Re: sensitive period in language acquisition?

From: Ivanovas/Milatos
Message: 875
Date: 2000-01-12

��<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META content="text/html; charset=unicode" http-equiv=Content-Type> <META content="MSHTML 5.00.2014.210" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">Marc wrote:</FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">>our children should learn 2 or even more languages at a very early age?<</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode"></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">I believe so, too. We moved to Greece when one pair of my twins was 8, the other pair 4 years old. The little one born here starts from the beginning. In the house we all speak German, outside: depending. All my kids seem to pick up languages very easy, when for the elder ones English and French was added at school they had a very good, easy start (still going strong). Admittedly a lot of TV-programs are English, too. But they rarely mix up languages (the younger ones more often than the older ones, especially they make mistakes that aren't really wrong, just Graecisms when speaking German that a non-German probably wouldn't even realize).</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">So I vote for teaching children as many languages as seem plausible (here tourism makes at least for additional English!)</FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">And Gerry: There is quite a scientifically specialized branch of neurophysiology working on the subject of language and language-acquisition. May be you'd better turn to them for final answers (as far as there are...)</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode"></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">Best wishes from Crete</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">Sabine</DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode"></FONT> </DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>