life, love & laundry
Uniquely Vietnamese
(Man I just lovesome good sun flare!!! These beauty berries recently made their appearance meaning it is really officially Autumn!!)
I read this article today:
Previous studies have shown that human fetuses can memorize sounds from the external world by the last three months of pregnancy and are particularly attuned to melodies in both music and language. Vocal imitation studies have also shown babies can match vowel sounds spoken by adults, but only from 12 weeks old.
Wermke’s team said their research showed an “extremely early” impact of native language and confirmed that babies’ cries are their first proper attempts to communicate specifically with their mothers.
“Newborns are probably highly motivated to imitate their mother’s behavior in order to attract her and….foster bonding,” they wrote. “Because melody contour may be the only aspect of their mother’s speech that newborns are able to imitate, this might explain why we found melody contour imitation at that early age.”
Fascinating stuff. So of course it makes me think about adoption and the early impact of our children’s other families on their lives. Although I didn’t really notice Addison’s cries being uniquely Vietnamese (probably – ahem – because she did not, no, could not cry for many months), we did notice that her first major string of sounds (babbling) sounded uniquely Vietnamese. She has always loved Vietnamese music and although we are pretty crappy about exposing her to the language, she seems to have a special affection for it when she hears it. Her speech is also nothing like ours. She doesn’t pronounce her vowels like us and doesn’t share our thick Michigan accent. She definitely has an accent entirely her own. I’ve always wondered how these things were affected by her early language exposure in the womb and for the first six months hearing only Vietnamese. I’ve had several Vietnamese people tell me or respond to youtube videos saying that she spoke like they did when they were little and sounded Vietnamese. This is totally fascinating to me. And honestly I love it because it is one of the more real and palpable connections she has to her past – to her other family.
Have you noticed any language differences in your adopted child?
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That’s so interesting.
It’s hard to tell with our son because he is being raised bilingual (English and a European language), so he sort of has an interesting accent in both. He is exposed to Vietnamese every so often, soon to be regularly as we are hiring a VN student to tutor us in basic language/pronunciation, and to ‘hang out’and play with our guy and talk to him in VN- so he doesn’t lose an ear for it. She’s really excited to start (and so are we :)
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It’s funny that you mention this because I’ve often thought Reagan sounds Vietnamese too, and our family sometimes mentions her “accent.” She is the only baby I’ve ever known who has said “ma-ma” before “da-da” and I have to think it has something to do with the sounds she was exposed to in her first 6 months out of the womb (and before). At some point I read that children start to distinguish between sounds which occur in their native tongue and those which do not within just the first few months of life, and that they even stop being able to hear
foreign sounds. Helps explain why so many adoptees seem to need speech therapy even when adopted very young.
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When Tank Boy was babbling, he totally sounded like he was babbling in Korean. I mean, not actual words, but the intonation of it. And when he was first learning to talk, it was the same thing. He was saying English words, but his voice sounded . . . how to describe it? Almost tight, or strained. I don’t want to characterize Asian language speakers has having tight or strained sounding voices, but do you know what I mean? More nasal, I guess. I don’t know how else to explain it. It reminded me so much of the way my former Chinese employers spoke, especially when they were speaking in Mandarin rather than English. With Quinn it’s hard to tell since he doesn’t speak too much, but there does seem to be a slightly more nasal quality to it. I am always afraid to type stuff like this for fear somebody is going to take great offense when I use words like “nasal” but that really is part of how we do or don’t speak, so there it is.
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Thanh had a sing-song quality to her language for a while. When she said, “outside” it sounded really different than how we say it, even though the sounds themselves were the same.
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