Re: Do children learn language more easily?

In article <pik8izs94vb5.yunpyhn675z8.dlg@xxxxxxxxxx>,
Joachim Pense <snob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Am Sat, 02 Dec 2006 11:57:23 -0500 schrieb Nathan Sanders:

Note my use of "first", not "native". The ability to learn a native
language continues for a few more years (it is certainly gone by about
age 10). The ability to start your *first* language does not last
past about age 5.

Does the last sentence hold because there is some specific ability
needed for acquiring a first language that gets lost by the age of
five, or is it just that by that age you will already have acquired a
language (if you are able to acquire language at all), so whatever
language you acquire now will be at least the second?

There are cases of so-called `feral children' who have had no known
linguistic input during the first five years or so of their lives, and
they were unable to learn language in a way resembling human usage.
Their language usage turned out to be very similar to what happens
when we try to teach gorillas sign language: an impressive ability to
learn sign/meaning pairs, but a severely diminished and highly
inconsistent ability to use them in in orderly, patterned ways,
despite years of instruction and, often for the feral children,
obvious frustration at their inability to communicate like everyone
else.

This apparent critical period might be due to some innate linguistic
ability that, like many other biological processes (stages of fetal
development, critical period for binocular vision, puberty, male
pattern baldness, menopause, hair greying, etc.), is on a genetic
timer.

Or it could be due to more basic properties of our brain that aren't
specific to language, properties that might be innate and biologically
timed, or might just be an unavoidable confluence of events in the
natural development of our brain.

Or the whole idea of a linguistic critical period could be our
collective imagination, merely a product of culture, and the deficient
language of linguistically-deprived children, the drastic differences
between L1 and L2 acquisition, and the timing of sufficient competency
in L1 are all just illusions and/or coincidence, stemming from the
different social lives, daily activities, and needs of children versus
adults, having nothing to do with the development of the brain itself.

It's still an open question the field, but most qualified researchers
believe in either linguistic innateness or some more general cognitive
explanation (either innate or more epiphenomenal).

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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Relevant Pages

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