One of the most curious questions concerning the development of babies is that of language acquisition. Recently it has been discovered that babies are already learning their language from the beginning, already in the first months of life, and it is that it has been seen when studying adults, that there are them with certain linguistic abilities just because they have lived A short time in a given country. In other words, that adults are able to retain language skills they were born with even if they have never spoken it.
A study done with people born in South Korea
As we read in IFLScience, the study has been published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, and to carry it out, the adult language skills that were analyzed were analyzed. they were born in South Korea and that they had lived there insufficient time to learn the language.
These adults resided in Holland, where they lived from a young age with their adoptive parents, learning the language of the Netherlands and, consequently, away from all verbal contact with their original culture.
The researchers decided to compare the Korean way of speaking of these adults, imitating certain consonants of that language, and compared it with other adults who did not come from Korea. In the first tests, everyone had even results (all spoke Korean equally badly, or equally well). However, after some classes one and the other, they saw that adults who had been adopted from South Korea they were much more efficient when pronouncing these consonants.
The age of adoption was not relevant
The most surprising thing is that the age at which they had been adopted was not relevant. As he explains Mirjam Broersma, co-author of the study:
One of the most interesting findings was that no difference was found in the learning outcomes of participants born in Korea and adopted less than six months of age, and those adopted after the age of seventeen months. This means that even in the first months of life, useful knowledge of the language is already established, and that what is preserved about the mother tongue is the abstract knowledge of what are possible patterns, and not so much the words.
For the authors of the study, this shows that those people who have been adopted, even in the first months of life, have an advantage over other adults if they intend to learn their theoretical mother tongue.
In addition, it explains how much babies and children learn about language from the beginning, at the level of pronunciation patterns and language construction, to try to communicate as soon as possible. That is why the researchers suggest to the parents something that has been recommended for a long time: talk to them from the first moment, explain to them what we do, what comes next, tell them how much we love them and even tell them anecdotes of ours, so that they can make those learnings that will help them speak more and better.
What if the genes were?
The researchers do not mention it, but perhaps you have heard or read somewhere that certain characteristics of the brain of newborns could be inherited from their parents and other generations. We know that the aggressiveness of certain children, for example, can be inherited through genes.
This being the case, since the character, which is reflected in a sum of behaviors that are born in the brain, may be of genetic origin, why shouldn't language also be? I do not speak of words, but of that predisposition to learn better the language of their parents, their grandparents, great grandparents, etc., and that consequently has been in the brain of this family for several generations.
Think about it for a moment: in the study they saw that babies under 6 months also had the ability to pronounce consonants better. What if it wasn't because someone spoke to them in that language, but because they carried that serial skill in their brain, inheritance of the brains of their ancestors?
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