Pro-Palestinian activists have come up with a unique way of maneuvering around online censorship in the Arabic language: using an ancient form of the Arabic alphabet that isn’t properly recognized by social media algorithms designed to detect offensive or controversial content. In light of the recent developments in the Israel–Palestine conflict, social media networks like Facebook have been accused of censoring pro-Palestinian sentiments, deleting posts, and banning users who display pro-Palestinian messages in Arabic.
The Arabic alphabet consists of 28 letters, many of which are only differentiated by a series of dots placed above or below the characters—for example, the Arabic letters د and ذ (which are respectively transliterated as d and dh) have the same basic shape, but the latter has a dot placed above it and represents a different sound. However, these dots weren’t always used in Arabic writing— sometime around the seventh century, the dots were introduced to make the Quran easier to read for non-Arabs who adopted Islam.
Nowadays, Arabic speakers looking to circumvent censorship online have adopted the undotted form of the alphabet, which has not been used this widely since before the seventh century. Machine translation and artificial intelligence systems are unable to recognize the undotted form of the language, making it an easy way to get around algorithm-based censorship—some Arabic speakers have noted that this form of writing is equivalent to writing English letters like b and d without any straight lines, as o.
As tensions between Israel and Palestine ran especially high in recent weeks, pro-Palestinian messages have been shot down on social media, with Facebook frequently labeling such messages as misinformation, even going as far as deleting the content entirely. Benny Gantz, Israel’s justice minister, recently had a meeting with executives at Facebook and TikTok, who committed to removing content that could incite violence toward Israel. Palestinian activists have noted that pro-Palestinian sentiments are indiscriminately marked as violent or hateful, while pro-Israel sentiment is rarely taken down on social media, regardless of how violent it is.
Using the ancient undotted form of the Arabic alphabet allows users to get around these restrictions, however, as machine translation systems and other algorithms cannot recognize which letters are which without the identifying dots.
In order to share information and spread messages about what is going on in Palestine, Arabic-speaking social media users have taken to using a form of the language which, while easily understandable for native speakers, is nearly impossible for computers to encode and translate.
Undotted versions of the language can easily be produced using mobile or web apps like Old Arabic, but systems like Google Translate typically translate the undotted language into unintelligible gibberish. Andrew Warner
A proposed language reform policy in Québec would give new immigrants to the Canadian province a pretty narrow timeframe to attain working proficiency in French: six months. Bill 96, a 100-page piece of legislation, aims to boost the status of the French language in Québec, but some argue that it could discourage immigrants from coming to the state, as it enforces a rather rigid framework for learning the language.
If passed, Bill 96 would require new immigrants to Québec to learn French within the first six months of living there—after that, the government would send all official communications to them in the French language, rather than in English or in translations into their native languages. Opponents of the bill believe this is too short a time period; while second-language acquisition is different for everyone, with individual factors such as language aptitude and personality playing a significant role, it is generally accepted that six months is not enough time to achieve a significant degree of fluency in a completely new language.
Still, the bill would make it considerably easier for new immigrants to learn the language, as Bill 96 also ensures that the government would offer French-language classes at no cost to the students. While the government currently offers French courses, learners must pay in order to enroll. In addition to offering free French courses and requiring new immigrants to learn French within the first six months of living there, Bill 96 would also change the language requirements for businesses, schools, and government agencies. If passed, the bill would require government agencies to use French as their exclusive language for written and oral communications.
The bill’s proposal comes at a pivotal time for the French language in Canada— earlier this year, the Canadian government proposed reforms to the nation’s Official Languages Act, which aimed to instill a sense of equality between French and English, the two official languages of the country. Québec remains the only province in Canada with a particularly robust population of French speakers, and the province does not recognize English as an official language. Andrew Warner
When we talk about remote or distance learning, we often think of things like Zoom meetings, recorded lectures or Canvas assignments, but a group of teachers from Panama’s Indigenous Guna community is adding another dimension to the term, broadcasting lessons over the country’s public radio system. According to a report from La Prensa Latina, the lessons are broadcast Monday through Friday and aim to teach the Guna language to young heritage learners up until around the equivalent of third grade.
In the Guna Yala province of Panama, classes are typically taught exclusively in the Guna language (also commonly referred to as Kuna and Dulegaya); however, a recent wave of lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic required a shift to remote learning through the end of June 2021. The teachers settled on radio as a method of remote instruction because many Guna people live in remote areas of the country, where internet and television are inaccessible and radio broadcasts are the only form of easily accessed electronic communication.
