To understand the importance of this period, we need to understand the existence of two laws: one is pruning in the development of brain neurons, and the other is that English is a phonetic method.
Most people may think that with the birth of a baby, the number of neurons in the brain will continue to increase, and the number of connections between neurons will continue to increase until adulthood.
In fact, this understanding is wrong. Since the birth of mankind, the number of neurons in the brain has reached about 80 billion, and there will not be much change since then. The biggest change is actually the number of connected neurons.
What do you mean? The synapse of a neuron holding hands with other neurons is considered as a connection number. This number of connections will reach its peak when people 1 are half to two years old. At this peak, a neuron may hold hands with hundreds of neurons around it. After that, the number of neurons began to decline. Scientists call this process "pruning of neuronal connections".
On the outer layer of those synapses that are often active, a layer of glial cells grows, wrapping the nerve connections, just like some wires are protected by insulating tapes, and they are not trimmed. And those connections that are not used often and do not wrap glial cells will gradually shrink afterwards, and these are trimmed away.
The pruning process will last until the age of 20. By that time, about 60% of the connections will be trimmed off compared with when I was two years old. I put a micrograph of neuronal connections of different ages in the manuscript. As you can see, connections are densest at the age of two.
Tell me, can you not trim it? Wouldn't it be nice to keep the greatest diversity and possibilities?
No, it must be trimmed. There is a genetic disease in reality, that is, when a child is two years old, the neuronal connections are not pruned, and such a child will develop into a serious mental illness in the future. So pruning is very important.
At first, all the nerve connections related to eating, drinking and sleeping were trimmed, and only the most commonly used ones were kept. So you will find that children can stop wetting the bed when they are about 3 years old. He left the nerve part that knew how to suppress urine, and other nerve connections that leaked urine were trimmed. In addition, the child's personality and thinking habits are also stable at the end of pruning.
After the age of 20, of course, new connections will be formed, but the scale and speed of those connections are far less than those from birth to two years old.
When the brain processes language, so do the highly active Wernicke area and Blocker area. When you continue to talk to your child in a certain language, the nerves involved will be stimulated repeatedly, so the possibility of not being pruned will greatly increase. Gradually, when the synapse is stable, when the external language stimulus comes, there is no other path for the nerve signal to go, and children can understand the language quickly and easily without extra thinking.
So some people say that "14 years old is the window period". Although this statement is not completely wrong, it was already at the end of neuron pruning. 14-year-old children's connection pattern of neurons in language area has long been a pattern suitable for fast Chinese processing. Although learning English at the age of 14 is better than learning English at the age of 40, it is far less effective than learning English at the age of two.
This is the so-called "window period", which gets twice the result with half the effort.
But another question is, how to learn a language?
Back to some parents' questions. Reading English picture books is actually not language learning. When learning a language, if we start with how to write words, we will go astray. The core content of learning a language is sound, especially for phonetic symbols, such as French, German, Spanish and Italian. Phonetic symbol means that the characters in this language are only used to record the combination of various basic sounds spoken in the mouth, and the rules are the same.
Chinese is not phonography, because Chinese characters not only contain the pronunciation of syllables, but also express some meanings. Therefore, it is very difficult to learn Chinese.
A person who can speak Chinese needs to spend at least 2-3 years memorizing the pronunciation of each word before writing Chinese. A person who can speak Spanish only needs a few hours from speaking to writing, because he only needs to know the spelling rules and then write down the writing methods of the characters corresponding to these 20 basic sounds.
Therefore, learning English should focus on sound.
Knowing the importance of the connection between pruning brain neurons and pronunciation in phonetics, we can combine the characteristics of these two things to analyze the matter of children learning language.
When a baby's brain processes a language, it is definitely not words, but after hearing a series of strange sounds, it can automatically correspond to a practical meaning, either "father", "mother", "clothes" or "toy". No matter what it corresponds to, the first step is to identify the details of that strange sound.
Many people think it is too difficult to teach a two-year-old child to learn English. Don't speak English. What doesn't he understand in Chinese? But in fact, the opposite is true. It was actually the easiest to teach him English at that time. It doesn't matter even if your parents can't speak a word of English. You can always find some English news and audio of English listening test on the Internet, right? Let him out.
You said that he didn't understand what it meant.
Yes, it's really a pity not to understand the meaning. But as long as that tone appears in his ears, the Wilnick area in his brain is highly active, and his brain is automatically processing this strange string of notes. This process does not require the participation of consciousness, but is determined by human genes. Even those patients who become vegetative after traffic accidents will never wake up, but as long as someone talks to him, his language area will be highly active. The child's brain will try to segment the breakpoint of this cross talk and gradually adapt to the pause law after the language is spoken.
If there is no follow-up stage to let children understand that those voices should be related to something in reality, what impact will it have?
As long as he listens to English regularly and extensively before he is two years old, he will be more accurate in listening to English and watching American movies when he grows up.
As for the steps of collocating meaningful syllables, we can also leave them for the future and improve them a little.
Of course, some parents are qualified to use English in their daily lives. At the age of two, children not only train to distinguish syllables, but also make syllables correspond to actual meanings.
When children learn English, it is very useful to just listen. The reason for this advantage is that when pruning occurs, the mapping of neural connections suitable for dealing with English pronunciation and distinguishing English pronunciation and intonation is preserved.
In this time window, there are connection graphs suitable for processing any language in your brain, depending on which ones you intend to keep. If you don't keep it or trim it, you can only rely on systematic training, rational thinking and extra attention to English learning if you want to master it in the future. Through bit by bit efforts, this part of the related connection will grow again, and this process is difficult and slow.
If you can understand this truth, you can at least know qualitatively how much it will improve your language ability to show English picture books to two-year-old children, how much it will be effective to learn English at the age of 14, or how much it will be effective to find a foreign teacher to practice when you go to college.
Some parents also asked, is there a window period for programming languages, logical thinking and various musical instruments? Judging from the law just now, the window period of these contents is not obvious.
Because the essence of programming language and logical thinking is not language, but mathematics and logic.
Language has a natural, gene-turned-on region, which is specially processed. Even when a child is sleeping, his language area will be highly active. Therefore, the window period provides an atmosphere and environment, which is a hundred times stronger than special study.
But mathematics and logic basically need systematic training, which is not an innate attribute of human beings. 50 thousand years ago, human DNA was highly similar to today's human beings, but the universal rational thinking of human beings only appeared in the last 200 years.
The reason why this happens, I think, is also because rational thinking needs a pre-physiological basis. In other words, the ability to express rational thinking can only begin after many peripheral nerve connections are correct and stable. Rational thinking here includes logic and mathematics.
In reality, there are also such examples. For example, many famous physicists and mathematicians, such as the famous physicist De Broglie, discovered their interests after twenty years old, and turned from literature and history to physics and mathematics.
Finally, talk about learning musical instruments.
This is a matter of distinguishing purpose. If you want your child to be a great pianist like Chopin, Liszt and Holovitz, I'm afraid you still need a child's skill. If you start practicing at the age of 18, it is impossible to become a great performer.
But if it is for fun, or if you want children to experience the beauty of music more in the future, it is never too late to learn musical instruments. The basic skills of any musical instrument can surpass most amateurs as long as they follow the mainstream teaching methods for 2-3 months. As for what can be played in the future, it is more about interest and impulse to music.
Sometimes, music is a complex art form, and appreciating beauty requires a higher level of understanding, and the window period of this kind of thing is not obvious.
The content of this paper comes from Zhuo Ke Science and Technology Reference.