Also, I don't think that Scott is avoiding the topic of intelligence (or other cancel magnets).
It's just that the topic of this article is "who learns languages faster, *children* or *adults*, and why?" rather than "who learns languages faster, geniuses or idiots? because I have absolutely no idea why that could possibly be, considering that intelligence is not even real".
We talk about IQ and intelligence elsewhere, and will probably do so again. As has been pointed out, this post is about language acquisition. It's got nothing to do with "Scott is too chicken to accept HBD is real, and not just that, but the hardcore version where black people are just genetically inferior subhumans".
If you're spoiling for a fight, you can get one online easily elsewhere, and indeed pick your time and you'll get one here. But you're complaining that the dish of the day is not beef, you wanted beef, where's the beef? on the Seafood Saturday Special menu.
I would not be surprised to find out that half of the readers here mostly agree with this. And the other half does not, such is life.
Also, you are at zero risk of getting banned for what you wrote now, but at non-zero risk of getting banned for the comment that started this thread. Not because of insufficient wokeness or something like that, but simply because it is a *cheap* attack, and we do not do such things here.
Instead, you could have written a paragraph or two about how *you* believe intelligence is related to language acquisition (and maybe even make it relevant to the current topic of "kids vs adults"). If you want your point to be better represented, you could start by making it rather than merely insinuating.
Seeing "~1000 possible phonemes" casually written like that made me think—how on earth would you even count that? Is 1000 very close? It feels rather high.
If you define 'aspiration' as the delay between the release of a consonant and the onset of modal (regular) voicing, you can subsume 'voiced aspirates' (i.e. South Asian /bh, dh, gh/ sounds such as in Hindi, Bengali etc.) under the general category of 'aspirated'. This is what most phonologists, such as myself do. And research has shown that humans (and chinchillas) generally divide what should be a smooth continuum into distinct categories (Google Peter Eimas for references.
Actually, most Indo-Europeanists I know believe the voiced aspirates of IE are the same as the 'voiced aspirates' of the Indic languages. And it's certainly the case that Grassman's law (which applied to aspirates in Indo-European, and to Greek and Sanskrit) treats murmured (voiced aspirated) and long VOT (voiceless aspirates) as belonging to the same category.
> because aspiration is the natural result of having the VOT start *after* the vowel has already started being articulated
This isn't right. Aspiration gives you a very rough waveform. It looks nothing like a vowel, or a voiceless vowel. It's a feature that has to be specifically added.
The number is not 'arbitrary'. Languages have distinct phonemics, which are either prototype or exemplar categories (depending on your religion) but have identifiable centers, so that the number of phonemes for any language is a simple number. If not, it would be impossible to learn to spell, even for languages like Indonesian and Spanish, where the phoneme/grapheme correspondance is very simple. You are welcome to consult, just as one of many dozens of references, my book: https://benjamins.com/catalog/clip.3
There is considerable research on how phoneme systems vary among languages of the world. You can start here: https://phoible.org/
I agree that the number of phonemes is arbitrary, but the fact that there are discrete categories (and thus countable) is not. As for the phoneme model, I'm one of the school of linguists who continues to believe that there are segments as well as syllables, but I'm a little less confident in the existence of features as real mental categories.
Nonetheless, the fact that the vowel systems of the languages of the world cluster around a 5-vowel model (accidentally) reflected in the vowel system we inherited from Latin cannot be a coincidence. The virtual identity between Hawaiian, Zulu, and Spanish vowel systems reflects spikes in human perceptual systems--there is no possible contact explanation.
The same facts apply to consonant systems--despite languages with dozens of consonants (like !Xoo), all languages have columns centering around bilabial, coronal (dental or alveolar) and velar. And Ken Stevens (Stevens, Kenneth. “On the Quantal Nature of Speech.” Journal of Phonetics 17, no. 1–2 (1989): 3–46).showed this is not arbitrary either.
I thought there are often at least a few phonemes in many languages that are somewhat unclear. Because of things like "cot"-"caught" merger, some English speakers clearly have one phoneme here, while others clearly have two, and there are likely a good number of English speakers who have some ambiguous number of phonemes.
