Comment by hrktb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hrktb | Hacker News Reader

> But between then and now, research has shown the depth of the relationship all of us have with our native tongues—and how traumatic it can be when that relationship is ruptured.

I wondered what these research were.

From the additional readings section I see these two that could be related:

> Hallett, D., Chandler, M.J., & Lalonde, C.E. Aboriginal language knowledge and youth suicide. Cognitive Development 22, 392-399

> Wang, Q., Shao, Y., & Li, Y.J. “My way or mom’s way?” The bilingual and bicultural self in Hong Kong Chinese children and adolescents. Child Development 81, 555-567 (2010).

It seems that these studies were done in environments where language has a very strong cultural connotation and strongly binds to an identity.

Not discrediting it, but I wouldn’t expect the same to be true for a Belgian couple speaking NL first and French second but moves to France and switch to French only.

Put another way, I think the whole arguments need disassociation with contextual factors if the goal is to focus on language. Otherwise language is just a part of the whole picture, and we should talk about first cultures perhaps, and not first languages.

Identity is a big confound in the relearning experiments involving foreign adoptees. There are quite a few studies looking at Korean children adopted by French or North American families. These children seem to completely lose their first language (no neural response in fMRI), even though some were adopted as late as 9 years old. However, when they enroll in introductory Korean classes in college, they seem to pick up the phonology more quickly than their classmates.

The confound is that it's not clear if they are "reactivating" some long forgotten part of their brains that maintained Korean phonology, or if they are simply more apt learners due to identifying as Korean. In other words, one of the challenges in learning to pronounce a new language is the ability to overcome "sounding funny" to your peers/yourself, but these Korean adoptees may not have that holding them back since they feel that they are reacquiring a lost part of their identity.

We’d have to look closer to the study, but there is a lot of research reaching the conclusion that learning languages has lasting effect on the brain, in particular in bi-lingual children ([0] for instance)

In that respect, picking back a language they once developed the “hardware” to fully master would be faster for them than people starting from scratch, even if presumably they’ve completely forgotten it.

I’d also expect children having learned language with the same structure to learn Korean faster, just as fully bi-lingual people learn tjeir third or fourth language faster in general.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6124684/

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