Re: Do children learn language more easily?

In article <18iswmvi0ffwh$.1s422rvpno3p4.dlg@xxxxxxxxxx>,
"Brian M. Scott" <b.scott@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sun, 03 Dec 2006 00:15:40 -0500, Nathan Sanders
<nsanders@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:nsanders-B743A6.00154003122006@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in
sci.lang:

[...]

From child to child, language to language, there are developmental
milestones that they achieve in a particular order.

At the gross level, certainly. Probably at a more detailed
level, if you allow for the occasional exception.

When comparing billions of samples taken from the same population,
some variation is mathematically expected. Once we accept natural
statistical variation, we can get pretty detailed in the order and
nature of developmental milestones.

Babies are just less developed human adults, not completely alien
creatures. Without direct evidence to the contrary, it is quite safe
to assume that their needs are a proper subset of adult needs.

No, but it *is* safe to assume that the two sets have a very
large intersection.

I should have said something like "(largely?) a proper subset", but at
the time I wrote it, I couldn't think of anything to justify the hedge.

In the end, babies still just want food, rest, physical comfort,
health, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary for humans (or animals in
general, for that matter). Throw in some social and emotional factors
like happiness, companionship, creative expression, occasional periods
of solitude, etc., and we still haven't even pushed the envelope of
adult needs.

Certainly, some child-specific needs exist, such as stimuli for normal
development of various organs and systems (vision, hearing, balance,
memory, etc.), but I doubt children are consciously aware of these
needs to the degree required to properly account for Rosenfelder's
idea of an active, need-based, motivational model of language
acquisition, especially since the critical periods for most types of
stimulus-driven development end well before children achieve adult
linguistic competency (i.e., their language continues to progress long
after their stimuli needs have been met).

Nathan

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

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

.

Loading