Child Development and the Brain by Rob Abbott & Esther Burkitt

Author:Rob Abbott & Esther Burkitt [Burkitt, Esther and Rob Abbott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447307068
Publisher: Policy Press

Multilingualism

There is a continuing debate in the United Kingdom about the place of language teaching in our schools. There is some evidence to suggest that it might be much more helpful for young children across the globe to experience more than one language at a very early age. The work of Kuhl and others has shown that there would seem to be considerable benefit to very young children in spending time hearing and engaging with speakers of other languages.

There have been many claims that there are cognitive benefits to multilingualism. Foremost amongst these is the idea that, always, those who continually speak more than one language have to make very quick decisions about which language they are listening to. This leads to improved executive functioning in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Various studies have suggested that this gives an advantage in all stages of life. These include a study of seven-month-old infants (Kovács and Mehler, 2009) and a study of two-year-old infants (Poulin-Dubois, Blaye, Coutya and Bialystok, 2011), to name but two. Multilingualism is also thought to help other aspects of learning. This is particularly the case when learning another language. Those who already speak more than one language seem better able to learn a new language (Kaushanskaya and Marian, 2009; Bartolotti and Marian, 2012).

The FOXP2 debate

In 2001 there was much excitement about the FOXP2 gene, which was seen as being responsible for human language. The debate and the excitement have come and gone since then. The discovery of a family (given the pseudonym KE) who had a rare condition that affected the way they talked but caused them no other cognitive or language problems added to the excitement. The family were found to have a single-point mutation to their FOXP2 gene. More recently, ideas about the FOXP2 gene have been even more overstated. In February 2013, for example, the idea appeared in the press that the gene might be the cause of why women putatively talk more than men (Telegraph, 2013), and started to go viral on the internet. The truth, such as we currently understand it, is far less exciting. The FOXP2 gene, like all genes, does not cause or encode any particular condition. It seems to be involved in some aspects of neural plasticity, as well as in the ways in which motor neurons are controlled including the way in which we (and a number of other animals) are able to vocalise (Andreadis, 2013).

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