Language is, as the experts say, something that is best learned when one is very young, while the brain is at the height of its elasticity and has not yet gone plastic. Language learned in early age is incorporated, internalized in a way that does not happen later on in life. Moreover, he who learns a second language as a child learns also the sort of fluency in that language that is otherwise common only to people who speak it as their native language. This is to say that the child learns to speak without an accent.
It has been shown on brain imaging that a particular area of the brain lights up in response to the stimulus of language. In the person who has learned two languages as he grew up, both languages activate this same area. However, in the individual who has learned a second language in his adult life, brain activation by the second language has migrated or expanded to an adjacent area of the brain. It is as if a second room has been needed to house this second language.
Albert, my wife's ex-husband, learned both English and Indonesian as a small child, having been raised by turn in both countries. He is equally fluent in both. An American listener would find nothing at all foreign in his speech, nor would an Indonesian listener.
And then there is me, trying to learn Indonesian at the ripe old age of 55. It is frustrating. I am wondering why my parents couldn't have done me the favor of regularly traveling to Indonesia. It makes me feel neglected and abused. And I swear, this second language room in my brain is about the size of a closet. A broom closet. And it is just not lighting up very well. Just a little light squeezing in under the door.
Talk about a plastic brain. I think that when I die they may put mine on display, the perfect example of what happens between childhood and old age.
Not only that, but this plastic has holes in it. Mine is an MS brain, a sieve, a leaky boat--and friends, it's sinking fast. I don't know whether to bail or to row.
More to come . . . .
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