Category: Research

I thought I would share some interesting research I’ve seen recently, which may be of interest to some of you as well.  It may already be common knowledge, but a recent study described in this article and in the below video demonstrates that infants raised in bilingual (and presumably multilingual) environments demonstrate cognitive benefits at a younger age than previously thought.

Another study discussed in the Huffington Post shows the importance of reading aloud to children from birth, which may form part of the “language-rich interactions” that are so beneficial to young children and which may be associated with cognitive benefits years down the road–one study discussed in the article shows that children who grow up among books are”nearly 20 times more likely to graduate from college.”

So! I encourage you to find some time in the day to read to your kids (and if you can, do it in the minority language)! Make it part of your nighttime or morning rituals (or both!) and enjoy the many rewards associate with reading with your children.  If you are looking for some recommendations, check out my past ones here.  And for any mothers/parents to newborn or young infants out there who are deep in baby-world and can’t stand another kids’ book right now, I highly recommend finding an adult book of interest in your preferred language and read that aloud to them. When N was a newborn and had marathon nursing sessions, reading aloud was often the only thing keeping me awake! (And I confess, I sometimes also read aloud from Facebook–but hey, whatever works!)

I came across this 2010 Ted Talk by Patricia Kuhl recently, which is certainly not new to some, but was new to me.  I thought I would share as it supports what we’re all trying to do to some degree:  expose our children to language early and often.

Ms. Kuhl touches upon an interesting point, which is basically that children should be exposed to new languages as early as possible.  She starts out by explaining that “babies and children are geniuses” at learning languages “until they turn seven, and then there’s a systematic decline. After puberty, we fall off the map.”  This is not to say that you can’t learn a language after 7, but it does become increasingly more difficult.  I can attest to this, as I briefly flirted with the idea of learning Slovak, until I realized learning a handful of phrases during my morning commute was not going to cut it (and did you know Slovak has 7 conjugations and even nouns are conjugated?!).