Re: Do children learn language more easily?


Ar an chéad lá de mí na Nollaig, scríobh Nathan Sanders:

The UN calls people children up until the age of eighteen; even the US
Army doesn’t enlist people under 17.

The UN's definition of "children" is irrelevant when talking about
language acquisition. Everything necessary for using a native
language competently is learned within the first five years.

So you don’t have the basic politeness to deal with what he writes as he
writes it?

Also, I flat-out disagree that everything necessary for using a native
language competently _as an adult_ is learned within the first five
years. And if you’re going to compare the two processes, you need to have
the same desired result; and an adult learning a language wants an adult
command of the language, not the command of a five-year-old.

[...] A three-year-old child is not only learning Spanish, but is also
still in the stages of learning the very fundamentals of language (and of
the nature of the world and society) that you now take for granted as an
adult. You're free to learn things in a completely different order,
while he is forced to progress through a certain set of developmental
milestones. So there will certainly be pieces of language that you can
pick up faster than he can.

That is, pieces of the language are easier for me.

I can say that a particular waitress looks androgynous, wonder what the
Italians ate before the Spanish brought tomatoes from the New World in
reaction to my conversation partner expressing a similar bemusement at
potatoes in Germany, discuss things like political systems, what will
happen in Cuba when Castro dies, not things a three-year-old can say
anything useful about.

You're confusing content with ability to express content. I can't say
anything useful about Dedekind domains or diophantine approximations,
but that doesn't mean that my command of English is not "effective".

It’s not effective in those contexts. But knowledge of those contexts is not
a social expectation, whereas if you couldn’t say anything useful or
understand a conversation about democracy versus dictatorship, potatoes
versus tomatoes, whether or not and why a woman is attractive, then your
command of English would not bad, it would not be effective to the level
expected of a native speaker.

Once he reaches five years old, a child can say useful things about
anything he comprehends (and some things that he can't). It's just
that, as a five-year-old, he necessarily will have been exposed to
fewer things than an adult has, and thus, will understand fewer
things, so his language will *appear* to be less effective because he
has fewer things to talk about (with adults).

And when a second language learner can’t talk with adult native speakers
about household vocabulary, about travel, about food, that second language
learner’s command of the language is bad, and needs to be improved. And?

Now, I and the three-year-old Spaniard have differing areas where our
respective commands of the language fall down.

Which is why comparing adult and child language is exceedingly
difficult and trickier than non-specialists appreciate. How do you
compare native pronunciation with knowledge of technical vocabulary?

You say they’re both important and need to be learned to have a good and
effective command of the language. (If, by technical vocabulary, you mean
that of the paragraph on ethics I posted.)

Which one is more "effective" for communication?

Once you’re not confusing phonemes and people understand your pronunciations
of words, you don’t need native pronunciation to talk usefully about
ethics. You do need the vocabulary of the area.

Which one shows a deeper understanding of the language?

The technical vocabulary, because the learner is more self-aware when
learning it and has some appreciation of the history and variety of meanings
it has, and perhaps also is aware that it comes from another language and as
such will have a slightly different construction to native vocabulary. While
the child learner is never consciously aware of the relation and
construction of phonemes, as every introductory phonetics course
demonstrates.

[...] Situations are not language. Language can be used to describe
situations, of course, and if you don't understand the situation, you
will find it difficult, if not impossible, to accurately describe it.
But that says nothing about your command of the language, only your
knowledge of situations.

Knowledge of situations, and how to describe them, is a crucial part of
knowing a language. Crucial. And it’s not co-incidence that the constantly
come up in language textbooks.

Now, if you do understand the situation, but still can't describe it,
*then* it says something about your command of the language. And
after three years, I'd expect a child to be much better than you at
describing many mundane situations, like everyday household events.

In other words, you and the child both demonstrably fail to describe
certain sets of situations, but in the child's case, it's from lack of
knowledge of the world (not the language),

It can also be from lack of exposure to certain situations in a given
language, for multilingual children. E.g. if a child is taken camping with
its grandparents, and the camping expedition is conducted in the language of
the grandparents, which differs from the language of its father and the
community it grows up in, that child will have the same trouble describing
camping in the language of its community as it will describing a situation
it hasn’t experienced.

The adult language learner’s situation is similar, and can be remedied in a
similar way; I’m reasonably certain that after a year living in a
Spanish-speaking household through Spanish, seeing and talking about those
household events, I would beat the three-year-old hands down at describing
everyday household events.

[...] Who do you think is acquiring a first language? I know of no cases
of someone successfully acquiring their first language starting after the
age of five.

Mike Wright has a child you’ll be interested in.

[...] So why should anyone think that embarrassment is any more useful for
language acquisition? There simply is no evidence that embarrassment
even exists during first language acquisition,

If you mean that window up to the age of five, you’re not taking Rosenfelder
in good faith, and that makes your point irrelevant in the context of
discussing what he writes.

let alone that it is a motivating factor for acquiring native-proficiency
in a language.

Consider second language acquisition, where embarrassment certainly
abounds (just look at late night talk show jokes about Ahnuhld
Schwarzenegger, numerous exaggerated mockery of stereotypical foreign
accents in TV and film, etc.),

Do you get the impression that Schwarzenegger went to a playground every day
in California where every single day someone he considered an equal
ridiculed him? Or is it once every few months, on TV shows he typically
doesn’t watch, from people he has very little to do with, while his normal
daily interaction is with people he respects who never mention it?

and yet, despite all of this constant,
incredibly public embarrassment, adults still have difficulty
achieving native-sounding fluency in second languages.

--
Santa Maradona, priez pour moi!
.

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