How multi-lingual children learn languages
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: How multi-lingual children learn languages
#2Trying to extrapolate between learning natural languages and learning programming languages seems rather questionable to me.
Re: How multi-lingual children learn languages
#3There isn't any citation to the (quite interesting) study finding mentioned as a premise in this article. My two older children are native speakers of BOTH English and Modern Standard Chinese, and they once spoke to each other mostly in Chinese, although in recent years they have much more occasion to use English. There should have been follow-up studies on what happens to native multilingual persons when they suffer strokes by now, and there could even be brain-imaging studies on first-language and second-language multilingual persons by now, perhaps without conclusive results.
This submission makes me curious about the author's premise than about his conclusion.
Re: How multi-lingual children learn languages
#4Trying to extrapolate between learning natural languages and learning programming languages seems rather questionable to me.
True, but that's just how he came up with a new way of looking at the results of the study. (Serial vs. parallel learning)
Re: How multi-lingual children learn languages
#5Let me give you another tiny sample group for the study. Indians! I started learning Hindi, English and Bengali when I was four. Most of my fellow citizens(middle class) were in the same boat because there are 22 official languages here in India. After college I moved to South India, where there is another myriad family of completely different languages. I can barely keep up with them. Does it improve or harms my ability to learn new programming languages? Personally, no. Generally, well the answer to that question lies in the high quality programming services provided by Indians well recorded by thousands of forums across the web :). So, no I don't think the comparison has any merit.
Edit: The no. of official languages is now 22.
Re: How multi-lingual children learn languages
#6There isn't any citation to the (quite interesting) study finding mentioned as a premise in this article. My two older children are native speakers of BOTH English and Modern Standard Chinese, and they once spoke to each other mostly in Chinese, although in recent years they have much more occasion to use English. There should have been follow-up studies on what happens to native multilingual persons when they suffer…
I haven't found the full text, but it seems that this 'The bilingual brain: Cerebral representation of languages' by Fabbro in 2001 might be it. A related study: 'Multilingualism in Stroke Patients: A Personal Account' is available here : http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ijel/article/view/27556...
Re: How multi-lingual children learn languages
#7There are too many factors involved here.
For example, human languages are reinforced completely differently.
From birth, you will hear from inside the womb often one language. Later, you hear and speak either a couple or more languages but generally in different contexts, e.g. mostly one with parents, maybe one or more with friends or strangers and one with school and media.
The latter context is normally reinforced further with reading and writing, while the former rarely or not at all. I suspect, though without more studies it would be impossible to know, that it is the exclusively spoken languages that are most affected. The reading and writing languages, as well as being used in different contexts, are highly likely to be processed by the brain differently.
In addition, almost all of these human language uses will be tied to life events and (strong) emotional feelings.
So, the comparison to programming languages seems tenuous at best, especially since there are plenty of other contexts where one can misapply learned rule-sets in general. The word "language" is almost a misnomer across these two different fields, in my opinion.
Re: How multi-lingual children learn languages
#8I was born in to a multi-lingual environment, learning Dutch, Swedish and English since birth. Later in life I learned French and German due to my locality; I also took Latin and Greek in school and have been teaching myself Japanese just because I enjoy the challenge. Finally, I also have enough exposure to Spanish as well as Hebrew to be able to put together a decent conclusion as to what a conversation might be about. Each of these languages have been learnt at different parts of my life and I would say that the only one I am still fluent in speaking is English. My Dutch is rusty, but I can hold a conversation, though will stumble over words as I try to translate them (ironic since I used to think in Dutch and had the same issue translating what I wanted to say in to English). The interesting thing is, while I may not be fluent in speaking any of the other languages, I understand them. I can pick up on key words and can figure out what is being said. Due to the nature of languages and the etymology behind words - I can often pick up on conversations in other languages I have not learned.
In contrast of my multi-lingual background in the spoken form, I also try to diversify the programming languages I am familiar with. While the idea of a programming language and a spoken word language vastly differs, I still see it as just learning another language - that is the mindset I go in with. A spoken language has rules - wether they are related to phonetics, semantics or most importantly the idiosyncratic rules of gender and relationships. Programming languages have a much more defined ruleset at the core that they all share (to a certain degree) and the language itself on top of it follows many of the rules I would expect in a spoken language.
I don't know if there is a correlation to the exposure of languages at a young age - but in my experience it has helped me.
Re: How multi-lingual children learn languages
#9by attaching more than one label/tag to an inner representation?
Re: How multi-lingual children learn languages
#10The point about keeping languages separate is interesting. I know bits and pieces of many different languages, but I only know two reasonably well. I studied French for about six years in high school and college, but I haven't had much occasion to use it since and am somewhat rusty. Conversely, Japanese I hear quite a bit of these days so my experience with it is much more recent.
But sometimes when I try to remember the French word for something, I get a Japanese word instead, which is odd because the languages are nothing alike. Similar problems exist for programming languages, for example, trying to remember the Perl way to do something and getting the Ruby keyword instead.