Between the lines: why bilingualism is child's play

A power couple in neuroscience, professors Patricia Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff were in Hong Kong recently to give a talk on their respective areas of expertise - emotional quotient and intelligence quotient - and the role of each in language acquisition.

The US researchers, who have accumulated a vast amount of data on how babies learn, have presented their findings not only to the Education Bureau, but also to the Clinton and Obama administrations, as well as governments and school boards across Europe and the US.

Language is not the same as communication. Babies can cry to communicate their needs, but until they are able to think about, play with and use words, they have no language skills. Language allows us to talk about the past and project our thoughts into the future. Language acquisition is the most complex brain process.

It is difficult to acquire language later in life because the brain loses its elasticity. In terms of learning new languages past the age of seven, Kuhl posits that the "window of learning" stays open longer for children who were exposed to different languages as babies.

In theory, a 15-year-old growing up in a bilingual environment such as Hong Kong will learn any new language more readily than one who has only ever been exposed to one language.

Meltzoff's leading research supports a growing body of evidence that bilingual people have an advantage when it comes to executive functions, specifically inhibitory control and task switching. Greater task-switching skills can be explained as a natural extension of bilingual people's ability to switch between two languages.