[SOUND] This idea is one of those that really runs counter to the one that's commonly expressed in the monolingual literature. That is that young children are language geniuses. That they know all the pieces of language by a certain age. I'm not arguing that they know no language, right? That they're not specialised. But I think the argument can be made, that in fact, what they know is quite plastic and can change quite easily depending on the exposure and what language they may hear going forward. The results from bilinguals and from adoptees suggests that there's lots of plasticity, that the language system is still developing and that it still requires lots of support from the environment. And that even very complex forms of grammar are not set in stone and completely developed, possibly even up until age eight. When we thought of the nonverbal literature, we thought about what it meant to be an expert in a motor domain, so for example, golf putting. Or within a cognitive domain, for example, playing chess. And in those domains, the nature of expertise took on a very different language. We talked about automatic and controlled. We talked about building different pieces together. And I think the analogy I take for language is one that's very similar to a sports analogy. Let's consider sports or athletics as an analogy for language. Think about what happens early in development when we think about children playing soccer. So I remember going to watch my five-year-old daughter play soccer games, and basically what happened was everybody just chased the ball. So essentially the ball was in one place and the children just chased the ball back and forth across the field, until hopefully they scored a goal in the right, correct goal. Right? So, and at that point, the development of skills were trying to dribble the ball, push the ball across the field, trying to kick the ball, and, of course, if you think about how young children kick the ball, a lot of them kick facing forward, but they don't turn sideways when they kick, that comes later. And so there's development of all these basic level skills. Similarly, we could think about kids in the U.S. playing baseball. The children will watch a ball coming at them and learn to hit it with a baseball bat. And what we have is a development of lots of little motor skills. Right? These motor skills of turning sideways and kicking, of throwing, of catching, of retrieving, of running, of coordinating themselves with the ball, all get put together. But they can be co-opted. So we can take a child who's played baseball and we can take that throwing motion and then incorporate it into a tennis serve. Similarly, we can take the kicking motion and incorporate that into a ground stroke in tennis. Essentially the forehand is like a kicking motion except that there's no kicking. But the turning part that's used to generate the force from the body is very similar in a kick, as it is in a forehand. The force that's used to generate power on a forehand is very similar to the one that's used to generate power in a kicking motion and power in a batting motion. They're not identical, but we can take these pieces and reconfigure them for different sports. So again, the analogy of sports fits nicely with the analogy of language early in development. And then what happens later? Well, later you get strategy. So if you watch soccer games in high school, what you'll see now is people don't chase the ball anymore. Now what happens is you get spacing. You get the goalie staying at the goal most of the time, except in emergencies. You see the defenders staying back and the forwards and midfielders staying in the forward part of the field. And so what happens is you get this ebb and flow of the players moving back and forth across the field in a very strategic manner and they're no longer thinking about I want the ball right now. They're thinking about how can I create the best spacing in this particular situation? So it becomes much like a chess match. Players move back and forth depending on the situation on the field. So the strategic component also appears in language later in life. You begin to see people writing paragraphs, maybe the five sentence paragraph, or eventually the five paragraph essay. Eventually, whole papers written for 20 pages. And eventually, people may even write books, entire tomes that require lots and lots of layering and lots of strategic thinking beyond the simple grammar of a sentence or the pronunciation of a word. So we can start to ask the question within the bilingual literature about what this means, because there appear to be some things that strategically cross different domains. Within language, we can think about what are the things that are shared, and what are the things that are separate? In very early work on the psycholinguistics of bilingualism, researchers really thought about the shared separate dichotomy. They suggest that maybe people who grew up as simultaneous bilinguals had shared language systems, and those who grew up as what's called sequential bilinguals, right, or second language learners, had separate language systems. But over time, researchers began to realize that, in fact, the idea of shared and separate existed within every bilingual. The idea of a shared separate system has been most profoundly seen in the work of Judith Crole, who's shown that when we think about concepts, those exist across languages. They're alinguistic. Now I'm not trying to say that every concept is that way, but if we think about basic concepts such as chairs, dogs, houses, those concepts cross over into different languages. What separates each language are the particular words that we use. In terms of a bilingual, if those languages are distinct enough, they will actually acquire two labels for the same concept. Initial stages of second language learning, especially in adults, will lead to this process of translation, what Brian McQuinny has called parasitism, where one language is parasitic on the other. It essentially needs the other language to exist. The idea being that whenever a person tries to retrieve the word in a second language, it's connected to the first language word. However, retrieval of that first language word is not linked to the second language. It existed independently before the second language was learned. So you get this asymmetry, this dependence of the second language on the first and this lower dependence, much lower, at least initially, of the first language on the second. Over time as proficiency improves, that asymmetry decreases. But what we see initially is a parasitism, a dependence of that second language on the first, and a translation process that slows things down. What we can think about is a type of triangle, right, in which each language exists independently, and a conceptual space is connected to them and initially this connection occurs through the first language. So the person has to go from the second language, translate to the first, to access the concept. As time continues, what begins to happen is that second language gets connected to the conceptual space and concepts are accessed more directly. But initially, there's a direct connection between the second and the first that's much stronger that begins to diminish over time and we begin to see stronger and stronger connections between the second language words and the concepts.
