Language develops immediately after birth. The amount of language cell synapses increases exponentially and peaks out at the 8 th month. Voice recognition capability is at its best. Your baby can discern the basic sounds of any language.
Expose your baby to as many languages as you can during this sensitive period. This stimulates the networking of synapses and the development of a sophisticated voice recognition system. Your baby will speak foreign languages like native speakers.
Synapses not in use wither away in droves. The ability to pick up foreign languages declines sharply with the closing of the window of opportunity.
Knowledge about early language acquisition has been greatly facilitated by breakthroughs in the understanding of early brain development, which was in turn facilitated by rapid advances in medical scanning technology.
The old belief warns parents not to expose a baby to foreign languages before mastering the mother tongue. The baby would get confused or even language impairment, so the experts say.
But bi-lingual babies born from mixed marriages are not confused. Children brought up in multi-lingual societies like Singapore, Switzerland and in Scandinavian countries are more gifted in languages than children brought up in monolingual societies in the US, UK, France, China or Japan.
Our own research reveals that babies' world of languages is completely different from that of adults. They are highly focused on sounds and sound patterns. Languages share over 80% of the basic sounds and are easy for babies. Babies have no concept of words or national boundaries.
A baby builds up a massive database of sounds and sound patterns in any number of languages in the 1 st year. He draws enormous satisfaction in imitating the sounds in the 2 nd year and shifts his attention from sound to meaning, building up vocabulary and sentence patterns in the 3 rd year.
Our Gifted Babies program comprises age-sensitive playgroups offered in 6 languages. The highly interactive games, songs and activities create a social context for babies to exercise their senses and their fast developing brain. The stimulated brain builds up billions of networks of brain synapses to form a sophisticated multi-lingual voice recognition system that also serves as a central processing unit. Your baby thus develops higher IQ, better EQ and can speak 5 languages fluently by the age of 3. We take pride in having nourished so many gifted children over the past 4 years.
Sam TS Chow, Director,
Le Beaumont Language Centre, 2008 |