Currently, twelve teachers broadcast the Guna lessons on AM and FM radio from Panama’s State Radio and Television System (SERTV) studio in Panama City, the nation’s capital. The lessons are also recorded so that students can find the classes on social media later in the day if they have access to the internet from their homes.
The Guna language is spoken by around 60,000 people in Panama and Colombia and is fairly robust within Panama due to the fact that the people were granted some level of cultural autonomy in the early 1900s after the Tule Revolution. After the Ngäbere language, Guna is the second most widely spoken Indigenous language in Panama.
Still, Spanish is the only officially recognized language at a national level within Panama, and Guna students often must learn Spanish alongside their native language. One teacher told La Prensa Latina that interest in the language is steadily growing within the country and that their program has generated significant engagement on social media. Due to the Guna program’s success, SERTV plans to expand its reach and broadcast classes in other Indigenous languages of the country. Andrew Warner
New research shows that attending a Boston public preschool led to positive long-term impacts on educational attainment as attendees were more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college. The short-term effect of preschool on test scores was minimal, but there was a substantial impact on student behavior. Effects were larger for boys but did not differ by race or income.
Economists Guthrie Gray-Lobe (UChicago), Parag Pathak (MIT), and Christopher Walters (UC Berkeley) studied the short and long-run impacts of Boston Public Schools’ universal public preschool program through The School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII), a research lab based in the MIT Department of Economics that partners with school districts and higher education institutions to “conduct policy-relevant research and examine the connections between human capital and the American income distribution.”
The study found that enrolling in preschool increased the likelihood that a student would ever graduate from high school by 6%, attendance at college on time by 8%, and taking the SAT by 9%. However, Boston public preschool had little detectable impact on elementary, middle, and high school state standardized test scores. Nor was there much effect on the likelihood of students repeating a grade.
The report suggested that boys and girls attending preschool have a higher chance of attending college, but the preschool effect is larger for boys. Somewhat surprisingly, the study found no differences in preschool impact by race and income (determined by whether a student receives a free or reduced-price lunch). But, overall, the study implied that all students—regardless of race or income—are likely to benefit from universal preschool.
It is the first study that uses a randomized research design to examine the long-term outcomes of children attending a large-scale program. As policymakers consider increased public investment in universal preschool, the research findings suggest that preschool can lead to long-term educational attainment gains through improvements in behavior. Furthermore, the observed effects across demographic groups suggest that all students are likely to benefit from universal preschool.
High-quality early childhood education is increasingly viewed as an important and cost-effective intervention to address early-life deficits. President Biden’s $1.8 trillion spending and tax plan includes a $200 billion investment universal free preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds. The plan includes children from wealthier families along the lines of programs in cities like Washington and New York City, but some education advocates are recommending a program that targets low-income children.
On last month’s Spanish Language Day, Google Doodle celebrated the letter Ñ (pronounced “enye”), which is the only letter in the Spanish alphabet that originated in Spain.
The letter Ñ was created in the 12th century by Spanish scribes who came up with a way to save time and parchment when hand-copying Latin manuscripts. They decided to shorten words with double letters, combining the two letters into one with a tiny n on top to signify the change—this tiny n symbol is called a tilde.
For example, the Latin word for “year” is annus which became año in Spanish. Today, the letter Ñ appears in more than 17,700 Spanish words.
Newly released data from the U.S. 2020 census reveals the growth of the Hispanic population in the U.S., which is reflected by the country’s most common surnames, which are increasingly Spanish in origin, while the number of Spanish speakers also continues to rise. Already common family names such as García, currently in sixth place according to census data, and Rodríguez, taking the ninth spot, are expected to rise even further up the rankings last released in 2010.
The Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, a non-profit organization that promotes Spanish art and culture around the world, issued a report for Spanish Language Day, showing that the U.S. population of Hispanic origin represents 18.3% of those counted in the census, two thirds of whom are under 35. It is estimated that by 2060 this population will amount to almost 111 million people.
By that year, the US will be the second most populous country of Spanish speakers in the world after Mexico. That will put it ahead of Colombia (48 million) and Spain (46 million). In fact, according to Spain’s Cervantes Institute, by 2060 an estimated 27.5% of Americans will be of Hispanic origin – one in three citizens. Currently, Spanish is the second most spoken language in 43 of the country’s 50 states and 13.5% of Americans speak Spanish at home. This percentage is significantly higher in Texas (29.4%), California (29%), New Mexico (26.1%), Florida (21.8%), and Nevada (21.8%). Spanish is also by far the second most studied language at all education levels in the U.S. The Hispanic community has the lowest average age within the census, and 71% of Hispanic people speak Spanish at home.