For any particular speaker there's probably a finite number, but between dialects of course the number will vary. And there are cases where the merger is ongoing even within a particular speaker. But overall for any particular dialect the number is pretty stable, and it's rare for more than one phoneme to be fuzzy enough to be unclear. In French, for pretty much all speakers /ø/ 'peu' and /œ/ 'peur' are pretty much allophones now, but /e/ 'mes' and /ɛ/ 'mais' are still distinct for older speakers. and /o/ 'faute' and /ɔ/ 'sotte' are distinct for most standard speakers, but have merged in some dialects and some younger speakers. Again, this is just a small corner of the phonology.
A lower bound would be the union of the phonemes in all the world's languages. Throw in an ad hoc factor of two, and that might be a reasonable estimate.
One thing to note is that while you can count the number of phonemes in an individual language discretely, and you can sort of classify consonants into common discrete phonemes cross-linguistically, vowels are actually just a continuous spectrum so any number of “total phonemes across languages” is meaningless. Here is a great video on that https://youtu.be/FdldD0-kEcc?si=xJ2e25Sy3WAPM8GK
In the same sense that the number of colors is meaningless, sure. But like with colors, you can still reasonably partition the perception space, despite it being continuous.
The issue is that (I believe, not a linguist but from things I’ve read) every language “partitions” the vowel space slightly differently, it’s rare for two languages to have vowels that align exactly (not to mention all the dialectal variation). If you tried to do a count of all partitions of the vowel space found in all languages you will pretty much just be counting how many languages there are in the world rather than anything meaningful
Different accents will divide up the vowel space differently too, so there's no such thing as the "English" division of vowel space, it's going to look very different in Aberdeen versus Alabama, or Kingston vs Queenstown.
Worse still, there's pretty continuous transitions between these vowel sounds; pick any point on the "cot-caught" spectrum and I can find you a speaker somewhere in the world who uses that particular version of the short "o".
That is not a problem specific to vowels. Different languages also partition the consonant space differently. (Many consonants have obvious discrete differences between them, but many others don't, and even when those differences are physically present, languages often don't perceive them.)
Examples:
1. /n/ and /l/ are both sonorants (speech sounds that can be maintained indefinitely; compare /m/ with /b/) with an alveolar place of articulation. In one of them the air flows out of your mouth, and in the other it flows out of your nose, but that might not matter.
2. /θ/ (the consonant at the beginning of "thick") is a "dental fricative", meaning a sound produced by a tightly restricted continuous airflow that is articulated against the back of the teeth (in other words, near the back of the teeth is _where_ the tight restriction on airflow is located). It is a rare sound if you're counting by languages, though not if you're counting by people. This gives us a lot of data for how languages divide the consonant space around it:
2a. English-speaking children take longer than usual to learn this sound. When they start to speak, they produce an /f/ instead, a labiodental fricative that doesn't even involve the tongue. (I believe this is the closest available match to the physical waveform.) Russian in the past (and possibly still in the present) also drew this equivalence, as seen in the conversion of e.g. "Timothy" to "Timofei". Cantonese speakers perceive this equivalence today.
2b. Mandarin speakers do not perceive /θ/ as being similar to /f/. Instead, they perceive it as being /s/, an alveolar (the gum ridge just behind the teeth) fricative. It is notable that both Cantonese and Mandarin recognize both /f/ and /s/, so this is not a question of what sounds are available in the target language.
2c. Most Germanic languages have lost the sound /θ/, replacing it with /t/ or /d/. /t/ and /d/ are not fricatives at all, but their place of articulation is close to /θ/. This is another equivalence option, though I'm not sure how common it is to perceive the sound this way. (Historical development is a slightly different, but related, kind of thing.)
3. There is a continuum (directly corresponding to "how far back along the roof of your mouth are you restricting the airflow?", a nicely analogue quantity) from alveolar /s/ through "post-alveolar" /ʃ/ through "palato-alveolar" /ɕ/ to "palatal" /ç/ and "retroflex" /ʂ/ . How do we decide which symbol(s) to use in a given language? (No language draws the contrast this finely.) We don't, really; it's arbitrary.
Hello again. M.I. answer is more competent, still one more example: Russians write "o" and "a" but when I was at a loss how the ones in хорошо (= ok) are pronounced. They are all different and none a German "o" for sure. A friend helped me: "It is neither o nor a. Something in between." Also colors: In Japanese the sun is 'red' and the grass is 'blue'. And snow in Moscow is just dirty-as-snow ;)
Right, so neither the names for colors nor the symbols for vowels capture the entirety of their respective perceptual spaces. I wouldn't put the number of vowels at, say, six, any more than I would the number of colors at a dozen. But I don't think the fact that these spaces are continuous precludes an estimate how many essentially different (where figuring out what that means precisely is the problem) ones there are.
