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Can genes predict foreign language learning skills?
With language skills becoming ever more important, Anne Merritt looks at whether there is a genetic component to language learning ability
Every frustrated language learner has, at some point, proclaimed that they just "don’t have the gift" of picking up foreign languages.
It’s easy to imagine that the aptitude for learning a new tongue exists somewhere beyond our control, perhaps in our blood or brain chemistry, or in the drinking water that flows through Northern Europe and feeds the frustratingly fluent English-speaking Scandinavians from Oslo to Helsinki.
Language teachers will explain to students that anyone can learn a foreign language, and that the skill comes from nurture and not nature. But does biology play any role at all? Is there any part of our DNA that can predict whether or not we can be successful polyglots?
In fact, neurobiologists have identified a gene that correlates to language. The FOXP2 gene was discovered in the 1990s through a study of a British family in which three generations suffered from severe speech problems.
The 15 afflicted members of this family shared an inherited mutation of FOXP2, a gene that plays a central role in the brain’s language production processes, both cognitively (through pattern-mapping abilities) and physically (developing the facial muscles needed for articulating complicated sounds).
This discovery pioneered new notions of a human ‘language gene’ and led to a trend in evolutionary research in the early 20th century, comparing FOXP2 genes in humans and other species, to shed light on how humans developed the capacity for language.
Recently, that mutated FOXP2 gene discovered in that British family has, surprisingly, been associated with foreign language learning ability, according to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.
Assistant professor Bharath Chandrasekaran from the university’s Moody College of Communication discovered this association in the same genetic variation in FOXP2 that had been connected to language impairment nearly two decades ago.
Genetic research is strengthening the connection between biology and language learning
The research, published in the May edition of the Journal of Neuroscience, involved a pool of 204 young adults, who were tasked with listening to unfamiliar speech sounds and categorising them.
Participants then gave saliva samples, from which researchers found that individuals with a certain variation on the FOXP2 gene were both faster and more accurate at doing the language task.
So how can knowledge of a learner’s DNA help in the process of mastering a new language? Chandrasekaran and his colleagues did not propose specific approaches, but linguistically speaking, it would be difficult for language trainers to focus on one specific dimension of the learner’s brain.
While the aforementioned research references a specific ‘language gene’ in the human brain, studying a new language actually requires several parts of the brain, comprised of several different genes, to work together. This includes the cognitive processes of memory, reasoning, perception, and information ordering. The strength and efficiency of these processes vary naturally from person to person.
Regardless of whether that variation comes from one’s genes, one’s surroundings, or both, these processes are pivotal in second language learning.
Though genetic research continues to strengthen the connection between biology and language in humans, we still have a long way to go in determining how to optimally apply this knowledge in the world of language learning.
Anne Merritt is an EFL lecturer currently based in South Korea. She writes here.