I studied Latin for four years in high school, but give me the Aeneid or Julius Caesar’s memoirs nowadays and they might as well be, well, Greek to me. Over time, my once-formidable ability to parse out conjugations and declensions has devolved into recognizing a few basic words here or there and piecing together some sentences. Completing a full translation of any Latin literature would require some intense investments of time and effort.
But a new research study suggests that if only I had taken up the language early in life, and practiced speaking it more, I wouldn’t really ever have forgotten it—and relearning it could have been cinch.
Psychologists at the University of Bristol surveyed native English speakers who had learned either Hindi or Zulu while living abroad as kids. Both of these languages contain certain sounds, or phonemes, that are very difficult for native English speakers to recognize. Even those people who remembered none of the vocabulary from these neglected languages were able to quickly relearn and recognize the distinctive phonemes. The early language exposure had permanently altered some circuit in the brain.
More research is needed to find out exactly what happens in the brain during early language learning. But the findings, which appear in the September issue of Psychological Science, suggest that we never really “lose” languages learned during childhood. They also make a powerful argument for giving children intensive instruction in many different languages as early in life as possible—even if they quickly “forget”—to facilitate language learning in later years. As Ovid wrote, “Qui non est hodie cras minus aptus erit.” (He who is not prepared today will be less so tomorrow.)
—Aalok Mehta
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