There's an old poem translated as "there is a grey eye weeping" but the eye colour might be grey-blue or even blue:
"(of eyes) grey(-blue); light blue"
So I wonder if Japanese 'blue' grass (as distinct from Kentucky bluegrass) has a similar derivation?
In modern usage, "glas" is green and "gorm" is blue, though there is a little-used distinction that "uaine" should mean green for objects where "glas" is for vegetation; and if we're speaking of black people then that is "duine gorm" (literally 'blue person') rather than "dubh" (black) because references to 'black man' mean a supernatural entity or the Devil.
Unsure, Japanese grass may be of a slightly darker version - or referring to older, not-spring-fresh grass. I assume, it comes down more to where languages (their speakers) put their color-boundaries on the spectrum. For Russians, light-blue (goluboi - also: gay) is a different color than dark-blue (zeeny) , not mere shades. That the "sky is blue" is neither a trivial nor an ancient statement, I read once. Dunno where, but https://zeteojournal.com/2015/03/02/blue/
This seems like a good time to mention that, although the exact range of wavelengths assigned to each color name can vary and overlap quite differently from language to language, there is actually a fairly consistent pattern in the order in which languages develop color terms over time, and what colors a language will have if it has x color terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Color_term_hierarchy.
Also, in this vein, the understanding of color in old Greek texts is quite different from our contemporary colors, hence the famous "wine-dark sea." Would you describe the ocean (blue-green, perhaps) and wine (dark red-purple, maybe) as being the same color? The Greeks did.
I'm not 100% sure. But as far as I can tell, the Greek just says that the sea looks like wine. It doesn't specify that what the sea has in common with wine is the color.
I think that translators of Homer into English decided that the similarity of the sea to wine must refer to its darkness, hence "wine-dark sea" (I don't think Homer says "dark"). Translators tend to copy one another, so the phrase has become the standard translation, and readers tend to interpret it as meaning that the sea and the wine are similar in color, even though even the translation doesn't say that.
But it's true that Homer didn't use a word for blue, and that the word cyanos, which to later Greeks means blue, in Homer means dark. So, for example, Zeus has cyanos eyebrows - surely his eyebrows aren't blue. This has led to many mistranslations in the past, for example, everybody having blue eyes, instead of dark (I think that, in all Homer, the only character who actually has bright eyes is Athena).
One hilarious case of translators copying a mistake from one another is Dante's leopard always being "parti-colored" or "multi-colored" instead of speckled or spotted, that is, how a normal leopard looks like. Because of this mistranslation, William Blake drew a hilarious leopard of many colors in his illustrations for Dante's poem.
Okay, for concreteness, here's one way of counting the number of colors:
1. Pick a basis for your color space. Something three dimensional should do.
2. For each point in this space, find the volume around that point that your test subject(s) cannot perceive as different from it. (EDIT: You'll need some threshold, like "95% of subjects don't perceive a difference 95% of the time.")
3. Integrate the reciprocal of this "indistinguishability volume" over the entire space.
You might be limited by the resolution of your measurements of imperceptible differences, but I expect this procedure to converge as it gets fine enough. (This works for vowels as well, using formant frequencies as a basis; three should do.)
So even if you find any particular partition arbitrary, you should be able to agree on the NUMBER of perceptually distinct entities.
This seems like a good rough first approximation, but I think there's two main problems.
One is that this sort of "just noticeable difference" isn't going to be clear-cut. There are some differences that you notice 99% of the time, some differences that you notice 1% of the time, some differences that you notice 50% of the time, and these are likely to be different enough that you'll get substantially different estimates.
I think the more important problem is that you're very unlikely to pick a basis for the space in which the "just noticeable differences" are of the same size (and shape) throughout the space. For instance, it seems to be easier to tell apart similar shades of yellow than similar shades of blue, so a simple and symmetric representation of color space will be very non-homogeneous, and you need to use an odd shape (https://munsell.com/about-munsell-color/how-color-notation-works/munsell-color-space-and-solid/) to get a representation with something like equal perceptibility differences.
