Born to be Multilingual

Did you know that babies at birth are ease dropping on our adult conversations and working hard to learn the phonetic sounds of what they are hearing? During the first year of a baby's life, these consistent spoken sounds and patterns are imprinted on babies’ brain cells as they form a map in the auditory cortex. Amazingly, as babies become proficient at decoding what they are hearing, they begin to somewhat lose their natural ability to discriminate between sounds that are not made in their own language, which occurs at... are you ready for this? 1 year old! Although anyone can learn a foreign language at any age, we know that as we get older, it gets harder. That's because after 10 years of age, the brain starts to prune away the language learning connections that haven't been used, while strengthening the existing connections we currently have to speak and think. Of course, the more we use it, the stronger these connections become allowing us to speak and think more clearly and efficiently in our native language.