Children are better language mimics than adults
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Everyone knows that children pick up a second language faster than adults. Except they don’t, says Samuel Ortiz, an associate professor of psychology at St. John’s University. Children are just better mimics, he said. Their brains are wired to give feedback on how to produce the sounds being heard. That changes around age 10, he said, when the brain starts to devote resources to other types of learning, Ortiz said. “(The brain) just assumes it’s heard all the sounds that it needs to hear. And it becomes very difficult – not impossible but difficult – for most people to be able to reproduce those later on in life.” |
A kindergartner coming in without English is automatically five years behind that process and needs help in the native language in order to keep on par, Ortiz said. Bilingual education remains highly controversial, but Ortiz said the science consistently supports quality bilingual education over English immersion. A long-term study by researchers Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier found even greater success in dual-language instruction, where English- and Spanish-dominant children share a classroom and spend half the day in each language. But many educators remain unconvinced. “Logic and common sense tells me if you want to learn something, you have to do it,” said Lucille Guttman of White Plains, a retired school psychologist and psychology teacher. “It may be painful at the beginning. It probably is. But they have to learn it,” she said.
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