Island rescue

So the tonal distinctions of Chinese syllables, for example, learnt so easily by young native speakers become increasingly difficult to recognise and reproduce for older, foreign learners. But researchers are increasingly finding how able young children are at acquiring more than one language at once. “The important precursor to word learning has led to the assumption that vocabulary acquisition starts in earnest only in the second year,” Gaskell and Ellis write. “One might expect that the increased demands of learning multiple languages at the same time would lead to substantial delays in reaching key stages in infant word learning,” they say. But increasingly the evidence proves opposite. “Perhaps surprisingly, the data available so far suggest that any differences between bilingual and monolingual infants are quite subtle, and that any delays for bilinguals are relatively short lived.” They report on work examining the ability of young children to associate minimally different spoken sequences (for example, bih and dih) with visually presented objects. This kind of mapping can be performed by monolingual infants by 17 months, in spite of the difficulty of the minimal distinction. Bilingual infants failed this task at 17 months, but 20-month-olds were able to learn the mappings, they report. “Children start to learn to read some years after they begin to talk. Where we might reasonably propose genetic support for spoken language acquisition, the fact that writing is a recent invention, and that only a tiny minority of the people who have lived and died on this planet have ever learned to read, means that the acquisition of literacy, including the acquisition of new written words, must be supported by other, more general, cognitive and neural systems,” they say. “Cognitive processes that assemble the meanings of phrases, sentences and texts operate on both spoken and written language. What is unique about learning to read is the remarkable way that readers learn to recognize letters across different shapes and forms and to recognize words that are differentiated only by the number and sequence of their component letters.” The researchers have called on the Chilean government to plan for the eradication of goats, rats, mice, feral cats, brambles and other damaging species that are increasingly threatening an extraordinarily rich endemic flora and fauna. The density of the endemic plant species has particularly intrigued botanists. To date, 131 indigenous species have been identified that exist nowhere else — the highest level of plant endemicity anywhere in the world. In addition to the plants, the islands are home to three endemic bird species and four subspecies. One of these is the iconic firecrown hummingbird, the only endemic oceanic hummingbird in the world.