Comments?
Source:

www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/isoa-too100313.php

Eric

The order of words
The structure of language influences learning
Think of a frequently used noun or verb in our language. Try to count how many times you have uttered it in the last two hours. Now, do the same with the article "the". The language we speak is not only made of content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, for instance) but also of lots of words that provide a support to them (articles, prepositions, etc.) that are used much more frequently than the first (function words, or functors). Despite the huge variability of known languages, language scientists were able to divide them roughly into two main categories: the languages in which the functor precedes the content word – and that use a Verb-Object order (VO) – and vice versa (OV). The experimental observations showed that the frequency of the terms is a clue that helps identifying to which category a language belongs and, as a consequence, "tuning in" to it.

Knowing the language's structure enables the individual to segment the speech (to divide the language flow into single words) and affects language learnability. This effect has been observed also in very young children for some languages, such as Italian and Japanese. Now a group of neuroscientists including Jacques Mehler and Marina Nespor of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste have extended the experiment also to adults, employing a wider range of languages. The research has been published in the review Frontiers in Psychology.
The experiment was carried on Italian and French native speakers (in representation of the VO language group), and on Japanese and Basque native speakers (OV languages), carrying out learning tasks centered on sentences in an artificial (invented) language that could feature one of the two order structures. "In the previous studies we observed that infants as young as 8-month-old already 'prefer' an artificial language that mirrors the structure of their native language," explains Nespor. "In this new series of studies we have observed this type of preference also in adults".
"This would also explain the increasingly greater difficulties encountered in learning a new language when growing up. Children, while showing such preference precociously, are in fact much more flexible and can easily learn also a language that has a different word order from their own, while adults seem to be more rigidly tied to their native language scheme." adds Nespor. "Of course, when learning a language, also other variables come into play such as lexicon and prosody" concludes the neuroscientist.

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I'm always amused when western scholars use Japanese culture as indicative and representative of the rest of Asia - to wit - the current population of Japan - roughly 130 million. Current population of China OR India - over 1.3 billion - utterly eclipsing Japan's population, if not the rest of the world combined ... and yet...western authors continue to ignore the histories and cultures TWO of the world's most populous (if not rather historically closed) societies, with relatively unbroken recorded histories also utterly eclipsing most allegedly civilized european and western nations.

Is it laziness? Ignorance? or selective statistics? Admittedly, I've never read or studied linguistics - so I wouldn't know if the author indemnified his/her study with a disclaimer.

However, this study may explain why millions of Chinese students who've studied English for over 10 years, still can't read/write/listen/speak English. I guarantee if I studied Chinese for 10 years - I could compose poetry, write song lyrics, go to KTVs and not hunt for ancient and dated English language songs, and probably even fast rap fluently...(can't even do that in English)...