If you settle on some threshold probability of successful discrimination, and do the painstaking research with subjects throughout the feature space, you might well get a number that is relatively reproducible. This number may well also give you some meaningful difference between the "size" of color space and vowel space and other perceptual spaces. But I still don't think the number is going to be meaningful as a "number of possible phonemes" or a "number of possible colors". It's going to be more like a "size of discretization that will generally get close enough for most subjects not to tell the difference most of the time".
I remember back in the day when they described different computer graphics codings as being 4 color, 16 color, 256 color, 65,536 color, and "millions of colors". I suspect that the method you're describing isn't likely to get a number of distinguishable colors in the millions, but I think it turned out to be useful to discretize that way anyway, partly because of how we are sensitive to these things at larger scales than just distinguishing isolated colors. (I think a similar thing is true with the way we distinguish accents, even though everyone is recognizably using the same phonemes.)
Just for a context, I checked on Google the language with most phonemes, and it cited Guiness Book of records saying that it is Xóõ (also known as Ta'a; formerly called "southern Khoisan") with about 130 consonants, 28 vowels and three different tones. Rather unsurprisingly it is spoken by about 3000 people. Also apparently counting phonemes is not a strict science and various authors differ in their estimates (hence the "about" above).
There's not really a good way to count that. Phonemes can be counted *within* a language, but not really *across* languages.
Both English and Spanish have phonemes represented with the same alphabet. It seems reasonable to say that the phonemes they both commonly represent with the letter "s" is the same phoneme (because they are usually pronounced so similarly), while the phonemes they both commonly represent with the letter "r" is a different phoneme (because they are usually pronounced so differently), but what about the phonemes they both commonly represent with the letter "t"? The default pronunciations of those phonemes are pretty different (think about how differently the word "Latino" sounds when spoken by someone who is trying to keep the Spanish sound, versus someone who is not - the difference is an aspiration after the release of the tongue from the dental region) but you do get something very similar to the default pronunciation of the Spanish phoneme in the English word "stop".
Vowel phonemes can be particularly problematic. Consider the vowel phonemes that differ in the English words "feather" and "father". There's another vowel phoneme in English somewhat between the two, in the word "fatter". German has phonemes that we might have thought of as corresponding to the first two, in words like "Fest" and "fast", but they don't have one corresponding to the third. Interestingly, German has borrowed some words from English that originally used this third vowel, like "Handy", for cell phone, but they merge it with the -e- vowel rather than with the -a- vowel, as an English speaker might have guessed.
Whoa, hold on! When you say "English", I think you must mean "establishment AmericanEnglish", or whatever it's called these days. My British "fatter" is way beyond my "father".
Good point - and of course this just makes it even harder to identify phonemes across languages, since different regional versions will realize them differently, in ways that perhaps "correspond" differently to phonemes in other languages.
That said, I'm struggling to imagine the accent you're mentioning. For me, "feather" is pretty far forward (but not as far forward as "fit" or "feet") while "father" is farther back (though not as far back as "forth", "foot", or "food"), and "fatter" is between "feather" and "father". I pronounce "chance" and "castle" with the "fat" vowel, but I've heard some accents (maybe Australian?) in which they have the "father" vowel.
I think there are also foreign borrowings like "taco" and "pasta" that Americans tend to produce with something like the "father" vowel while I think British people (and my Canadian mother) pronounce with the "fat" vowel. (I suspect Americans once did this too, which is why the states "Nevada" and "Colorado" tend to be pronounced differently by locals, whose ancestors probably did it the way British people would today, and other Americans, who tend to treat these like modern borrowings).
I just realized that it could be that it's really the "father" vowel that is different! I'm thinking of it as pretty much the lowest central vowel, close to the /a/ in the /i/-/a/-/u/ system that many languages have. But I think I have heard some British accents in which it's more in the vicinity of an /æ/.
There must also be an element of available time for older learners. I started learning a very different language (Croatian) at c.30 and with a demanding job, exercise, work on the house, and a social life it is very hard to fit the lessons and home study in. God knows how it would be with a kid in the mix.
Exactly, the kind of learning children do is qualitatively different than what adults generally do.
Children are spending up to their entire waking day learning to some degree or another. An adult, even living in a foreign country, is not likely learning more than half the time - likely much less.
Absolutely. On another qualitative level, the child likely doesn't realise how bad they are as they practice. While on the other hand the adult is painfully aware!
Somewhat tangential, just out of curiosity - what drove you to learn Croatian? Was it a personal connection?