Globally, more than 585 million people in the world speak Spanish, of whom 41.1 million (7%) are from the U.S. The history of Spanish in the U.S. dates back around 500 years. According to the cultural organization The Hispanic Council, “Since then, countless milestones illustrate [the importance of Spanish] in the country, such as the fact that 15% of its states and cities have names of Hispanic origin, that the first Californian Constitution was published in Spanish and English, and that the first election advertisement in Spanish was produced 61 years ago and starred the iconic Jackie Kennedy.”
“The fact that the United States is seeing a predominance of Hispanic surnames is a reminder of the great past, present and cultural importance of the Hispanic community in the country,” the statement added.
Last month, the leader of Québec’s Liberal Party and spokesperson for the protection of the French language Hélène David released a 27-point plan for the future of the French language in the province.
“It is our duty, now and forever, to keep alive this French language that we live in, in this Québec built by those who came before us, inhabited by us, and protected forever for those who will follow us,” said Liberal opposition leader Dominique Anglade. “Because French is our language, our strength, and our future, it is essential that it be supported by the exemplary nature of the state. This is what we are proposing to Quebecers in this essential step to ensure that our French language, inherited from our ancestors, lives on together and that we intend to pass on to our children, thus perpetuating a rich Francophone tradition in this American land.”
The decline of the French language in the province has stirred controversy over the past year, and the ruling CAQ party has said it will release reforms to the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) before the end of the current session in the National Assembly.
The proposals include a requirement for all public postsecondary students to complete three French classes to graduate, maintaining current quotas at English-medium colleges, and applying Bill 101 to small businesses with 25–49 employees.
In addition, the plan would set up a new body to replace the Office québécois de la langue française and appoint an independent French-language commissioner.
The five fundamental principles are as follows: 1. The inalienable right to work in French must be strengthened by only requiring other languages in limited and justified situations. 2. There is a shared responsibility of Quebecers to ensure French’s vitality in Québec by providing tools for all citizens to master the language. 3. Investment must be made in the mastery of French by ensuring French equivalents to English words and phrases are available. 4. Partnership must be created with English-speaking communities to ensure Anglo rights are protected. 5. Students are free to choose their institutions of higher learning.
For centuries, the Rohingya people, a Muslim ethnic minority indigenous to Myanmar, have not had access to the Quran in their native language. However, a campaign led by Rohingya Vision has recently raised more than $20,000 toward funding for an audio and video translation of the scripture, making the text much more accessible to the largely illiterate and highly impoverished community.
“It is extremely sad to say that for over 14 centuries, the Rohingya are deprived of understanding the holy revelation, the Quran, in their own Rohingya language,” said Muhammad Noor, CEO of Rohingya Vision, a news outlet specializing in documenting Rohingya communities in Myanmar and the diaspora.
Past attempts at translating the Quran into Rohingya have largely been unsuccessful and Rohingya have had to access the scripture in the original Arabic or use Urdu translations when available. Like its people, the language has largely been relegated to the fringes of Myanmar society. The government of Myanmar does not use the term Rohingya to describe the people or language, instead opting to refer to them as “Bengali,” in part due to linguistic similarities between the Rohingya language and Bengali (unlike Burmese, which is the official language of Myanmar, Rohingya and Bengali are both Indo-European languages).
The majority of Rohingya people are currently living in displacement camps, and as a result, many do not have access to the education necessary to develop literacy in their native language. Because of this, the project to translate the Quran into Rohingya will focus on developing an audio and video translation to make it accessible for those who are illiterate.
Myanmar has faced strong international pressure for its persecution of the Rohingya people, who have largely been displaced from their native land. Since the 1970s, crackdowns on the Rohingya people in the Rakhine state of Myanmar have led to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fleeing to nearby nations, mainly Bangladesh and Pakistan, according to a report from Al Jazeera.
Myanmar’s government has been repeatedly accused of enacting an ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people, though the government denies this claim.
Another Islamic first was the publication in Chinese of a booklet of verses by Allama Muhammad Iqbal, which was launched at Pakistan’s embassy in Beijing. According to a report by Gwadar Pro, the booklet launch event was part of the festivities to mark the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Pakistan and China. At the event, Pakistani ambassador to China Moin ul Haque hailed Iqbal’s philosophical depth, political acumen, and artistic brilliance.
