By placing a finger over all except the very last syllable of a word, and exposing one syllable at a time moving from right-to-left, learners encounter considerably fewer obstacles in pronouncing (and later recognizing) these new words. Each syllable “primes” the next syllable directly out of one’s “working memory” while strengthening the synaptic connections for the whole word.
When students are taught in the traditional left-to-right method, this “brain-antagonistic” tactic adds to the difficulty of learning new vocabulary words. A limited vocabulary is a crucial factor underlying failure in school. A history of poor language and reading skills limits lifelong cognitive abilities and correlates with low-skilled employment and residency in correctional institutions.
Language: Where it All Begins
Neuropsychologists have linked specific regions of the brain to specific brain functions and processes. While working memory has been associated with the hippocampus in rats, the working memory system in humans is linked to several other brain regions, including the frontal and parietal lobes of the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex’s region responsible for understanding language (Wernicke’s area) gets “wired” well before the maturation of the motor area responsible for producing speech (Broca’s area).
Toddlers will regularly demonstrate that they “understand” language 12 to 18 months before they begin to speak. (“Ma-ma” and “Da-da” are not necessarily evidence of learning to speak, because deaf children utter these same sounds without hearing them first.)
Children often find ways to use gestures to communicate their wants and needs, referred to as “baby signs,” well before they learn to speak their first words. Toddlers at the Ohio State University’s Infant-Toddler Laboratory School have learned to sign using American Sign Language during late infancy (at the end of their first year), allowing them to express their ideas, their desires and intentions without the spoken word. Not only did these children speak earlier than the average, but they also displayed fewer temper tantrums, showed advanced emotional management and were more comfortable speaking.
Parents of toddlers are keenly aware of their child’s ability to recognize the correct names of objects, people and actions before the child can articulate the precise word to describe them. Moms and dads help promote language development through “parentese,” the exaggerated speech used worldwide by parents as they speak to infants, where we overemphasize important language sounds. The universal, instinctive nature of parentese, singing songs, and reading stories and poetry to toddlers leads to the mastery of language. With their budding mirror neurons activated, infants fixate on the mouth of a speaker and mentally rehearse how they would produce those same sounds, well before they are capable of speech.
However, when children hear no language at all, the circuitry for language gets “pruned” away. Once the brain pathways for a specialized function, such as language, have been redirected, the “window of opportunity” for learning begins to close. Those resources are diverted elsewhere to support other important behaviors, resulting in language delays, language production problems, or comprehension deficits. The brain has an enduring neural legacy that reflects how it was sculpted over time.
At approximately 22 months of age, normal neural circuitry has physically connected Broca’s area to Wernicke’s area, the cortical region devoted to understanding semantic analysis and word meaning. Once these connections are established, a child will begin constructing their first short sentences, almost always composed of a single verb and a single noun (“Tyler eat”), and nearly always in the proper word order. This is one of the most exciting moments of parenthood, signaling to them that the magic of human language is about to unfold right before their eyes.
7 Steps to Language Learning
1. Hearing lullabies and songs gives infants the building blocks — the distinct phonemic elements — of the local language. To build a foundation in the language, an infant must hear the sounds that it requires.
2. Sing those songs and learn to produce the sounds via mimicry while watching others. Songs for children characteristically stress frequently used sounds and grammatical patterns found in the local language.
3. Listen to, repeat, and then recite children’s poetry, in order to learn similarities in sounds (rhymes) by practicing the dominant phonetic elements.
4. Listen to stories emphasizing sentence structure, grammar, syntax, and the predictable nature of language (for example, subject-verb agreement and the word order for adjectives and the nouns they describe).
5. Repeat/retell stories in a child’s own words, making sense of vocabulary, the content and the context. Similarly, toddlers often engage in audible conversations with themselves, especially during multiple-step activities.
6. Draw pictures of people, objects, concepts, or story events. Children must learn to create mental pictures of objects in their “mind’s eye.” Nouns are more readily activated than words describing intangible concepts, so drawing can bring the abstract world closer to mind. The creative nature of drawing does for the brain during the day what dreaming does for the brain at night.
7. Begin reading and writing symbolic language. Several lines of evidence now suggest that the first six learning events leading up to actually “reading” symbolic language should always precede it.
About the Author
Kenneth Wesson speaks about the neuroscience of learning for educational organizations and institutions throughout the United States and overseas. Wesson has been acknowledged by the National Association of Independent Schools as being “influential in reshaping the independent school classroom.” Please visit his website for more information.
This article is updated from its initial publication in Brain World Magazine’s print edition.