I speak it fluently, born in Canada to immigrant parents. From observing family there seems to be a huge resistance to even attempting to learn "very different" languages. One of my (Croatian) cousins just married an American guy, who seems completely uninterested in learning any Croatian. He lived in Croatia for at least a year, but aside from basic things to get around (please, thank you, cheers, phrase book stuff) doesn't seem to have put any effort into properly learning the language.
I think available time must have a huge influence - I remember reading somewhere that those who learn languages most effectively devote way more time to learning the language than the "average" struggling learner, something in the order of 10x as much time, maybe more. Unfortunately I don't remember the source so this may be off.
I imagine the motivation has to be really high if you are going to commit a large chunk of your time to learning a language. Often it simply isn't worth it - in the case of my cousin and her husband, as far as I know they haven't decided whether to settle in Croatia or elsewhere. Perhaps if they settled there he would learn, but as he has so far "coasted" by mainly interacting with English-speaking expats, I'm not so sure.
I mean, I can't imagine I would ever seriously try to learn a language as different from English as Chinese. Logosyllabic with thousands of characters, tonal, deeply different cultural history and associated concepts and literary references...it would be extremely difficult and take an immense amount of time to do properly. Whereas, knowing English natively and Spanish okay (brief elementary school education during the supposed critical window, and high school and college education up to advanced intermediate level and some literature courses), I imagine I could tackle most Germanic or Romance languages without too much trouble. Nordic ones with weird sounds might be tricky.
Bok! I have a simple connection - my partner's parents are Croatian. Speaking to your example, I think I could have gotten away with only learning a "coasting" level. For me though, there were respectively altruistic, pragmatic, and selfish reasons. In order:
Altruistic - I'm very fond of her mother, who speaks good English but prefers Croatian. Learning to converse with her was in my mind a way of showing her my respect. We're here now and just the other day she kissed me on the head when I successfully complimented her sister's cooking in Croatian - it was a lovely moment.
Pragmatic - I'm in Croatia at least two weeks every August in a smaller city where most tourists are Italian/German, so it's useful for getting around.
Selfish - I've always had a very global outlook and a deep love of language but the fact I could only speak English embarrassed me. As an adult I've had a desire to learn another language, and so this felt like an opportunity to "prove" myself and learn something I valued.
If Scott is correct, does that suggest particular strategies that later language learning should purse to best counteract the effects seemingly observed in the data?
I don't know if it's implied from this necessarily, but he's written a lot about learning languages and his advice is overwhelmingly 'immersion' - learn the basics from a book and then visit somwhere that speaks that language and never speak in English while you're there.
Yes, anecdotally, this makes a huge difference between people who spend 2 months abroad and learn the language fluently, and those who spend 2 months abroad and don't improve much.
Not being able to speak your native language *at all* sounds like a horrible experience, but maybe that's exactly the mechanism how it works: a survival instinct makes learning the language a high priority (as opposed to mere hobby).
The Middlebury Summer Language Program (https://www.middlebury.edu/language-schools/) does this in a good way. Even though you're studying on campus in Vermont, rather than in a country where the language is spoken, all students in the program sign a pledge at the beginning of the month that states that they will not speak in English, and will try, as far as possible, to only speak in the language they are trying to learn. You basically limit your social life for a month to other people in this program, and so everyone is very patient with each other as they struggle for words, and helps them remember when it's clear what word or grammar they are struggling to get. It's much more effective than going to a country where people speak the language, but will often just switch to English when they hear you struggling and want to help.
Yeah I studied abroad and spent too much time in my room or with other study abroad students who spoke English and my Spanish did not improve nearly as much as it should have as a result.
I am not even sure about what are the relevant "effects seemingly observed in the data". That said, good courses pursue (very) slightly different approaches for kids resp. adults. (Bad courses do very different things, that is why they are bad.) But it is all "direct method", even if the amount of explicit grammar/ consciously contrasting L1 and L2 / learning 'strategies'/ use of L1 in class-room etc. may differ. Also, use of songs: great for kids and most adults, teens often go: 'Eeeh, childish/ awkward, won't do!' ;) In short, main difference: The younger the kids, the slower the progress. Much sloooooower. (Similar to elderly learners, but then: once a week is never enough.)
"Aside from saying that learning rate seems high in youth, probably stays high for a while, and then seems to go down in some kind of plausibly-continuous way most marked between 20 and 30, I’m pretty stumped here."