He said that Iqbal’s message has a universal appeal that transcends the narrow limitations of creed and nationality. The ambassador expressed the hope that this book would popularize Iqbal in China and deepen cultural ties between the two countries.
One-third of the nearly 23 million preschool-age children in the U.S. live with a parent who speaks a language other than English. Despite the size of this population and its distinct linguistic assets and learning support needs, nearly all states lack any standardized policies for systematically identifying these children. Yet doing so would provide the means for early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs to determine if these children are being effectively and equitably served—rather than waiting until they enroll in kindergarten. It is only at the kindergarten stage that federal laws kick in requiring identification of children who speak a language other than English at home, and require accountability for provision of appropriate instructional designs for English learners.
Two reports authored by analysts with the Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy provide a framework for the most critical steps early childhood systems should take to identify, understand, and track language development of young Dual Language Learners (DLLs), as well as a national scan of the procedures some state and local ECEC programs use to identify DLLs. An accompanying data tool provides state-level data on DLLs and a host of socio-demographic information on their families.
identifying young children who have exposure to a language other than English in their home environment;
collecting comprehensive information about DLLs’ language environment and experiences;
obtaining in-depth information about DLLs’ individual language and preliteracy skills in English and in their home language(s); and
making these data and other relevant information accessible to programs and policymakers across early childhood and K-12 systems.
“The young child population is at the forefront of the nation’s growing cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity,” the authors, Maki Park, senior policy analyst for early care and education, and Delia Pompa, senior fellow for education policy, conclude. “Developing responsive systems that recognize this diversity and are built to make fully visible the important characteristics, needs and experiences of DLLs, which have to date remained largely invisible, will be critical to realizing early learning systems that help young children harness their strengths and give them the opportunity to thrive.”
In the other report, Taking Stock of Dual Language Learner Identification and Strengthening Procedures and Policies, analysts Melissa Lazarín and Maki Park examine the extent to which federal agencies, states, and localities have procedures or guidance in place to identify DLLs in major early childhood programs. The report discusses the obstacles and substantial costs of failing to identify DLLs and taps into the literature on identification and classification of English Learners in the K-12 sector for potential lessons relevant to identification efforts of early childhood systems. The report also explores the innovative strategies several states and localities have taken to improve DLL identification and concludes with a discussion of opportunities to advance more comprehensive DLL identification policies and practices.
“Early childhood systems across the U.S. are at a crossroads,” said Margie McHugh, director of MPI’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy. “With the pandemic having laid bare the multiple disparities facing immigrant families with young children, and the American Relief Plan and other legislation providing significant new support for states to expand and improve quality in their ECEC systems, measures that recognize and include the needs of DLL children in ECEC system frameworks are long overdue. They are central to providing effective, equitable services to this very large and growing segment of the U.S. child population.”
For a new data tool with U.S. and state-level sociodemographic and family characteristics for young children by DLL status and by race/ethnicity, click here.
The recent shootings of Asian Americans and whether these will be considered hate crimes, tornadoes ravaging the Southwest and elsewhere, and fears of uncertain variants of the COVID-19 pandemic dominated the news during the writing of this piece. Crises, unfortunately, are not new to us. As educators, along with feeling deeply troubled by these, we have had a tendency to focus on what we perceive is missing or lacking in the lives of our students and their families.
When it comes to multilingual, multicultural students, we often find ourselves and others using deficit-based statements that describe what we perceive, such as “they don’t know English and their parents don’t know how to help their children learn.” This deficit-based lens can unfortunately contribute to predictable odds of failure for historically marginalized students, especially during the many crises that we have encountered and will encounter in the future. However, more and more researchers, practitioners, and scholars are finding that when we focus our attention on what we perceive to be weaknesses or broken elements in the lives of our students, we fail to see the inherent strengths and assets that they bring to our schools and classrooms. Further, if we use that lens often enough, we begin to default to it as our modus operandi rather than focusing our attention where we should: on identifying, cultivating, and building on students’ existing and developing assets.
Research points to the essential relationship between identifying and acknowledging students’ personal, social-emotional, cultural, and academic assets and their academic and social-emotional growth and success (Biswas-Diener, Kashdan, and Gurpal, 2011). Similarly, using and applying the same assets-based lens to our students and their families enables us to form more effective and lasting partnerships with them. One of the few silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises has been the manner in which educators responded with a renewed sense of purpose around partnering with and caring for multilingual, multicultural families.
