Do children learn language more easily?
- From: Ruud Harmsen <realemailonsite@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 09:40:34 +0100
I think this is important enough to post here. Mark Rosenfelder in
http://www.zompist.com/whylang.html
===
One may fall back on the position that language may be hard for
children to learn, but at least they do it better than adults. This,
however, turns out to be surprisingly difficult to prove.
Singletonexamined hundreds of studies, and found them resoundingly
ambiguous. Quite a few studies, in fact, find that adult learners
progress faster than children (Language Acquisition, pp. 94-106). Even
in phonetics, sometimes the last stronghold of the kids-learn-free
position, there are studies finding that adults are better at
recognizing and producing foreign sounds.
Now, I think Singleton misses a key point in understanding this
discrepancy: the studies he reviews compare children vs. adults who
are learning languages. That's quite reasonable, and indeed it's hard
to imagine an alternative approach; but the two groups are not really
comparable! All children have to learn at least one language; but few
adults do. So the studies compare the situation of all children with
that of the minority of adults motivated to formally learn other
languages.
Why do children learn languages well, when even adults who want to
learn them have trouble with them? Innate abilities aside, children
have a number of powerful advantages:
They can devote almost their full time to it. Adults consider half an
hour's study a day to be onerous.
Their motivation is intense. Adults rarely have to spend much of their
time in the company of people they need to talk to but can't; children
can get very little of what they want without learning language(s).
Their peers are nastier. Embarrassment is a prime motivating factor
for human beings (I owe this insight to Marvin Minsky's The Society of
Mind, but it was most memorably expressed by David Berlinski (in Black
Mischief, p. 129), who noted that of all emotions, from rage to
depression to first love, only embarrassment can recur, decades later,
with its full original intensity). Dealing with a French waiter is
nothing compared with the vicious reception in store for a child who
speaks funny.
If adults could be placed in a similar situation, they might well
learn languages as readily (I don't say 'easily'!) as children. The
closest such situation I can think of is cross- cultural marriage. And
indeed, this works quite well. My wife, for instance, a native Spanish
speaker who came here in her late 20s, has learned exceptional
English, since we speak it at home. By contrast, some of her
Spanish-speaking friends of the same age, married to other Spanish
speakers, speak English haltingly and with a strong accent.
===
--
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com
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