between languages, they think they use different words and they have different grammars, but at their base languages use different sounds," Lotto said.

"One of the reasons it sounds different when you hear someone speaking a different language is because the actual sounds they use are different; they have a sound code that's specific to that language," he said. "One of the reasons someone might sound like they have an accent if they learn Spanish first is because their 'pa' is like an English 'ba,' so when they say a word with 'pa,' it will sound like a 'ba' to an English monolingual."

For the study, the bilingual participants were divided into two groups. One group was told they would be hearing rare words in Spanish, while the other was told they would be hearing rare words in English. Both groups heard audio recordings of variations of the same two words -- bafri and pafri -- which are not real words in either language.

Participants were then asked to identify whether the words they heard began with a 'ba' or a 'pa' sound.

Each group heard the same series of words, but for the group told they were hearing Spanish, the ends of the words were pronounced slightly differently, with the 'r' getting a Spanish pronunciation.

The findings: Participants perceived 'ba' and 'pa' sounds differently depending on whether they were told they were hearing Spanish words, with the Spanish pronunciation of 'r,' or whether they were told they were hearing English words, with the English pronunciation of 'r.'

"What this showed is that when you put people in English mode, they actually would act like English speakers, and then if you put them in Spanish mode, they would switch to acting like Spanish speakers," Lotto said. "These bilinguals, hearing the exact same 'ba's and 'pa's would label them differently depending on the context."

When the study was repeated with 32 English monolinguals, participants did not show the same shift in perception; they labeled 'ba' and 'pa' sounds the same way regardless of which language they were told they were hearing. It was that lack of an effect for monolinguals that provided the strongest evidence for two sound systems in bilinguals.

"If you learn a second language later in life, you usually have a dominant language and then you try to use that sounds system for the other language, which is why you end up having an accent," he said.

"This raises the possibility that bilinguals can perceive speech like a native speaker in both languages," said Gonzales, whose own son is growing up learning English and Chinese simultaneously.

"The predominant view of late has been that bilinguals will never be able to perceive a second language beyond what a late learner is capable of, or someone who learns a second language late in life. So even if you learn two languages simultaneously from birth, you're always going to perceive one of them like a late learner," Gonzales said. "Our findings cast doubt on that prominent view in the bilingual literature."

Babies Learn Language From Mothers While In Womb

Image via: Canada.com

Babies only hours old are able to differentiate between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, scientists have discovered. The study indicates that babies begin absorbing language while still in the womb, earlier than previously thought.

Sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing are developed at 30 weeks of gestational age, and the new study shows that unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy and at birth can demonstrate what they've heard. 

"The mother has first dibs on influencing the child's brain," said Patricia Kuhl, co-author and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. "The vowel sounds in her speech are the loudest units and the fetus locks onto them." 

Previously, researchers had shown that newborns are born ready to learn and begin to discriminate between language sounds within the first months of life, but there was no evidence that language learning had occurred in utero. 

"This is the first study that shows fetuses learn prenatally about the particular speech sounds of a mother's language," said Christine Moon, lead author and a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. "This study moves the measurable result of experience with speech sounds from six months of age to before birth." 

The results will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal Acta Paediatrica. 

Forty infants, about 30 hours old and an even mix of girls and boys, were studied in Tacoma and Stockholm, Sweden. While still in the nursery, the babies listened to vowel sounds in their native tongue and in foreign languages. 

Their interest in the sounds was captured by how long they sucked on a pacifier that was wired into a computer measuring the babies' reaction to the sounds. Longer or shorter sucking for unfamiliar or familiar sounds is evidence for learning, because it indicates that infants can differentiate between the sounds heard in utero. 

In both countries, the babies at birth sucked longer for the foreign language than they did for their native tongue. 

The researchers say that infants are the best learners, and discovering how they soak up information could give insights on lifelong learning. "We want to know what magic they put to work in early childhood that adults cannot," Kuhl said. "We can't waste that early curiosity.

Via: "Medical Xpress"

Parrot Parents Name Their Babies

Parrots, with their amazing abilities to mimic speech and talk to humans in addition to each other, are by far impressive communicators. But research shows that parrot conversations are even more complex. Each parrot has its own signature call that others use to address it, which is the parrot equivalent of having a name. But where do these “names” come from? New research has shown that just like with human babies, parrot parents name their offspring, even before the babies can communicate themselves.

The research, led by Karl Berg of Cornell University, used video cameras to record the communication process of green-rumped parrots (Forpus passerinus) in Venezuela. The wild parrot study showed that even before chicks begin to chirp back at their parents, adults give them a signature sound by which they are addressed. The babies will take this sound and in some cases tweak it before using it throughout their life.

Scientists have known for some time that parrots use these signature calls to refer to each other. Observing the process in captive birds led researchers to wonder how wild parrots dealt with naming, because it could show how names are given. The researchers felt there were two possibilities for how parrots get their names: it could be biologically innate (each bird names itself) or assigned by another older bird, which turned out to be the case.

For the study, the researchers placed video cameras in 16 green-rumped parrot nests in Venezula. These birds are part of a large wild population that has been living in nesting tubes rigged up by scientists in 1987. The researchers then moved around the parrot eggs so that half of the colony were raising babies that weren’t theirs genetically. Recordings of the calls made by the parents before the chicks were able to chirp , and of the calls once the chicks were individually vocal showed that parents started making the calls when the birds were very young. Additionally, the recordings showed that the parent’s calls provided a basis on which the baby would imitate and tweak their own name. The names bore more similarity to the parents that raised the offspring, than the biological parents, suggesting that the calls are in fact learned by the chicks rather than innate.

Parrots are not the only animals known to have names. In addition to humans, dolphins also use specific names for each individual. Researchers believe that the sophisticated social lives of these animals may be what drives the need to have names. For parrots, having a name is a valuable tool for knowing who is who when flocks change or shift members.

This discovery shows interesting corollaries between human communication and parrot communication that may be useful for subsequent studies of speech development. The studywas published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Via: "GeekoSystem"