Many of the educators with whom we work ask us how they can be more supportive and involved with families during crises. And, just as importantly, they also ask how they can work more closely with their local communities and beyond to provide comprehensive supports for students and families. In this piece, let’s explore how we can overcome inequities by building from the strengths and assets of each of our unique communities (including our students and families as well as the individuals, organizations, agencies, and institutions that make up our local communities).
Begin with an Assets-Based Approach
We see crises, whatever they might be and wherever they might occur, as fueling our restart of what can be and is being done to band together. Indeed, if we really think about crises, we quickly realize that we are not silos unto ourselves. Our students and their families as well as members of our local, school, and classroom communities are all interrelated, interconnected, and even interdependent on one another. Further, when we take time to consider the possibilities of these overlapping ecosystems, we can truly support students to flourish.
A comprehensive assets-based perspective begins with looking closely at our students, their families, and our local communities and requires that we do the following:
Recognize students’ strengths. Take time to ask students, and their parents, about their interests and special talents and to observe students to identify their unique strengths, recognizing when a student enjoys drawing, interacting with others, playing sports, and so on. Then, and as importantly, take time to acknowledge and value these to support students’ ever-growing positive views of themselves and their competencies.
Recognize parents’/guardians’ strengths. These include the various strengths and attributes, which often go unseen, that parents and guardians use to support their children’s academic and social-emotional growth (Zacarian and Silverstone, 2015; Zacarian, Alvarez-Ortiz, and Haynes, 2017; González, Moll, and Amanti, 2005).
Learn about the many skills and assets that students and parents/guardians possess. An asset-based approach shines a light on the importance of asking questions that express a genuine interest in learning about students and parents/guardians that moves beyond collecting required information. Rather, it is focused on learning about the personal, cultural, social, and life experiences of children and their families so that we may infuse these understandings into our work with them. Further, it involves our willingness to share our personal, cultural, social, and life experiences with students and families so that they may know us as the unique individuals that we all are.
Invest time and effort to create and sustain meaningful partnerships with families. Building partnerships with families from multicultural, multilingual experiences should be foundational to what we do. These can greatly expand the number of meaningful interactions that our students engage in to support their social-emotional and academic growth. They are also wonderful supports for deepening our awareness and connection to our students.
Build school–parent/guardian partnerships with support of multilingual, multicultural communication. Just as we provide multicultural and multilingual supports to students, we must do the same with families. Multilingual, multicultural translators can greatly help parents/guardians and school personnel to engage in meaningful back-and-forth communication that helps our overall goal of working closely as partners.
Recruit and select community partners who believe in the same asset-based ideology as we do. Partnerships with individuals, agencies, organizations, and institutions in our local communities and beyond are essential for enhancing students’ and families’ interests, hopes and dreams, and well-being. As important as it is to develop partnerships, it is essential that our partners operate from the same assets-based ideology as we do. To do this requires that every partner:
Sees the importance of working collaboratively with parents/guardians by building trusting reciprocal relationships;
Unconditionally accepts and welcomes students and parents/guardians for who they are;
Believes that our students will be successful in school and beyond and that their parents will be active, meaningful, and purposeful partners with us.
Figure 1.1: Community Partner Ideology (adapted from Zacarian and Silverstone, 2020)
Listen—Really Listen!
While crises challenge communities and educators in unprecedented ways, they do not diminish our need to listen, really listen closely, to the different perspectives and experiences of our dynamically changing student and family populations. How might we humbly show and share our respect for and value on the assets that students and families have to offer?
Cultivate a Collaborative Culture by Learning Lessons from Crises
If we look closely at what we have learned and are learning from the pandemic and other crises, we see that many of us have drawn great comfort from:
Reaching out to families to see how they are doing,
Reaching out to colleagues to support each other,
Banding together with community partners to best ensure that students and families and (as importantly) we ourselves receive the services needed and to which all are entitled, and
Learning from mistakes made along the way to keep us from reverting back to seeing deficits instead of the many assets that we all possess.
Three powerful examples of these types of collaborations include Brockton Public Schools in Brockton, Massachusetts, Wolfe Street Academy in Baltimore, Maryland, and Salina Elementary School in Dearborn, Michigan.