Brains vary widely, and do life circumstances, so it makes sense if there is enormous variation in how and when our language learning skills deteriorate. It would be very surprising if we all lost our language learning ability in a similar way.
There also may be an effect where older learners consider they speak the second language "good enough" and don't bother going for complete fluency/speak it like a native.
That's partly because with children, we assume mistakes are from ignorance, but with adults, it's due to stupidity, and it's considered lacking in tact to tell someone to their face that they're stupid.
I think that should be the null hypothesis here: children and adults are equal at language learning, and all differences in outcome are due to adults not wanting to learn languages because it is so painful, shameful, embarrassing, costly in time and effort, avoidable by lifestyle changes and niche-seeking, steeply diminishing in returns*, and conflicting with one's personal identity. Even adults who should know better will avoid immersion and retreat to ineffective-but-comfy tools like Duolingo or Rosetta Stone instead.
* maybe even negative at points? I wonder if there's a 'valley of bad language skills' where you are too good at the new language for natives to judge you tolerantly or be amazed by your skills because they take you for a native speaker, but not yet average for a native speaker - so they take you for a kinda dumb native speaker...
I'd love to see some kind of analysis (more fine-grained than the Big Five, etc.) of an adult's personality vs their ease of language acquisition. Not sure how one would begin to go about it, but I think it would be instructive.
I have an intuition that children are simply happier to keep making funny sounds and getting things wrong in practice, in the same way that they're happy enough to produce amateurish art, etc. A sillier adult is probably in many respects a better language learner.
You see this in older adults who take up an activity with heavy kinaesthetic demands, like a martial art. Many are embarrassment-averse, and it takes them quite a while to loosen up and become at ease with the occasional slapstick results. And this in an area not nearly as central to self-image as good communication.
Here's a study comparing personality types and language learning success for learners that had "maximum" motivation to learn a language - required to learn for their job and given 100% dedicated work time to learn it.
> One-way ANOVAs and Spearman's rho correlations suggested that Intuitive type Ss had a small advantage in FSI classrooms in both speaking and reading. Thinking type Ss led Feeling type Ss in reading. Perceptive type Ss enjoyed an edge in the kind of flexibility needed to cope with the unstructured or ambiguous input common in FSI language classes.
>> It would be very surprising if we all lost our language learning ability in a similar way.
Well, very surprising given that there isn't a critical period for learning. The premise of the post was to interrogate that rather than assume it away, though.
Utterly tangential, what does your screenname mean? I'm picking up 'dorsal', or possibly a deliberate twist from 'drosophila' like the flies?
You are spot on....I was hoping a little twist on drosophila makes the name my own, but it is also memorable, and wont be confused with all the other fruit flies out there when I search for it.
It may also be that the knowledge of one's first language actively hinders the acquisition of the second to native levels: calquing might be so effective that one just does that instead. Basically "thinking in English" instead of Spanish or whatever.
Maybe, but while my english is far from perfect (it is my second language) I think in english as often as in my native tongue. In fact, I find it sometimes difficult to translate not just native->english, but also english->native even if I understand the sentence to translate perfectly. So I do not think that calquing is unlikely in my case (though, frankly, I am not the best person to judge it)
Calquing is about words, right(?) - would not really work if the languages are un-related. But "interferences" are a common problem, ie grammar et al from the first language gets (mis)used in the new language: I am cooking - Ich bin kochen (wrong, no 'continuous' in German, correct: Ich koche.)
No, also for phrases. It was a term I knew that was close enough to what I meant that I decided to abuse it figuring I would be understood perfectly. Which incidentally illustrates my point rather well. Your example is good too.
And yes, this probably doesn't work as well when the languages are too far apart, but you might be surprised how far you can push it.
I heard a lot of calquing when speakers of a minority language learn the new dominant language with new expressions for tech or admin-speak that did not exist in their old language ('Russian Germans' in Russia/ Russians in Germany). But they do that among their people, mostly. Anyways, "interference" covers all ways a language known interferes with the new language: "Language interference is the effect of language learners' first language on their production of the language they learn, or the learners' first language influences their second or/and their foreign language. The effect can be in any aspects of language, such as grammar, vocabulary, accent, spelling and so on." Also a 2nd language interfering with a third: Japanese learning German after English might say "Hallo" in formal situations, struggle with "R" or mix up "must not" and "nicht müssen"(=not have to).
