Early Exposure to Language in Babies

Leads to Easier Acquisition of the Language as Adults

Most scientists agree that the earlier you expose a child to a language, the easier it is for that child to learn it.

California State University, Northridge assistant professor of psychology Janet S. Oh wanted to take that concept a step further. She wondered whether early experience with a language - say before the age of one - can still help an adult many years later to acquire that language more easily that an individual who has not had such early exposure.

"Early indications are that it does," said Oh, who published the results of her pilot study in the latest issue of the Journal of Child Language.

Oh's pilot study compared 12 adults adopted from Korea by U.S. families as young children to 13 participants who had no prior exposure to Korean. All but one of the 12 adopted Koreans were brought to the U.S. prior to age one. Because their adoptive families were European Americans, the adopted Korean adults had little to no exposure to Korean after adoption. Oh wanted to find out whether relearning can aid in accessing early childhood language memory.

All 25 participants in the study were recruited and tested during the second week of the first semester of college Korean language classes. They completed a language background questionnaire and interview, a childhood slang task and a Korean phoneme identification task. Phonemes are the smallest contrastive units in the sound system of a language.

"The results revealed an advantage for adopted participants in identifying some Korean phonemes, suggesting that some components of early childhood language memory can remain intact despite many years of disuse, and that relearning a language can help in accessing such a memory," Oh said.

Oh had a suspicion that the adopted adults might have had some advantage in learning Korean as adults, but she didn't expect the results she got.

"The average age of adoption was five months, so we really weren't sure what the study would find," she said. "They were infants when they came to the United States so they weren't even speaking yet, and all exposure to Korean language and culture was pretty much cut off. Yet, when they started studying Korean as adults they clearly mastered learning the sounds that make up the language much easier than those who never had exposure to the language."

Oh said she chose Korean in part because the sounds that make up the language are so different from English. The distinctions between the speech sounds initially can be quite difficult for non-native speakers to hear, much less produce.

She said French researchers have studied adult adopted Koreans in France who left their native country between the ages of five and eight to see if they retained any vestiges of their first language.

"Those researchers concluded that there was no memory for their childhood language," she said. "But they didn't study whether relearning the language as adults would help in accessing that childhood language memory."

The pilot data were submitted with a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation, which awarded her and her collaborators - Rich Lee of the University of Minnesota, Sun-Ah Jun of UCLA and Terry Au of the University of Hong Kong - a $477,640, five-year grant to conduct a more extensive study on the impact of early language exposure.

The larger, more comprehensive study will examine the nature of childhood language memory; the kind of early linguistic experience necessary to aid in language learning; the nature of adoptees' perception of speech sounds of their childhood language and how it differs from language learners who have not had any prior experience with the language; and how social, cultural and emotional factors play a part in adoptees' success in learning their childhood language.

Oh pointed out that language plays a crucial role in how people identify themselves and connect with their culture.

She said her study could have implications for those who want to learn a second language as well as for those who teach them. It also could provide insight into the acquisition of language and on very early childhood language memory.