Re: Do children learn language more easily?
- From: Mike Wright <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:14:51 -0600
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Nathan Sanders wrote:In article <17776.38916.538117.17209@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ar an triochad� l� de m� na Samhain, scr�obh Nathan Sanders:The quoted portion was long enough for me to realize that Mr.
> > 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,
By the way, there was a link. The entire article is quite a bit longer.
Rosenfelder has less knowledge about language acquisition than I do,
and certainly less than the people who do actual research in the
field, whose articles and books I'm quite sure would be more
fulfilling, enlightening, and factual than anything of Mr.
Rosenfelder's opinions.
If I want to find out about quantum mechanics, I'll read multiple
published works written by actual physicists, not a webpage of
opinions written by a taxi driver.
Of course, that taxi driver could have written something utterly
brilliant and insightful, but my experience with internet hobbyists
dabbling in technical fields is that they are generally full of
fanciful ideas that fall in the face of hard research, and are far too
concerned with getting their ideas distributed than with getting them
correct.
I wish you'd been around back when Mark was defending the proposition
that language acquisition is _not_ different from the acquisition of
any other cognitive ability.
Ah...the good ol' days.
And, BTW, the ability to acquire a native language doesn't turn off at
age 5; a boy joined our class in 4th grade (I guess we were 9 or 10) in
New York, already speaking French (his Belgian mother's language) and
Russian (his father's language) perfectly, and within two months was
speaking English perfectly as well.
My stepsons were 7 and 9 when they came to the States (in 1966). They were pretty fluent within a year or less. They were thrown into school without knowing a word of English, and I didn't do much to teach them explicitly, because they didn't seem to need any help. I do have the impression that they learned a lot from TV.
If you heard them now, you probably wouldn't know that English isn't their first language--the younger one sounds so much like me that our friends can't tell us apart on the phone. (Except that he never says "y'all".)
However, when the elder writes, I sometimes see him leaving final "-ed" and, less commonly, "-s", off of his verbs. When I listen closely, I can see that he sometimes does the same in speech, though I don't think I'd ever have become aware of it if I hadn't first noted it in his writing.
On the other hand, neither has anything like "native" abilities in Hokkien, so, if they have a native language, it must be English.
My elder son still has excellent command of Hokkien phonology. I'm less sure about his syntax. His vocabulary was already disappearing by the time he was in college. On a trip to Taiwan, he would want to know how to say something in Hokkien, he'd ask me in English, I'd ask one of his relatives in Mandarin, and when he heard the answer, he'd often say, "Oh, yeah."
The younger went back to Taiwan about 4-5 years ago. He says that whenever he tried to speak Hokkien, his relatives laughed at him, so he got mad and just quit talking to them, going through his mother for most communication.
Several of my Taiwanese grandnephews are being raised speaking only Mandarin in the midst of relatives (and, presumably, neighbors) who speak a lot of Hokkien. (All schooling is in Mandarin.)
It will be interesting to see how much Hokkien they know when they grow up. One of then now lives in Canada, though, so he may end up with little more than English. I think he may have been about 10 when they moved to Toronto.
My older granddaughter was born in Korea and raised on a US military base by her adoptive Korean mother and American father (my elder), but with lots of Korean relatives nearby. She was pretty much bilingual when she came to the States at the age of 5 (in 1992), but started losing her Korean almost immediately. We sent her to Saturday morning Korean classes, which didn't help much, for several years. Then a couple of older cousins came over to live with the family. She and the cousins all helped out at the family's Korean market and restaurant, dealing with Korean-speaking customers, and she got back a little of her fluency. She has also been back to Korea for quite a few long visits--most recently this past summer.
Other than the trips, she's been out of that environment for about 4 years, and she doesn't feel the least bit confident of her Korean. I can't find anything wrong with her English--except that she talks like the average California teenager. ("So, she goes ..., and I go ..., and she's all ..., and I'm like ....")
(He went on to major, or concentrate, in linguistics at Wesleyan and
turned up at Chicago a year or two after me to do a terminal Master's
in Japanese. I've never heard of him again.)
(BTW, our headmistress thought I should attend "Dartmouth, Amherst, or
Williams," but my Cornell Regents scholarship pretty much decided that.
One per congressional district ... and they couldn't be transferred out
of state.)
--
Mike Wright
http://www.raccoonbend.com
.
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