Brockton was one of the hardest-hit cities with the COVID-19 virus in Massachusetts. While its school district has undergone significant budget reductions over successive years, a top priority of its school superintendent, Michael Thomas, is to support the physical and social-emotional well-being of students. It purchased smartphones for its bilingual bicultural team so they could continue having the one-to-one family contacts that had worked successfully before COVID. It also created a family school call center staffed with counselors, nurses, advocates, bilingual community facilitators, and others to help families access health, food, and work assistance and offered these services to staff.
Wolfe Street Academy is one of Baltimore’s public schools. School principal Mark Gaither continuously identifies its needs and finds resources and systems to address them. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it created partnerships with three community organizations that made regular donations of food. Wolfe Street Academy’s teachers, staff, neighbors, and others delivered goods to its families—especially families of essential workers. Also, its after-school coordinator, with help from family and community members, offers remote after-school activities including robotics, violin, yoga, art, theater, and debate.
Salina Elementary School principal Susan Stanley and site coordinator Amal Qayed in Dearborn, Michigan, have established partnerships with several community organizations including the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, Gleaners Community Food Bank, and the Amity Foundation. The school’s coordinator acts as the point person to empower the success of all students by removing barriers and building partnerships with local resources to drive results.
These three and others can best be described as nimble, multitalented, and multifaceted in using an asset-based ideology to build trusted partnerships with families and the community to support students’ needs, desires, and opportunities being realized. They know the power of moving beyond crises, whatever these might be. Further, they provide us with tremendous examples of what is being done to overcome linguistic and cultural inequities.
References Biswas-Diener, R., Kashdan, T. B., and Gurpal, M. (2011). “A Dynamic Approach to Psychological Strengths Development and Intervention.” Journal of Positive Psychology 6(2), 106–118. González, N., Moll, L. C., and Amanti, C. (eds). (2005). Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Zacarian, D. Alvarez-Ortiz, L., and Haynes, J. (2017). Teaching to Empower: Supporting Students Living with Trauma, Violence, and Chronic Stress. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Zacarian, D., and Silverstone, M. A. (2020). Teaching to Empower: Taking Action to Foster Student Agency, Self-Confidence, and Collaboration. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Zacarian, D., and Silverstone, M.A. (2015). In It Together: How Student, Family, and Community Partnerships Advance Engagement and Achievement in Diverse Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin
Debbie Zacarian, EdD, is known for her expertise in strengths-based leadership, instructional practices, and family partnership practices with diverse student and family populations. She provides professional development, strategic planning, and policy work with school districts and state agencies and organizations.
This article was drawn from Zacarian, D., Calderón, M. E., and Gottlieb, M. (2021). Beyond Crises: Overcoming Linguistic and Cultural Inequities in Communities, Schools, and Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
A new study conducted by researchers at Georgia State University and Istanbul Bilgi University suggests that twins undergo language acquisition at a slightly different rate from their single-birth counterparts. The team of psychologists and linguists found that twins tend to use fewer physical gestures and lag behind single children in terms of language development, findings which could expand our understanding of early language acquisition as we currently know it.
“The implications are fascinating,” said Şeyda Özçalışkan, the principal researcher on the project, which was published in the Journal of Nonverbal Communication. “It shows that gesture and speech go hand in hand in early development in twins. When one is lagging behind so does the other.”
Gesture and speech appear to be quite closely tied in first language acquisition—past studies have shown that when infants and toddlers begin using communicative gestures more and more frequently, the first signs of spoken language often come shortly thereafter. The current study positions itself as another study further solidifying linguists’ awareness of the phenomenon, as the researchers found that the longer it takes for infants to begin using gestures regularly, the later they are in developing spoken language.
Less research has been conducted with regards to how twins and single children produce gestures and speech differently—that’s where Özçalışkan and her team’s study comes into play. “There was close to nothing in research on gesturing among twins in any language,” Özçalışkan said. The researchers found that twins typically begin using communicative gestures slightly later than single children—additionally, the gestures that single children used were much more complex and frequent than those the twins used. The researchers also found that boy-boy pairs of twins lagged the most, compared to girl-girl twins, who produced slightly more complex gestures than their male counterparts.
The researchers credit these findings to two possible factors. First, they note that parents of single children likely provide their children with more individualized and frequent input than the parents of twins—it’s possible that parents of twins have shorter and less complex conversations with the infants, since their attention must be divided between two children. Additionally, the researchers also note that as infants, twins have been shown to develop their own rudimentary communication systems between each other, which could delay the acquisition of their native language slightly.
“Gesture is a very powerful tool,” Özçalışkan said. “Pay attention to your child’s gestures, and then provide verbal descriptions to help their language development.”
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