Language Is No Big Deal to Small Fry

They hadn’t been speaking that long, but when they did, the words came out in Chinese, Spanish and Korean.

No matter. Even without a common language, Yang Zhang, 3; Fernando Diaz, 3, and Joshua Song, 4, became inseparable friends when they enrolled this year at the UC Irvine Children’s Center, a preschool for 54 children of university students, faculty and staff.

“We were amazed and impressed,” said Brenda Toomer, one of their teachers. “They rode a one-driver, two-passenger bike together,” said Adrian Shelby, another teacher. “They had to decide who would drive, who would ride and who would push it up the hill. They would say things--it wasn’t English--and I guess they translated in their own little minds.”

The state-funded preschool, one of four child-care centers on campus, draws a high proportion of foreign students, said Bette Miller, the center’s coordinator. Yang’s mother is a post-doctoral neuroscientist from Canton, China; Joshua’s father is from Korea and studies plasma physics at UCI, and Fernando’s mother, who was raised in Mexico, studies linguistics and Spanish.

“Communication is instinctively something we have to do,” Miller said. Children who don’t have a common system usually invent one, she said.

On a day last week, the trio plus one--Scottie Krause, 3, from Germany--played outside communicating in the language of early childhood, pointing, mimicking, pushing, hugging, sulking. Yang sat alone on the play yard, head in hands. Joshua brought him a birthday cake made of sand and the two pretended to eat. Fernando arrived, dumping sand everywhere. The three immediately switched their game to making sand patterns on the concrete.

The three friends have begun now to speak English (they can all say “gummy dinosaur”) and their circle of friends has expanded.

“They really feel secure here,” Toomer said. “They started out together. You never lose your first friends. They’re really important.”