My Bi-Lingual Children

This article was forwarded to me by a dear friend.  My daughter Adia (age 3.5 years), is truly bi-lingual.  What I mean by truly is - she can think and speak simultaneously - both Chinese and English.  This is an AMAZING difference.  Most of us who learn Spanish and/or French - we don't THINK in these languages.  Instead, we think in English, and then translate into French.

Two interesting things about Adia: 1) She learned BOTH languages from the outset (different from me, a first generation American.  I learned Taiwanese and Chinese first, then age 6, I learned English); and 2) We have been speaking to her in Chinese and English since birth, but at some point, she stopped speaking Chinese to me (her Chinese mama).  She will only speak Chinese to my parents and the Chinese au pairs.  

Being bi-lingual has not affected Adia's language development.  At 4.5 months, she said, "Bird" pointing at a bird in the backyard, and "moon" at the moon.  I have heard that being bi-lingual can have delays, but this isn't true in both our girls cases.

Raya is still a baby.  She will be 5 months old.  2 weeks ago, she said, "Ma Ma.", while motioning towards me.  We will also be speaking both Chinese and English to her.  It will be interesting to hear the girls speak Chinese to each other.  :)  Enjoy the article!

By Robert Lee Hotz

iStockphoto

The ability to speak two languages can make bilingual people better able to pay attention than those who can only speak one language, a new study suggests.

Scientists have long suspected that some enhanced mental abilities might be tied to structural differences in brain networks shaped by learning more than one language, just as a musician’s brain can be altered by the long hours of practice needed to master an instrument.

Now, in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,researchers at Northwestern University for the first time have documented differences in how the bilingual brain processes the sounds of speech, compared with those who speak a single language, in ways that make it better at picking out a spoken syllable, even when it is buried in a babble of voices.

That biological difference in the auditory nervous system appears to also enhance attention and working memory among those who speak more than one language, they say.

“Because you have two languages going on in your head, you become very good at determining what is and is not relevant,” says Dr. Nina Kraus, a professor of neurobiology and physiology at Northwestern, who was part of the study team. “You are a mental juggler.”

In the new study, Kraus and her colleagues tested the involuntary neural responses to speech sounds by comparing brain signals in 23 high school students who were fluent in English and Spanish to those of 25 teenagers who only spoke English. When it was quiet, both groups could hear the test syllable — “da” — with no trouble, but when there was background noise, the brains of the bilingual students were significantly better at detecting the fundamental frequency of speech sounds.

“We have determined that the nervous system of a bilingual person responds to sound in a way that is distinctive from a person who speaks only one language,” Kraus says.

Through this fine-tuning of the nervous system, people who can master more than one language are building a more resilient brain, one more proficient at multitasking, setting priorities, and, perhaps, better able to withstand the ravages of age, a range of recent studies suggest.

Indeed, some preliminary research suggests that people who speak a second language may have enhanced defenses against the onset of dementia and delay Alzheimer’s disease by an average of four years, as WSJ reported in 2010.

The ability to speak more than one language also may help protect memory, researchers from the Center for Health Studies in Luxembourg reported at last year.

After studying older people who spoke multiple languages, they concluded that the more languages someone could speak, the better: People who spoke three languages were three times less likely to have cognitive problems compared to bilingual people. Those who spoke four or more languages were five times less likely to develop cognitive problems.

Not so long ago, people worried that children who grew up learning two languages at once were at a developmental disadvantage compared with those who focused on only one.

New research suggests that even babies have little trouble developing bilingual skills.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Infant Studies Centre reported that babies being raised in a bilingual family show from birth a preference for each of the native languages they heard while still in the womb and can readily distinguish between them.

Moreover, bilingual infants appear to learn the grammars of their two languages as well as babies learning a single language, even when the two languages are as different from one another as English and Japanese, or English and Punjabi.

About Sleep

Bittersweet Motherhood

Part V

About Sleep

This entry is about what I wished for when I blew out my 36 candles this past birthday: SLEEP.

I know we've all heard about parents and lack of sleep. But, seriously, until you are a parent to a newborn, you don't know how bad it really is.

I've read Baby Whisperer. Babywise. Happiest Baby on the Block. Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. ANY book you can name about babies and sleep - it's on my shelf, and engrained in my sleep-deprived brain.

I also have every Lullaby/Sleep CD out there, from Swahili to Japanese - they are ALL on my ITunes Library. (ok, maybe not ALL, but I have at least 44).

They all got some mighty good points. And sometimes, following the tips actually work. For example, Adia was sleep-trained by Dr. Weissbluth's book, "Health Sleep Habits, Happy Child"

But honestly, the best sleep book out there is Go the F$#k to Sleep. Because let me tell you something, baby sleep isn't a friggin' science!!! It just happens when it happens. And it won't happen in the first 6 months. I guess sometimes you get lucky. We did with Adia. Adia was sleeping 8 pm - 8 am (without wake) at 12 weeks. She hit a 4-mo sleep regression and started waking again, but pretty soon, by 5 months, she was sleeping through the night...it was wonderful, and blissful.

Just when I thought I got it down, here comes Raya. In SOOO many ways, Raya is so much easier. (BTW, the HARDEST transition is going from 0 to 1 child. The NEXT hardest is 1 to 2 children. After 2 children, the rest is a piece of cake - yes, that's right, suck it, Duggars with your 20 kids, Scott and I have it just as rough as you). Anyway, Raya is a piece of cake. She NEVER cries. Why? Because as a second-time mom, I know her every need, BEFORE she even thinks it. So, she never has to cry.

She is easier than my first child in EVERY way, except for sleep.

I just don't get it! Last night, Raya woke every 2o minutes, wanting to suck on her human binky. EVERY 20 minutes! I finally slept with my boob in her mouth. (Major kink in neck).

