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Literacy matters for children from the moment they are born. You might have heard the saying that babies brains are like sponges and this is true!¹ Learning to speak, and then becoming literate by reading, writing, and numeracy, can have serious impacts for people’s entire lives, and this development starts early. Among the scientific community it is commonly believed that there is a critical language period in children, roughly from early infancy to puberty, meaning that children can only acquire language effectively in this stage of life.²
Newer research supports these original claims as a neurology researcher and professor from UCLA took images of children’s brains and found that the brain systems that support learning new languages stop growing around puberty,³ suggesting that children under the age of 11–15 are uniquely suited to learning new languages.
There are also interesting claims being made about what this can mean for learning a second language; does proficiency in a second language only occur when you learn the language early enough? Some research would suggest, probably. One study examined bilingual individuals who spoke Spanish and Swedish.⁴ The study found that only a small minority of individuals who had learned Swedish after age 12 actually spoke like a native speaker while a majority of children who learned it…
