Project to explain differences in language-learning ability

May 31, 2007

An international project initiated from the University of New England will attempt to explain why some people are better than others at learning a foreign language.

The aim of the research will be to identify – and distinguish between – genetic and environmental factors that influence second-language acquisition.

The project, initiated by UNE's Language and Cognition Research Centre (LCRC), has attracted funding of more than US$10,000 from the prominent international journal Language Learning. This money, with additional support from UNE through the LCRC and the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, will be used to conduct a workshop of international experts in genetics, linguistics and psychology to develop detailed plans for the research. The workshop, at the Institute for Behavioural Genetics at the University of Colorado in the United States, will be on June 16 and 17.

UNE's Professor Brian Byrne, an international authority on the development of language skills in children, said: "It is well known that people vary considerably in how readily they can learn a new language, and investigating second-language learning in a way that can distinguish between genetic and environmental factors will go a long way towards settling the debate as to why this variability exists. Studies of identical and fraternal twins are the most commonly-used means of distinguishing between environmental and genetic determinants of behaviour. We expect that our first full-scale study will begin in 2008, using a large sample of twins."

Professor Byrne (pictured here) is a principal researcher in an international project that is using twin studies to understand differences in children's reading ability. "Identical twins are more similar to each other than are fraternal twins in aspects of behaviour where genetic factors predominate," he explained. "Where the family environment is of higher importance, both twin types will be equally similar."

UNE's Dr Liz Ellis and Dr Karen Woodman (specialists in second-language learning) and Mr Will Coventry (an expert in the statistical modelling of twin data) will accompany Professor Byrne to Colorado for the workshop. Other participants will come from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, the Universities of Hawaii, Michigan and New Mexico in the United States, and Stavanger University in Norway.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at May 31, 2007 05:55 PM