She just won't sleep!! We have tried everything! Even the Swing! Sometimes, she will sleep in it. OTher times she won't. We have the rocker, the glider, the BabySitter - we literally have every sleep-related device known to man.

I've put Raya down LATER (11 pm), and EARLIER (7 pm), but inevitably, she will wake every 2 hours.

??!?!?! Why?!?!?

Because, parents, she is a baby. So for those of you who have wonderful sleepers that go through the night - YAY! for you! Enjoy it.

We had a wonderful little A+ Sleeper - ms. Adia.

And this time, it ain't so easy.

It's a good thing I am taking a year off work.

Without sleep, brain cells die. Lookie here at Wiki - it says, "sleep deprivation causes the brain to become incapable of putting an emotional event into the proper perspective and incapable of making a controlled, suitable response to the event."

And, "Sleep deprivation may have been the underlying cause of the overdose deaths of celebrities Heath Ledger, and Anna Nicole Smith.^[23]"

This is why I am not practicing law this year.

First, for some reason, my second baby does not let me sleep. So, my brain isn't functioning.

So, in court, when someone presents a brilliant argument (for which normally I have a brilliant response),my brain is "incapable of making a controlled, suitable response to the event."

I have terrible guilt for not practicing law this year. It's almost as bad as the guilt I felt when I didn't time off to stay inside the house every day with Adia. (Remember, I WAS home, I was just out in the guesthouse, as a Stay at Home Working Mom).

I feel like I am letting my clients down.

But, if I go into Court, and I am at a loss for words (which is very rare, but is happening these days, because the most I can muster to an argument after 11 weeks of consecutive non-sleep is "Oh yeah? Well, you are too!"), I just cannot be the voice for the people.

I also cannot remember cases and statutes as clearly as I did before when my brain cells were properly rested and regenerated with sleep.

I know that something happened recently about Prop 8, but when I read the decision, the words blur together and I am thinking about what other binkys I can try to get Raya to take (after buying and throwing away 6 different brands already).

That is why I am not practicing law.

And I am blogging about it because I feel really, really guilty.

I will say, though - in case prospective clients are reading this - Over the past 3 years, I have helped train a brilliant associate (i say HELP because she was already naturally brilliant, and very easy to teach)...her name is Veronica. Veronica is handling ALL my cases now, with arduous fervor, and brilliancy (I know I keep using the same adjective; my sleep-deprived brain can't think of anything else but AWESOME to describe her).

So...my firm isn't shut down. It's just that me, Kelly, isn't going to be practicing law.

I am still running a firm. I had to fire a client yesterday.

I actually made a call while holding Raya so her cries could be an excuse for me to get off the phone.

Instead, my talking in my "attorney voice" put her to sleep!!!

Go figure.

I don't get babies and sleep.

Bi-Lingual Babies

Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language

By PERRI KLASS, M.D.


Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer “language confusion,” which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language.

Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish — or Mandarin — for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before. Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information.

And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren’t many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child.

But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two.

Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior — where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention — to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies’ brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain.

Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their infant-size EEG caps, ranged from 6 months to 12 months of age, they weren’t producing many words in any language. Still, the researchers found that at 6 months, the monolingual infants could discriminate between phonetic sounds, whether they were uttered in the language they were used to hearing or in another language not spoken in their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard. The researchers suggested that this represents a process of “neural commitment,” in which the infant brain wires itself to understand one language and its sounds. In contrast, the bilingual infants followed a different developmental trajectory. At 6 to 9 months, they did not detect differences in phonetic sounds in either language, but when they were older — 10 to 12 months — they were able to discriminate sounds in both. “What the study demonstrates is that the variability in bilingual babies’ experience keeps them open,” said Dr. Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the study. “They do not show the perceptual narrowing as soon as monolingual babies do. It’s another piece of evidence that what you experience shapes the brain.”

The learning of language — and the effects on the brain of the language we hear — may begin even earlier than 6 months of age. Janet Werker, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, studies how babies perceive language and how that shapes their learning. Even in the womb, she said, babies are exposed to the rhythms and sounds of language, and newborns have been shown to prefer languages rhythmically similar to the one they’ve heard during fetal development. In one recent study, Dr. Werker and her collaborators showed that babies born to bilingual mothers not only prefer both of those languages over others — but are also able to register that the two languages are different. In addition to this ability to use rhythmic sound to discriminate between languages, Dr. Werker has studied other strategies that infants use as they grow, showing how their brains use different kinds of perception to learn languages, and also to keep them separate. In a study of older infants shown silent videotapes of adults speaking, 4-month-olds could distinguish different languages visually by watching mouth and facial motions and responded with interest when the language changed. By 8 months, though, the monolingual infants were no longer responding to the difference in languages in these silent movies, while the bilingual infants continued to be engaged. “For a baby who’s growing up bilingual, it’s like, ‘Hey, this is important information,’ ” Dr. Werker said.

Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function. These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain.

“Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said. Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants.

Her research group is examining infant brains with an even newer imaging device, magnetoencephalography, or MEG, which combines an M.R.I. scan with a recording of magnetic field changes as the brain transmits information. Dr. Kuhl describes the device as looking like a “hair dryer from Mars,” and she hopes that it will help explore the question of why babies learn language from people, but not from screens. Previous research by her group showed that exposing English-language infants in Seattle to someone speaking to them in Mandarin helped those babies preserve the ability to discriminate Chinese language sounds, but when the same “dose” of Mandarin was delivered by a television program or an audiotape, the babies learned nothing. “This special mapping that babies seem to do with language happens in a social setting,” Dr. Kuhl said. “They need to be face to face, interacting with other people. The brain is turned on in a unique way.”