If you haven’t started Junior on French or Spanish lessons by the time s/he is seven years old, it’s probably too late: Research shows that a child’s developing mind best absorbs multiple languages during infanthood.

And it’s all in the procession:

Mastering your dominant language gets in the way of learning a second, less familiar one, Kuhl’s research suggests. The brain tunes out sounds that don’t fit.

“You’re building a brain architecture that’s a perfect fit for Japanese or English or French,” whatever is native, [University of Washington professor Dr. Patricia] Kuhl explains — or, if you’re a lucky baby, a brain with two sets of neural circuits dedicated to two languages.

It is remarkable that babies being raised bilingual — by simply speaking to them in two languages — can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one. On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months.

Italian researchers wondered why there was not a delay, and reported this month in the journal Science that being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible.

More flexible, and more schizophrenic, too. In the most benign, linguistic way possible, of course. Since I’m the product of just such a dual-tongued upbringing — being taught Greek and English concurrently during childhood — I definitely think that that process shaped my mental profile. Presumably for the better.