Why Knowing Your Limits Can Be Your Major Advantage |
I have always had a problem speaking English since I started doing so as my second language at age 27.
Early in my teaching career, students occasionally complained about my accent. My department chair once summed up my performance in a line that still rings in my ears: Dr. Sun was a good teacher, but he had an accent.
My children, never known for mercy, urged me to try harder. “Anything can be done,” they insisted. The unspoken accusation was clear: If I still sounded foreign, I simply wasn’t trying hard enough.
What neither of them knew was that biology had already cast the die.
There is a name for the stubborn grip of one’s mother tongue. It is called imprinting, a form of learning that happens early and is mostly irreversible. The idea entered science through the eccentric brilliance of Konrad Lorenz, who famously persuaded newly hatched goslings to follow him around as if he were their mother. His trick was simple and profound. At the moment of hatching, he made sure he was the only moving object in sight. The goslings learned, once and for all, who “mother” was.
Lorenz’s work earned him a Nobel Prize in 1973, shared with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. At the time, imprinting was mostly treated as an animal curiosity, charming and slightly absurd. Its deeper relevance to humans took longer to sink in.
That insight came in part from