The Learning Experience: Nurturing Early Development and Language Acquisition
The Learning Experience (TLE) is an early education and daycare center that provides joyful, engaging, and fun experiences for infants, toddlers, and preschool-aged children. Since 2002, TLE has focused on positively impacting the lives of children ages six weeks to six years by developing and implementing ground-breaking childcare and early education programs. TLE's proprietary curriculum encourages children to learn by exploring and doing, forming a foundation for kids to Learn, Play and Grow under the care of nurturing teachers. The curriculum is designed to meet or exceed nationwide standards and is all-inclusive, with enrichment programs like music, engineering, and fitness offered at no additional charge.
Creating a Foundation for Language Development
Humans possess an innate ability to learn language, a complex cognitive function that distinguishes us from other animals. Infants can detect complex patterns in speech and automatically generate implicit rules to reliably detect and produce these patterns in the future. The ability to learn certain aspects of language, however, is limited after early childhood, marking a sensitive period for language learning. This period makes language an important model system for studying developmental plasticity in children.
The Critical Period for Language Acquisition
The plasticity that drives the development of the language system is important to consider when we try to interpret differences in the organization of language between healthy individuals and those with disordered or atypical organization. It is also central to our ability to understand how the system changes after neural injury and in recovery. Humans are born with the ability to learn language, much like we are born with the ability to learn how to walk. For the brain to develop language-readiness, it is believed that there are consistent milestones in structural development that must occur. For example, Eric Lenneberg posited that certain “maturational indices of the brain,” such as cortical density and white matter myelination, must reach at least 65% maturity for language acquisition to begin (Lenneberg, 1969). The concept of a “critical period” for the neurological scaffolding to be in place to develop a function is not specific to language development. There are clear advantages to having a window of time early in development when the brain can receive input from the environment that will rapidly shape how it processes information. It takes immense cellular resources to reconfigure neural circuits, so it is prudent to establish a framework early that is as specific as possible to the most important information, with some flexibility after this phase for new information to make minor changes (Werker & Hensch, 2015). In some sensory systems, there is an important early window during which experience must tune the response profiles of the various neuronal populations involved in perception (Hubel & Wiesel, 1964; Wiesel & Hubel, 1965). In the language system, there is also a developmental window during which linguistic input is essential for successful development. The most extreme examples are the rare cases of “wild children,” who, due to tragic circumstances, were raised with close to no exposure to language (e.g., news coverage of Genie: James, 2008). Even when they are rescued as children, these individuals do not develop full language abilities (Curtiss, 2014). These cases are critical evidence that linguistic input is required early in life for the development of a functioning language system, analogous to visual input being required for the development of a complete visual system. Another clarifying example is when people who immigrate to a new country at different ages attempt to learn a second language. When the amount of experience with the new language is held constant, there is an advantage to being younger than 8 years old for acquiring the second language to proficiency (Johnson & Newport, 1989). Phonology (processing the fundamental perceptual units of language, such as phoneme or syllable sounds, and their allowable combinations in speech) has an early critical period that is believed to begin in utero and starts to close after 10-12 months of life (Werker & Hensch, 2015; Werker & Tees, 1984, 2005). In some cases, experience during the critical period provides input that creates and then sharpens perceptual sensitivities. In the case of phoneme discrimination, it has been shown that a full range of representations for phonemes exists at birth, and then through specific listening experience, the native language phoneme classes are maintained and sharpened while unused, non-native classes are weakened (Maurer & Werker, 2014).
Werker and Tees (1984) demonstrated that English-learning infants can discriminate Hindi “d” sounds not used in English, but only until 10-12 months, when the critical period for phonology gradually closes (Werker & Tees, 1984). Around this age, the child has accumulated enough specific listening experience to sharpen the phonological representations of their native language through a process called perceptual narrowing (Maurer & Werker, 2014). Interestingly, if specific listening experience begins earlier than normal-such as in the case of infants born prematurely-it does not shift the closure of the critical period to be earlier than what would be estimated from the full-term due date (Peña et al., 2010). This is because the onset, duration, and closure of the critical period are determined both by environmental input and by the maturation of key biological players (inhibitory parvalbumin cells in particular; Werker & Hensch, 2015). Thus, a framework for phonology is established early to process the most important information in a child’s linguistic environment.
How the Brain Adapts to Different Language Environments
The developing auditory system undergoes perceptual narrowing, which sharpens representations for native language phonemes. It is interesting to consider how these representations change if the individual stops receiving native language input and starts receiving input from a different language, a situation that can arise when an infant is adopted from one country to another. Some evidence suggests that even if the individual loses ongoing interaction with the native language, their native phonological representations may remain intact. Korean infants adopted by American families before 1 year of age who go on to take 3 years of Korean in college are better at discriminating Korean consonants than native-English students with the same college-level training (Oh et al., 2010). Related findings from animal work suggest that maps that are established early have a signature or ‘enduring trace’ that can be reanimated later when the same initial conditions are reinstated (Knudsen, 1998: auditory system in barn owls; Hofer et al., 2006: visual system in mice).
