Learning a languageWhen Do We Learn a Language Children begin learning languages at birth (infants pay attention to their parents’’ voices, as opposed to random noises or even other languages), and haven’’t really mastered it subtleties before the age of ten years. Indeed. we never really stop learning our language. This isn’’t exactly the sort of behavior (like foals walking an hour after birth) that we call ’’instinct’’ in animals.Do We learn When We Don’’t Have to But at least it’’s effortless, isn’’t it Well, no, as we can see when children have a choice of languages to learn. What’’s found is that, to be frank, children don’’t learn a language if they can get away with not learning it. Many an immigrant family in the U.S. intends to teach their child their native language; and for the first few years it goes swimmingly so much so that the parents worry that the child won’’t learn English. Then the child goes to school, picks up English, and within a few years the worry is reversed: the child still understands his parents, but responds in English. Eventually the parents may give up, and the home language becomes English.People’’s Influence A child is likely to end up as a fluent speaker of a language only if there are significant people in her life who speak it: a nanny who only speaks Spanish, a relative who doesn’’t speak English, etc. Once a child discovers that his parents understand English perfectly well, he’’s likely to give up on the home language, even in the face of strong disapproval from the parents. It’’s a myth that children learn to speak mainly from their parents. They don’’t: they learn mostly from their peers. This is most easily seen among children of immigrants, whether they come from differing language backgrounds or merely different dialect areas: the children invariably come to speak the dialect of their neighborhood and school, not that of their parents. (I found a neat example of this in my college’’s alumni magazine: A liberal family in Mississippi sent their daughter to the public schools, which except for her were all black. She grew up speaking fluent African-American Vernacular English. )Do We Need Grammar Supporters of the ’’language instinct’’ make much of the fact that children learn to speak without formal instruction --- indeed, they notoriously ignore explicit corrections. Very little of what we learn is through formal instruction. Children aren’’t schooled in video games, either, yet they pick them up with the same seeming ease. The apparent effortlessness is largely an illusion caused by psychological distance. We just don’’t remember how hard it was to learn language. (In fact, there’’s some studies suggesting that memory is tied to language, so that we can’’t remember the language learning process. ) The perception of effortlessness should be balanced, anyway, by the universal amusement (which some cartoonists have been mining for nearly half a century) over children’’s language mistakes.Do Children Learn Faster One may fall back on the position that languages may be hard for children to learn, but at least they do it better than adults. This, however, turns out to be surprisingly difficult to prove. Singleton examined hundreds of studies, and found them resoundingly ambiguous. Quite a few studies, in fact, find that adult learners progress faster than children. Even in phonetics, sometimes tile last stronghold of the kids-learn-free position, there are studies finding that adults are better at recognizing and producing foreign sounds. Now, I think Singleton misses a key point in understanding this discrepancy: the studies he reviews compare children vs. adults who are learning languages. That’’s quite reasonable, and indeed it’’s hard to imagine an alternative approach, but the two groups are not really comparable! All children have to learn at least one language; but few adults do. So the studies compare the situation of all children with that of the minority of adults motivated to formally learn other languages.Why 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. Adults consider half an hour’’s study a day to be onerous. ●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). ●Their peers are nastier. Embarrassment is a prime motivating factor for human beings (I owe this insight to Marvin Minsky’’s The Society of Mind, but it was most memorably expressed by David Berlinski (in Black Mischief, p. 129), who noted that of all emotions, from rage to depression to first love, only embarrassment can recur, decades later, with its full original intensity). Dealing with a French waiter is nothing compared with the vicious reception in store for a child who speaks funny. If adults could be placed in a similar situation, they might well learn languages as readily as children. The closest such situation is cross-cultural marriage. And indeed, this works quite well. My wife, for instance, a native Spanish speaker who came here in her late 20s, has learned exceptional English, since we speak it at home. By contrast, some of her Spanish-speaking friends of the same age, married to other Spanish speakers, speak English haltingly and with a strong accent.
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