Language on the brain
Scientists are particularly interested in the brains of people who speak more than one language fluently because that skill is hard to acquire after about age seven.In one of Kuhl's studies,for example,native Mandarin Chinese speakers spoke Chinese to nine-month-old American babies for twelve sessions over four weeks.Each sessions lasted about 25 minutes. At the end of the study,the American babies responded to Mandarin sounds just as well as did Chinese babies who had been hearing the language their entire lives.
If a child regularly hears two languages,her brain forms a different pathway for each language.However, once the brain solidifies those electrical language pathways by around age seven,it gets harder to form new ones.By then,a baby's brain has disposed of,3 or pruned,all the unnecessary connection that the infant was born with.So,if you don't start studying Spanish or Russian untill middle school,you must struggle against years of brain development,and progress can be frustrsting.A twelve-year-old's brain has to work much harder to forge language connection than an infant's brain does."We ought to be learning new languages between ages zero and seven,when the brain does it naturally