The Early Bird Catches the Words
Scientists are finding new evidence that there is a critical time for acquiring skills like language learning. Children who are not exposed to a language before puberty are usually unable to fully acquire and use language as well as early learners. There is also evidence that the acquisition of a second language is best done in a similar critical early period in life.
Recently, neuroscientists examined the brain activity of people who learned sign language at different times in their lives. They found there is a critical period for acquiring a non-verbal language, just as there is for a spoken language. Using magnetic resonance imagining (MRI), scientists discovered differences in brain activity patterns between those who learned sign language before puberty and those who learned it after. When both groups underwent the same testing conditions, the brains of subjects who learned sign language before puberty, showed significantly more right hemisphere brain activity than their late learning counterparts. They also found that late learners never become as fully fluent as early learners.
This research suggests that there may be critical times when language neurosystems in the brain are particularly sensitive to change. This research has important implications, not only for the acquisition of sign language, but more broadly for the development of fluency in all languages.
So next time your child has difficulty understanding you, keep talking.
In general, people realize that there are critical periods for learning and the acquisition of skills. We all know that people who learn a second language early in life generally are more fluent than those who learn it in adulthood. Similarly, musical listening and playing skills are best developed in youth. That is not to say that adults can’t learn and achieve some degree of mastery, but that younger individuals are more likely to attain greater artistic abilities and sensibilities than their older counterparts. It always amazes me when I hear of musicians from the classical era who were composing and performing great musical works while still youths. And how many adults can you think of, who now wish that they had been more diligent in their musical studies as children, knowing that it is going to cost them more as late learners?
There are indeed developmental windows in life. Those who aren’t exposed to the opportunities during these times may find themselves in a position whereby they have greater struggles or limitations as they set their course for higher levels of proficiency in a particular realm. If such a goal can be attained at all by effort, it seems they have to work harder to achieve it.
And in many instances diligence isn’t the key anyhow. If the wiring hasn’t been developed in the brain, the ceiling may be set. For example, when I was a young child I had an eye problem which went uncorrected. My eyes never learn to work together to develop depth perception. They were each seeing independently, not in a co-ordinated fashion. By the time a specialist diagnosed my problem, the nerve pathways in my brain had already been too well established. With a relatively simple treatment during one of those critical periods, perhaps my vision would have been normalized. But I cannot now by wanting or trying or practising make my brain work to see the way most people do.
Windows of opportunity exist in many realms. Most of us take advantage of these critical periods in the normal course of development. It is rather the exceptional situation where language exposure does not occur or brain stimulation fails to occur. Most of the critical learning times we fail to take advantage of are fortunately for us not crucial to our lives, but only our desires.
A famous developmental psychologist by the name of Erik Erikson believed that we go through different stages in life in which we are challenged with a task. It is a task associated with a life question. The first stage, Erikson believed, concerned the theme of trust. The challenge for the infant is to develop a sense of whether their world is a secure place or a chaotic, unstable and unsafe space to inhabit. During this period, infants learn to trust or distrust setting the stage for future hope or despair.
The issue of trust is a theme which occurs during a critical period of learning about the world. It is possible to learn a measure of trust if we have been thwarted in our first attempts during this stage. But it seems that we may never be able to handle trust with ease.
Furthermore, we bring our own abilities or inabilities to trust within our human relationships into the realm of our relationship with God. Sometimes we confuse our own limitations with his trustworthiness. What results is a distortion of God’s character and a lack of understanding of our own. Our vision is muddied. We need a clearer vision of God’s true qualities and our own weaknesses. Only then will be see accurately.
David Humphreys and Debbie Hughes
© August 2004
