Picking Up a Second Language Is Predicted by Ability to Learn Patterns

Some people seem to pick up a second language with relative ease, while others have a much more difficult time. Now, a new study suggests that learning to understand and read a second language may be driven, at least in part, by our ability to pick up on statistical regularities.

The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Some research suggests that learning a second language draws on capacities that are language-specific, while other research suggests that it reflects a more general capacity for learning patterns. According to psychological scientist and lead researcher Ram Frost of Hebrew University, the data from the new study clearly point to the latter:

“These new results suggest that learning a second language is determined to a large extent by an individual ability that is not at all linguistic,” says Frost.

In the study, Frost and colleagues used three different tasks to measure how well American students in an overseas program picked up on the structure of words and sounds in Hebrew. The students were tested once in the first semester and again in the second semester.

The students also completed a task that measured their ability to pick up on statistical patterns in visual stimuli. The participants watched a stream of complex shapes that were presented one at a time. Unbeknownst to the participants, the 24 shapes were organized into 8 triplets — the order of the triplets was randomized, though the shapes within each triplet always appeared in the same sequence. After viewing the stream of shapes, the students were tested to see whether they implicitly picked up the statistical regularities of the shape sequences.

The data revealed a strong association between statistical learning and language learning: Students who were high performers on the shapes task tended to pick up the most Hebrew over the two semesters.

“It’s surprising that a short 15-minute test involving the perception of visual shapes could predict to such a large extent which of the students who came to study Hebrew would  finish the year with a better grasp of the language,” says Frost.

According to the researchers, establishing a link between second language acquisition and a general capacity for statistical learning may have broad implications.

“This finding points to the possibility that a unified and universal principle of statistical learning can quantitatively explain a wide range of cognitive processes across domains, whether they are linguistic or nonlinguistic,” they conclude.

Children With Brain Lesions Able To Use Gestures Important To Language Learning

Children with brain lesions suffered before or around the time of birth are able to use gestures – an important aspect of the language learning process– to convey simple sentences, a Georgia State University researcher has found.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, assistant professor of psychology, and fellow researchers at the University of Chicago, looked at children who suffered lesions to one side of the brain to see whether they used gestures similar to typically developing children. She examined gestures such as pointing to a cookie while saying “eat” to convey the meaning “eat cookie,” several months before expressing such sentences exclusively in speech.

“We do know that children with brain injuries show an amazing amount of plasticity (the ability to change) for language learning if they acquire lesions early in life,” Özçalışkan said. “However, we did not know whether this plasticity was characterized by the same developmental trajectory shown for typically developing children, with gesture leading the way into speech.  We looked at the onset of different sentence constructions in children with early brain injuries, and wanted to find out if we could see precursors of different sentence types in gesture.

“For children with brain injuries, we found that this pattern holds, similar to typically developing children,” she said. “Children with unilateral brain injuries produce different kinds of simple sentences several months later than typically developing children. More important, the delays we observe in producing different sentences in speech are preceded by a similar delay in producing the same sentences in gesture-speech combinations.”

Children with brain injuries also had a more difficult time in producing complex sentences across gesture and speech, such as conveying relationships between actions, for example saying “help me do it” while making a painting gesture.

“This in turn was later reflected in a much narrower range of complex sentence types expressed in their speech,” Özçalışkan said. “This suggested to us, in general, that producing sentences across gesture and speech may serve as an embodied sensorimotor experience, that might help children take the next developmental step in producing these sentences in speech.

“And if you bypass the gesture-speech combination stage, that might negatively affect developing a broader representation of complex sentence types in speech.”

The researchers also compared children with smaller brain lesions against children with large lesions, and found more of a delay in producing sentences, both in speech and in gesture-speech combinations, in children with large lesions.

The research has implications for developing interventions to help children with the language learning process, “as it shows that gestures are integral to the process of language learning even when that learning is taking place in an injured brain,” Özçalışkan said.

“When children do different kinds of sentence combinations across gesture and speech, that’s like a signal to the caregiver that ‘I’m ready for this,’” she said. “The caregiver can then provide relevant input to the child, and that could in turn help the child take the next developmental step in producing that sentence entirely in speech.”