I'm a native English speaker who at various times in her life has been fluent in Arabic, German, and Spanish, and had decent in understanding written Latin - so obvs I have some experience and thoughts about learning to speak in other languages.
Imho, learning other languages as an adult is a grind (so it takes real effort, time, practice) and my experience has been that as my proficiency in my native language increased (so as I grew older) and my English-speaking became more complex (so larger vocabulary) my English-precision would get in the way of saying it in the moment in another language. It's a second order kind of thing, first I have to dumb down what I wish to express from my complex English to something more basic, and then think how to say it in the other language. Basically, it's an extra step and it gets in the way, slows me down, makes me trip over my tongue, etc.
And then there are aspects that are just me-related. I value precision in speaking, so I'm less willing to open my mouth and sound dumb in another language, when the optimal strategy to learn is to speak, speak, speak and let others correct you. I also need to understand grammatical rules etc. because that's how I think about language. My Spanish language training was by full immersion, no grammar explained, and it was the hardest language for me to learn despite its reputation as one of the easiest.
Both of my comments go toward why an adult would find it harder to learn versus a child. Children think/speak simply in their native language and when learning another just weigh in and go for it with much less inhibition - both aspects make language acquisition easier and quicker. I've witnessed adults who have those same two qualities (don't care about precision, not very inhibited in speaking) have a much easier time learning a new language too.
This chimes with me a lot. John Pasden, who does a lot of work teaching Chinese, has written about how it can be very useful to adopt a new personality in the second language - a bit dumber and happier and more gregarious, essentially - because it enables lots of conversations. And I'm sure he's right, but I've never been able to do it.
It still interferes with my ability to raise my reading speed. There's more stuff I'm interested in in English, and even when I find something good in Chinese, reading it at my slow pace is too much like hard work; so I don't practice reading much; so I don't get better; and so on, in a vicious cycle.
I have to point out the misuse of the word "phoneme" at the end here.
The term in linguistics that gets used for raw individual linguistic sounds (considered as discrete things) is "phones". (To the extent that this is meaningful, of course. Some phoneticists would likely insist that we shouldn't be thinking in such discrete terms and that perhaps "phone" is not such a good concept; but I'm going to ignore such concerns.) The thing is, in any given language, lots of sounds are considered equivalent. E.g., the sounds in English that are "r" and "l" would be considered equivalent to a Japanese speaker, while English makes no distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants as many languages do. It's these equivalence classes of sounds that are called "phonemes".
Thus, it makes no sense to talk about "the total number of possible phonemes", across languages, because phonemes are not meaningful across languages; the differing equivalences will conflict with one another. (Is voicing significant and aspiration irrelevant? Or perhaps it's aspiration that's significant and voicing that's irrelevant?) What you mean is phones, not phonemes.
Hmm, when I took some linguistics, we used "phoneme" for the sounds, and "allophone" for an equivalence class of sounds. These equivalence classes also relate to orthography ("t" appearing as /t/, /d/, or other sounds in various words), so might be different than the equivalence classes to which you are referring
I think you're misremembering. "Allophone" refers to the phones *within* the equivalence classes. Two say that two allophones in a given language is the same as to say that they are the same phoneme in that lanugage.
I went to the first piano recital I've ever been to of any kind two weekends ago with my niece and nephew ages 7 and 5. There were about 10 other kids of about the same age and I understand most had been playing for 6 months to 3 years.
They were terrible.
The first thing I said to my wife after was that I have a hot take -- I think we start teaching kids piano way too early. They had absolutely zero grasp of what a piano song is supposed to sound like or the rhythm required. I bet a ton of kids get discouraged that after so much practice they still suck and quit at ages 8-10 -- if only they started at 11 or 12 instead, I bet they would be much better and enjoy it much more!
I am quite sure that the average adult with zero piano playing experience would have done much better than these kids with the same amount of practice time.
On the other hand there is also a grammar in music (especially important if you want to go into composing). So maybe if you want just to learn the instrument, it does not matter so much to start very early, but if you want more advanced use of music you really need to start early to develop appropriate processing areas in the brain
I think for the tiny fraction of people who go into music as a profession, there is probably some advantage to have started very young, but I think for the reasons typically cited by parents for encouraging it (broadening horizons, appreciation of the art, physical/mental activity, etc.), the kids would be better served waiting a lot longer to learn (unless they were clearly precocious).
