Jan. 30, 2007 - Think playtime, but with a purpose. From California to Connecticut, toddlers sit on the laps of their parents or caretakers and are spoken to in Italian, French, Spanish and, increasingly, Chinese.

They sit in circles, distracted by cuddly toys, at schools such as the Language Workshop for Children in New York or informal groups organized by parents.

For mom Karen Albright, having her 2-year-old daughter, Carolyn, attend French and Chinese classes seems natural. Carolyn "already speaks Spanish and English, because her baby sitter speaks Spanish," says Albright. Encouraging a caregiver to speak in his or her native language to the baby makes sense to parents like Raj and Mamta Purohit of New Jersey. In the long run, they believe their daughter Anaka's exposure to native and grammatically correct Chinese is better for her than exposure to sometimes broken English. The Purohits see it as turning a possible liability into a bonus.

Mandarin (the dominant form of Chinese in the world) is not an easy language to pick up. The Foreign Service Institute ranks it about four times as time-intensive to learn as French, but these babies (many as young as 6-months old) are getting a head start. And if the success of the courses at the Language Workshop for Children and the rise in advanced placement language courses at high schools around the country are any indication, the popularity is surging.

Every Advantage
Susan and Jason Krause want to give their son, Gavin, every advantage. Jason Krause manages real estate assets in China, and beyond the possibility of preparing his toddler to take over the family business one day, he also believes that teaching his son other languages is crucial for Gavin's overall development as a global citizen.

"I think it's important to show others in the world that we're not so U.S.-centric," explains Gavin's father. "Everyone should speak English, but we're going to make an attempt to speak their language as well. It helps culturally when you're doing business or in social engagements, just to learn what other people are about."

Parents are also learning more about the developmental window in which children can most readily absorb new languages. For the first 6 months of life, for example, babies can hear every sound from every language in the world. According to Ann Senghas at Barnard's Language Acquisition and Development Research Lab at Columbia University, between month 6 and month 10, our brains actually begin to prune away sounds that we are not exposed to frequently.

'Understanding Comes Long Before Speaking'
There have been several studies that have, in one way or another, found advantages in starting children off in a new language at a young age. Researchers don't know whether it is biological or social, but most children who learn a language before puberty seem to develop the ability to speak it as a native would.

Francois Thibaut, who runs the Language Workshop for Children, has created a line of linguistic software for young children. He says the method works better when the babies are preverbal. "Understanding comes long before speaking, and speaking before reading and writing," he says. "That's the way you learn your own language."

There are no translators in any of Thibaut's classes, because he says when we translate for children we actually add confusion; for clarity we should keep using the word we want them to learn.

Multilingual Myths
Some parents fear that with all these different words and languages, their children will have a harder time picking up English or will get confused. However, there are emerging theories that the brain is designed to pick up multiple languages early in life, and that our current monolingual focus is actually an evolutionary aberration.

Allesandra is a teenager who started studying languages at the Language Workshop for Children before she can remember. She speaks fluent French, Spanish, Italian and English, and is working on Chinese, Portuguese and Latin … and she hasn't even set foot in a high school yet.

A well-rounded and articulate young woman, Allesandra recognizes the advantages that multiple languages will afford her, and still wants to pick up Hindi (the national language of India) by the time she enters college.

"When I am older, I want to have an international job in something that has to do with health care or medicine … because I really like science too," she says. "So, I think that by knowing Hindi and Chinese, I could work in parts of the world that need a lot of help."

The 'Apple' Example
Allesandra's interest and excellence in math and science is not an unusual byproduct for children who are fluent in multiple languages. Research has indicated that multilingual students do as well, if not better, on standardized tests in high school than their monolingual peers.

To understand why, think of an apple, and then think of the word "apple." If you speak only one language, you associate the object (the apple) with that word, and only that word. But, for example, if you know three languages and three words for "apple," the words become more like symbols to you, similar to the symbol "x" in an algebraic equation.

Perhaps so many engineers and computer scientists are involved in software breakthroughs because they've become fluent with symbols the way a poet has with words.

And perhaps some future poets of symbols and words are getting a head start as bilingual babies.

Many of the students attending The Language Workshop for Children catch my attention. As one example, I have always made a point of observing the progress of Chinese-American students who were sent to the LWFC to learn French or Spanish (and in some cases both languages simultaneously) who were already bilingual in English and Chinese.

We teach a child another language by introducing that language’s basic phonetic sounds and guiding him (through various methods and materials) to attach meanings to those sounds and to replicate those meanings in a standard grammatical sequence. As we all know, it is the brain that processes and sorts languages unique sounds and meanings and directs the voice to utter recognizable speech.

Over the years I noticed that my bilingual Chinese-English students were often the first to call out the right French or Spanish answer during visual aid games, but I never understood why. Each of my students’ parents was equally enthusiastic and committed to doing everything possible to help their son or daughter learn a new language, whether it meant bringing them every single week or making sure they practiced with their take-home materials. But week after week, I saw that the bilingual Chinese-American youngsters often lead the class.

When I mentioned this to a colleague of mine, the director of a children’s music program, she told me that her Chinese-American students were very often class leaders too. They grasped musical concepts immediately, consistently called out answers, and could recall musical concepts taught to them in weeks past.

I recently discovered an article suggesting that the answer may lie in a study published by Britain’s Wellcome Trust. Researchers there concluded that Chinese Mandarin speakers use both the right and the left sides of the brain to process voice melody. French, Spanish and English speakers process music, emotion and voice melody on the right and logic, math and literal meaning on the left. Applying the Wellcome Trust’s findings, the process of learning Chinese may promote enhanced critical thinking and cognitive processing skills.

To work more effectively with Chinese translators, my assistant director and I recently took private Mandarin lessons. She and I found Mandarin grammar to be relatively simple but, predictably, as adult learners pronouncing it was a different matter. A simple Mandarin sound like “ma” can have different meanings depending upon the voice melody used to speak it. “Ma” pronounced with a flat “ahhhhhhhhh” and an enlongated “aaaaaaaah” says two different things. That is why people speaking Chinese may sound like they’re singing. They’re not, they’re just applying the almost musical pitch and range the Chinese language requires to communicate meaning.

The Wellcome Trust’s researchers theorized that the musical pitch, range and voice melody needed to learn Mandarin sensitizes and trains a Chinese speakers brain to learn to discriminate and interpret a far wider range of audial cues, tones, and phonetically based sounds than non-Chinese speakers. Perhaps this tells us why young bilingual Chinese-American students have an exemplary ability to excel in language and music education.

In the early 70’s (and into the 90’s) at times the LWFC’s Spanish classes were empty. Then suddenly in the late 90’s demand for Spanish began growing. Today the number of requests for Spanish is greater than that for French. But it’s time for Chinese. Not just because it’s a sensible choice to prepare a child for a future career, but based upon what I have seen, my colleague experienced, and the Wellcome Trust’s findings, studying Chinese early may give a child neurologically-based abilities to recognize extreme variations in pitch, melody and meaning, which translate into abilities to learn language, music and possibly other disciplines.

© 2005 The Language Workshop For Children.