Several months ago, on a transatlantic flight to Rome, I was standing in the rear of the plane by the galley waiting for a cup of coffee to awaken me when a cherubic blonde six or seven year old approached me. "Dove il bagno?" he uttered. Seeing my quizzical look, he tried again, "Ou sont les toilettes?" Had I not been trying to recouperate from five hours of fitful sleep, memory of high school French would have permitted me at the very least to answer, "C'est la.". But, seeing my dumbfounded look, the exasperated child blurted out, "Where's the toilet?" I motioned silently toward the tail section and the little linguist marched off.
An hour later, while waiting for our luggage in the baggage claim area, I happened to be standing beside the child and his parents. I complimented his mother on her son's facility with three languages and inquired how he had been able to learn them so young. She replied that she was Italian--her husband was French--and that they had been living in New York City for the past three years. Her son, Jacques, had never taken any language lessons, but he had been exposed to all three languages since he was an infant. Through further questioning, I learned that, with the exception of an occasional word substitution, Jacques has no trouble keeping the languages separate. His mother did say, however, that he has distinct language preferences at different times. Whenever he's talking about things to do with the home--food, sleep, family--he tends to speak in Italian. Jacques, at his tender age, must feel the formality of French because, she said, he is inclined to discuss more intellectual or abstract thing en francais.
English? This is the language he uses for the "fun" things. He talks about television shows, his friends, his toys and records in English. Often, in the same conversation, Jacques switches from Italian to English to French with complete facility.
I thought back to my four years of high school French and questioned myself on why I was so ill-equipped to carry on even a simple conversation with a seven year old. I realized two things were different between Jacques's and my language learning. Jacques had been exposed to other languages (1) naturally and (2) at a very early age. In contrast, I was 14 before I began trying to learn French and then I started with ponderous conjugations from grammar books and English/French cassette tapes.
I had hit upon the right answers to my question. These two factors--age and hearing the language naturally--were the crucial determinants. An increasing number of studies by neurologists, brain-physiologists, psychologists, educators, linguists and anthropologists have come to the conclusion that the easiest time to learn a language is between the ages of two and five!
The reason is both physiological and psychological. In a comprehensive study by neurosurgeons Penfield and Roberts published under the title "Speech and Brain Mechanisms," it was found that the physiological reason for success in learning a language early in the home is that a child's brain has a specialized capacity for learning a language--"a capacity that decreases with the passage of years." The study is backed by reports of immigrant families that arrive in a new country without previous knowledge of the local language. Inevitably, in two years the children have learned the new language while their parents
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