Re: Do children learn language more easily?

In article <m56tm2t4kofr6chhn9esnud95dshjvu66b@xxxxxxx>,
Ruud Harmsen <realemailonsite@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think this is important enough to post here. Mark Rosenfelder in
http://www.zompist.com/whylang.html

Judging from what you've quoted from him, I don't think Mr.
Rosenfelder is qualified to make pronouncements about language
acquisition.

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.

"Full time" for children isn't more than a few hours a day, scattered
throughout the day in small chunks. Babies sleep multiple times a
day, for multiple hours at a time. They also spend a large portion of
their waking time crying, a state that is hardly conducive to learning
anything requiring concentration.

Adults consider half an
hour's study a day to be onerous.

Even if true (it's not --- my high school and college foreign language
classes lasted an hour per day, and homework would be even more than
that), this wouldn't explain anything. If half an hour is onerous for
adults, it should certainly be onerous for children, who tend to have
far less patience and shorter attention spans than adults do.

What needs to be explained is why adults, who can sit alertly through
two-hour snoozefests like Chariots of Fire, would find it "onerous" to
spend half an hour learning a language, while children, who can barely
play with the same toy for more than five minutes, can somehow manage
to magically devote their "full time" to learning language.

Babies, unlike adults, demonstrate no ability at all to focus on any
single activity for more than a brief period of time.

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).

More nonsense. Babies are doted on almost continuously by generally
observant and over-protective guardians, and in the vast majority of
cases, they can often get what they want rather quickly with nothing
more complex than incoherent crying.

Later on, children can get essentially everything they need with
simple sentences. Children have absolutely no "need" whatsoever to
learn things like relative clauses, island constraints, pied piping,
subject-aux inversion, pronouns, etc. And yet they do it anyway,
despite their simpler child language being more than sufficient to
meet their needs.

Compare this to pidgins: adult speakers of pidgins get essentially
everything they need (which is certainly far more comprehensive and
complex in nature than children's needs) by using a linguistic system
that is typically no more complex than the speech of a five-year-old,
and in fact, is often simpler in many ways.

If pidgins work for adult needs, and if language acquisition is driven
by need, then we would not expect child language to ever progress in
complexity beyond what we see in pidgins. And of course, we find that
child language does progress well beyond pidgin-level complexity.

Their peers are nastier. Embarrassment is a prime motivating factor
for human beings

Completely irrelevant to the important early stages of language
acquisition. Babies learn many properties of language in their first
year, before they've uttered a single word. No one can make fun of
them for "talking funny" if they aren't even talking yet!

In the next few years (ages 2-3), embarrassment from their peers is
also largely irrelevant, since their peers speak in the same one- and
two-word utterances. It's hard to make fun of someone's speech when
you yourself have just started putting a noun with a verb.

By the time peer opinion could even be fully expressed (age 4-5), most
average children have mastered everything they "need" in their
language, and more, lacking only the uncommon, complex, or arcane
features of their language that (concidentally?) adults often have
difficultly with.

Further, embarrassment seems to do nothing to alleviate some of the
most salient disfluencies a child can have, such as lisps and
stuttering, which are mocked far more frequently than other
disfluencies like using the wrong preposition. One would think that
if embarrassment was this hugely important, all-powerful motivator for
learning language, it would fix something as simple as pronouncing /s/
with the tongue only a centimeter out of place. But lisping children
often need years of speech therapy to correct it, if they can even
correct it at all.

And no amount of embarrassment from pedantic authority figures seems
to dissuade the average speaker from ending sentences with
prepositions, splitting their infinitives, or getting pronoun case all
mixed up inside cooridinated NPs.

So if neither peers nor authority figures can successfully embarrass
us into changing our language for seemingly minor things that can be
altered in straightforward, logical ways, why on earth should we
assume it plays any significant role in language acquisition at all?

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

.

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