The evidence is building...new language acquisition research
From Dr. Kuhl's paper (this research is being carried out using the latest brain imaging equipment and soon I will post another paper from 2008 that is linked to this one):
http://www.ii.metu.edu.tr/~hohenberger/development/literature/Kuhl_2000_Lang_Magnet.pdf
"Infants heard 4 native speakers of Mandarin (male and female) during 12 25-min sessions of book reading and play across a 4–6 week period".
Our students speak to 5+ fluent or native speakers per lesson over a 25-30 minute period in the lesson and our courses last 4 weeks, sometimes a bit more.
Remember the stats from the first 700 students we taught?
http://www.languagesoutthere.com/articles/english-out-there-london-course-statistics-2001-to-2003
Here's the longer excerpt from the 'social interaction' section of her report:
"The impact of social interaction on speech learning was demonstrated in a study investigating whether infants are capable of phonetic and word learning at nine months of age from natural first-time exposure to a foreign language. Mandarin Chinese was used in the first foreign-language intervention experiment (Kuhl et al. 2003). Infants heard 4 native speakers of Mandarin (male and female) during 12 25-min sessions of book reading and play across a 4–6 week period. A control group of infants also came into the laboratory for the same number and variety of reading and play sessions but heard only English.Two additional groups were exposed to the identical Mandarin material over the same number of sessions via either standard television or audio-only presentation. After exposure, Mandarin syllables that are not phonemic in English were used to test infant learning using both behavioral (Kuhl et al. 2003) and brain (Kuhl et al. 2008) tests. Infants learned from live exposure to Mandarin tutors, as shown by comparisons with the English control group, indicating that phonetic learning from first-time exposure could occur at nine months of age. However, infants’ Mandarin discrimination scores after exposure to television or audio-only tutors were no greater than those of the control infants who had not experienced Mandarin at all (Kuhl et al. 2003) (
Figure 3). Learning in the live condition was robust and durable. Behavioral tests of infant learning were conducted 2–12 days (median = 6 days) after the final language-exposure session, and the ERP tests were conducted between 12 and 30 days (median = 15 days) after the final exposure session, with no observable differences in infant performance as a function of the delay".
Have a good think. She links the above to SLA in adults in the paper and in another which I want to comment on in more detail in another post/newsletter.
More to come.
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