How to Cultivate Children's Language Intelligence

Most children can speak one word at 9~ 12 months, and gradually accumulate about 50 words by 15 ~ 20 months. The number 50 seems to represent the basic amount of children's language, which is like detonating a veritable language "atomic bomb". After learning the first 50 words, children begin to accumulate 50 new words every week, and this amazing growth rate will last until most of the primary school time. With the increase of vocabulary, toddlers begin to string words into two-word phrases, then three-word phrases, and then they connect them into sentences like coded information: "Bernie wants apples." "Where's Barney?"

The second language explosion involved the use of grammar, which happened at the age of 3. At this time, children's vocabulary accumulation and vocabulary strings cannot accurately express their meanings without the help of some word order rules, tenses, suffix changes and conjunctions. The linguist Steven Pinkel said that people use grammar to clarify the meaning of word combinations. He said, "If girls eat ice cream or candy, boys eat hot dogs", which is not organized in grammar, so it is not clear what it means.

Without any training, the ability to use grammar soon appeared. This is a natural ability. By the age of 3, preschool children can start to organize vocabulary according to certain meanings, such as: "Why did he leave?" Verb tenses are not easy to use at this time. When a child reaches the age of 4, most of what he says will fully meet the grammatical requirements.

Linguists have provided even more surprising evidence that grammar application skills are innate and pre-arranged, which spontaneously appear before school age, and it is not impossible to learn after a certain age, but extremely difficult. Pinkel gave a powerful example about a woman with an average IQ. She was born in a rural area of California. She was born deaf and disabled. She was misdiagnosed as stunting, but not hearing impaired. Her parents won't let her go to sign language school or English school. Finally, at the age of 32, she found her predicament and got a hearing aid. After years of silence, she received intensive language training. After training, she learned more than 2000 words, but she can't use grammar at all, despite the efforts and attempts of linguists. She has been piling up sentences with words she has mastered, such as "banana to eat", "orange in Tim's car" and "this woman is going to take the bus." Because she didn't learn a language at all when she was a teenager, her innate ability to use grammar was abandoned and eventually became an irreparable regret.

Language researchers are born with the ability to use grammar in childhood. Gave us a second example. This situation is rare. A child born with mental retardation can have normal language ability after training. Children in this special situation have Williams syndrome, and their IQ is between 40 and 50. As Pinkel said, these children with low IQ can master a large number of words after training, including some very uncommon words, and they can also say all kinds of complex and grammatical long sentences.

Lin Kai provided another example to prove that human grammar use has innate characteristics. She said that parents may think that correcting children's tenses and prepositions will play a decisive role in the growth of their grammar use. But psychologists have studied a 4-year-old child and proved that this assumption is not valid. The boy can only say a few words because the language formation area of the brain is damaged. However, he can understand and understand thousands of words, and he can easily distinguish "what can monsters eat?" And "What can eat monsters?" He can correct the grammatical mistakes in the second sentence.

Linguists like Pinkel believe that human beings have genes used in grammar, and these genes are arranged to play a role at around 3 years old, which is the same as the genes of permanent teeth are arranged to play a role at around 6 years old. Similarly, in the process of brain development, there may be a special window of opportunity for human beings to acquire grammar. If a child is not exposed to grammar knowledge in daily life through people's conversation, reading, singing or sign language, he may eventually lose the ability to speak according to grammar. Even if he can learn more new words indefinitely, he can't speak correctly according to grammar.

To enrich this argument, psychologist Eliza studied a group of deaf people and the age when they first came into contact with language. Children who start learning sign language immediately after being diagnosed as deaf can reach a higher level of language fluency than deaf children who start learning at the age of 6. But they can use sign language more skillfully than deaf-mute teenagers who learn sign language after 12 years old.

Newport and his colleague Johnson found striking similarities when they investigated how people learn a second language. They studied some immigrants from North Korea and China who came to the United States. These immigrants began to learn English at different ages, ranging from 3 to 39. An English grammar test was conducted for each immigrant, and it was found that the score did not depend on the length of time the subjects tried to speak English, but on their age when they arrived in the United States: those immigrants who started learning English at the age of 3-7 could finally speak English like locals, use grammar correctly, and could not recognize the accent of their birthplace. If they go from 1 1 to 15, their proficiency is only half that of the former. If they start learning English after 17 years old, their proficiency is only one third of the former.

Obviously, both mother tongue and second language should be started before school age, which will not only waste time, but also lose the foundation of language learning because of losing language contact opportunities during the window of opportunity. This view is also supported by some bad examples of children with normal nervous system. These children grew up in some poor and abused environments, so they were deprived of all the opportunities of friendship and normal speech. Of the 9 "wild children" with detailed biographical records, 6 were able to learn to speak normally after being rescued, all under 7 years old.

So what can children under 7 do when they are exposed to the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar of a language? The answer is to shape the brain by giving priority to strengthening the connections within and between the neural circuits of the brain (especially the left hemisphere). Helen Neville used a brain wave recording device (called event-related potential recorder) to study when and where the language process in the brain happened. She and her colleagues found that the more words a 20-month-old child knows, the more electrical activity in his brain is concentrated in the left hemisphere. They also found that in older children, ideographic words (nouns, verbs and adjectives) stimulate brain waves in the back of the two hemispheres, while grammatical words (articles, conjunctions and auxiliary verbs) only stimulate brain waves in the front of the left temporal lobe. 4-year-old children, the reaction of the back of the brain to ideograms and grammatical words is still the same. However, when 1 1 year old, only the front part of the left temporal lobe triggered event-related potentials when encountering grammatical problems. This means that the older children are, the more languages they hear and learn to speak in the environment, the greater changes they make to their brains, and more neural circuits will be pruned into a left hemisphere way that specializes in grammar. "Wild" children and deaf children who are deprived of language stimulation between the ages of 4 and 7 or 8 will not have this phenomenon of "leaning to one side", so it is impossible to completely catch up with the language ability of children of the same age who are not deprived of language.

As parents, when deciding how to stimulate and educate preschool children, they may need to pay attention to these findings and cheer up to make a decision: if preschool children develop normally, they don't need special language training to make their speech more fluent and mature. What children need is an extension of the rich language environment that children need-listening to some conversations, singing, stories and children's songs every day, listening to adults and responding. If the child has hearing impairment or language impairment, it is necessary to find it as soon as possible and take measures as soon as possible. Helen said, "If you are the parents of a deaf child, you should expose the child to phonology or grammar without delay. If the child is quite deaf, he may have to learn sign language before learning the language; He can start learning sign language before the normal school age. Then use his sign language skills to learn the language. "

Helen said that some parents of deaf children spent years trying to find ways to motivate their children to speak English. If this is not successful (generally, it will not be successful), the whole primary education may be delayed and children will not communicate in any language. To make matters worse, Helen added that as the window of opportunity in the brain closes, children's ability to acquire knowledge will encounter more and more obstacles. She said: "Grammar and phonology are two subsystems of language. If they are exposed too late, they will suffer serious losses." We don't know why yet, but pre-adolescent children are reluctant to learn languages. It is almost impossible to pass this time. However, she added, there is also some good news, that is, once accents and grammar are fixed, people can constantly expand their vocabulary throughout their lives.