A groundbreaking discovery by a team of Trieste-based scientists could spell an end to hours of lessonsfor adults trying to learn a second language.
The group, led by Jacques Mehler at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), has discovered that the human brain has a mechanism which not only teaches infants how to speak, but also helps adults to learn foreign languages.
According to the team, it is this fundamental mechanism that allows humans to calculate the pauses between one word and the next, a vital process in language learning, as well as the frequencies between certain groups of syllables.
The discovery, published in Friday's issue of Science magazine, represents the latest stage in a five-year research project which produced pioneering work in the field of infant linguistic perception.
Mehler's earlier research, which concentrated on the reactions of newborns to changes in language, discovered that the ability to discriminate between different languages is the first step in learning our mother tongue. Children have to learn which sounds the words of their target language are made of, and how they are represented in the continuous stream of speech.
In this project, Mehler's team assessed the reactions of two-months old babies to different languages spoken by a bilingual person. The scientists discovered that the infants responded strongly when the speaker changed language.
However, if there was a change of speaker, but no change of language, the babies showed minimal interest, proving that children have the capacity to differentiate languages at two-monthold.
In a following experiment, the team let the infants hear the same recording through a filter, so words could no longer be identified but the intonation remained (as though through a wall), and the babies were still able to discriminate between languages. If certain words were spliced out of the original sentences, they could no longer tell the differences.
The SISSA director, Edoardo Boncinelli, said: "Somewhere in the brain, probably below the cerebral cortex, there is a mechanism which enables these analyses. This is a fascinating process."
"We're gradually discovering how children learn to start speaking, which is one of the most fascinating issues today in cognitive science."
The team explained that understanding the difference between one word and the next is easy if reading, but not so straightforward if listening, particularly in a foreign language.
The researchers' latest objective was to understand how children manage to differentiate the spaces between one word and another.
( People's Daily August 31, 2002)
