The capacity of the brain to absorb new languages is extraordinary in the early developmental years, but the language center of the brain stabilizes at a certain age in childhood, making learning a new language much more difficult, including the pronunciation aspects. I'm forgetting the age at which this happens, but I'm pretty sure that it is before age 13 -- a perfect reason to teach foreign languages in the early grades, and not to wait until high school like most US schools do!
Anyway, while looking in one of my books for the developmental capacity for languages, I stumbled on this interesting fact: we all know that language is primarily processed in the language center of the brain, don't we? Well, people who lived in Japan at an early age, whether genetically Japanese or not, process isolated vowel sounds predominately in the left hemisphere, while all others do so predominately in the right hemisphere. Significantly, in English and many other languages, it is impossible to compose a sentence without consonants, but it can be done in Japanese. The book,
The Brain, Restak (Bantam Books, 1984) speculates why there are such differences between the philosophies of Japanese and western culture:
"If Dr. Tsunoda's research is correct, the left hemisphere in the Japanese brain is concerned with things that are as important as logic is to a Westerner: intuition, indirection, and the creative use of space and sound. The sensitivity to these multiple components of human communication facilitates judgment about people and events that would be impossible to a person who relies on 'logic' alone.
Central to Dr. Tsuanoda's thesis is the importance of language as a determinant of brain organization, patterns of thinking, and ultimately culture. While Westerners allocate both their language and logical functions to the left hemisphere, with the nonverbal aspect of communication to the right hemisphere, the Japanese brain, in contrast, processes sounds and experiences relevant to emotion in the left hemisphere. The stimulus for the relegation to one hemisphere or the other, according to Dr. Tsunoda, is none other than language itself.
'I believe that the mother tongue differenciates the way in which people receive, process, feel, and understand sounds in the external environment,' says Dr. Tsunoda. 'The mother tongue is closely related to the development of the emotional mechanism in the brain. I conjecture that the mother tongue acquired in childhood is closely linked with the formation of the unique culture and mentality of each ethnic group.'"BTW, the only language other than English I've ever studied was Spanish, and when traveling in Germany, everyone mistook me for Italian. I think because I was the only one who could properly pronounce "pizza diabolo."