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Other evidence suggests that the phonological representations for the native language are plastically altered and can undergo ‘first-language attrition’ if the individual stops receiving native language input and acquires a second language (Costa & Sebastián-Gallés, 2014). Korean infants adopted to French families in isolated villages do not discriminate Korean speech sounds better than their native French-speaking peers (Ventureyra et al., 2004). Pallier and colleagues (2003) measured fMRI activation while Korean children adopted by French families and native French speakers listened to speech stimuli from various languages. They found that brain activation in the Korean adoptees was no different for Korean stimuli as any other unknown foreign stimuli. French stimuli evoked activation patterns that were similar in Korean adoptees and native French speakers; however, the activation was stronger in native speakers (Pallier et al., 2003). This highlights that linguistic input from the infant’s environment shapes their phonological representations, but these representations can continue to be plastically modified early in life if the input is dramatically altered.
Bilingual infants tested on phoneme discrimination paradigms demonstrate perceptual narrowing to both native languages by 10-12 months (Spanish and Catalan: Albareda‐Castellot et al., 2011; French and English: Burns et al., 2007; Sundara et al., 2008; for a review: Costa & Sebastián-Gallés, 2014). It is impressive that bilingual infants can simultaneously acquire two sets of phonemes in the same span of time that monolingual infants learn one because they likely receive less input from each language than in an environment where one language is spoken exclusively (Costa & Sebastián-Gallés, 2014). The neural plasticity involved in tuning phonological representations for multiple native languages is not well understood (see Höhle et al., 2020 for a recent review). In contrast to the previously discussed cases involving ‘first-language attrition’ after adoption to a new country, the ongoing simultaneous input from two languages in bilingual households shapes phonological representations that can be readily used for either language.
Cochlear Implants and Sign Language: Alternative Pathways to Language
When a child is born deaf, it raises the question of whether the plasticity available to the phonological system is sufficient for acquiring spoken language if they opt to receive a cochlear implant. When a child is born deaf, ‘residual plasticity’ in the auditory system outside of the early critical window makes it possible for speech representations to develop when a cochlear implant is introduced later (Kral et al., 2019; Kral & Sharma, 2012). However, there is still a limited window of time for optimal speech acquisition through a cochlear implant. In congenitally deaf infants, the critical period for acquiring the phonology of a spoken language through a cochlear implant may close around 12-14 months (Houston et al., 2012).
Not everyone who is born deaf decides to receive a cochlear implant, and it has been shown that when congenitally deaf individuals acquire sign language, it follows the same developmental trajectory as spoken language acquisition (Newport & Meier, 1985). The critical period for language acquisition is not exclusively for spoken language. Congenitally deaf children exposed to sign language from their deaf parents at the start of life are compared to congenitally deaf children born to hearing parents and do not receive consistent sign language input for years. Deaf children with earlier exposure to sign language outperform their later-learning counterparts on language proficiency measures (e.g., copying stories and answering comprehension questions, verbal working memory, grammatical morphology; Mayberry, 1998; Newport, 1990). The perceptual narrowing of sign language representations follows the same maturational timeline of perceptual narrowing in spoken language phonology (Krentz & Corina, 2008; Palmer et al., 2012).
Transfer of Linguistic Skills
The linguistic structures learned by young children may scaffold later learning of languages, even when the original language and the new language utilize different sensory and motor modalities. When a child is born hearing and acquires spoken language, and then loses hearing during childhood (e.g., due to meningitis) and acquires sign language, there is an interesting phenomenon whereby their spoken language representations facilitate sign language acquisition. These initially hearing, late-learning signers tend to outperform congenitally deaf children who learn sign language around the same age as their first language (Mayberry, 1998).
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Testimonials and Experiences at The Learning Experience
Parents consistently praise the caring and dedicated teachers at TLE. Miss Rina, Miss Linda, and Miss Kearsten are mentioned as being exceptional teachers. Maddie at the front desk is recognized for her energetic kindness. Parents appreciate the positive experiences their children have at TLE, with some expressing that their children love being at school and would happily spend all their time there.
Many families highlight the positive impact TLE has had on their children's development. Children flourish in the nurturing environment, and parents appreciate the high expectations and quality care provided. The teachers are described as amazing and very caring. The experiences of children in various classrooms, such as Ms. Jeanine's classroom, are highly regarded.
Some parents specifically chose TLE to support their children with specific needs, such as ADHD. The positive experiences and the caring nature of the teachers have been instrumental in their children's growth and development.
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