It's not just grammar, there's also ~sensory discernment ("ear" for pitch, "feel" for rhythm).
There are a lot of music programs marketed to (parents for their) young kids that are pedagogically inappropriate, as @Jack described - kids need to learn almost entirely through games and direct interpersonal interaction, not rote practice - but acquiring relative and absolute pitch etc is absolutely an advantageous musical skill that kids will be more likely to achieve if they are getting practice at it from younger ages, for similar reasons to language acquisition even if there isn't a relevant critical period.
I suspect you're right about this. I also suspect that the reason kids do most of the world's music learning is because they're small enough that we can bully them into it easily.
The upside to the current state of affairs is that you get a bunch of kids who at age 14/15/whenever they get into music, already have some mechanical ability on their instruments.
I read a great piece of writing once on talent, which was saying that for almost everyone there's a period where you start enjoying an artform, want to have a go at it yourself, try, and notice that you suck. Like, you want to try drawing because you like other people's beautiful pictures; you draw one; it's terrible; so you stop.
Forcing kids to learn stuff is how we get over that hump, I think.
I don't think bullying is always necessary. I think kids might be (a) easier to trick into thinking they're not terrible, so they keep going longer; (b) genuinely more easily amused, so that they can tolerate only being able to do very easy things for longer.
Part of it is that they hear about some prodigy that can play Mozart at 6 and think their kids can approach that level. If you look at professional level classical musicians, they all started around that age or younger. You basically have to, there's no way kids can compete for selective music programs in their early teens if the competition started earlier and has a 1000 hour advantage in practice time
As a mostly self-taught guitarist, I found I really only got better via internal motivation of wanting to play like musicians I admired on records or in songs I enjoyed. Most of my formal guitar lessons had none of that. I suspect most children when learning music are playing songs they do not enjoy or only marginally tolerate.
This feels right, but I think there's some hope that kids might be more easily amused, and might genuinely enjoy some less complicated stuff. Plus, kids might enjoy just the process of "I'm making sheet music turn to sound" in a way that's a bit harder as an adult.
I think I see a bit of this with my son reading: he's 4 so he's obviously not going to read continental philosophy, but he doesn't *want* to read continental philosophy; he gets some kick just from the fact that letters turn to sounds, and some more if the story is simple and funny. This seems like the wrong level to be enjoyable to an adult.
I haven't looked up what the professional linguists say on the matter, but I would see Korean "r" and "l" are allophonic in native and Sino-Korean vocabulary, but contrastive in loanwords from English, at least in medial positions. (e.g. "fried" and "flied" would be pronounced differently and written differently in Hangul, whereas In Japanese they would be pronounced the same and written the same in katakana.)
>"more like the the "s" in "pleasure"."
I find it interesting that you would say that, since I have noticed many Chinese speakers (mostly from the PRC) have trouble pronouncing words like "pleasure" and are clearly attempting to approximate the sound using the Mandarin phoneme that is represented as "r" in Hanyu pinyin. The two sound qualitatively very different to me, although other people must also perceive them similarly — the old Wade-Giles romanization represented the sound as "j", presumably based on the phonetic value of that letter in French.
Not quite. In Korean, when the consonant r/l is geminate (doubled), it is pronounced l, so you have a difference intervocalically: tari 'bridge' vs. talli- 'to run'. English r and l are usually treated the same way; r gets realized as the singlet consonant, l as the geminate. They are thus no more contrastive in loanwords than in native words.
Ah, that makes sense. I was wondering why I couldn't come up with any contrastive pairs in native words — turns out I just wasn't thinking hard enough.
"Like the s in pleasure" was standard description in my Mandarin classes in college, because it's the closest English approximation. It's one of four retroflex consonents, with the tip of the tongue at the top of the palate. The others are ch/zh/sh. It's kinda like a gentler and voiced English "sh" with the tongue curled back.
I do not know in this case, but Japanese have additional problem of having just about 100 syllabes, hence those silly sounding renditions of english words in Japanese.
this is nitpicky, but the ~100 number is the number of mora, not syllables. long vowels and diphthongs, syllable-ending n, plus a few subtleties push the number of syllables up to at least the mid-hundreds if not more
That's an issue of her only knowing how to do Chinese syllables (which are set up as consonant + vowel; a final "n" or "ng" is allowed but most other consonants aren't) and representing "call" as "cou" rather than "cou-lu" (notice how in many of the other cases she does convert the final consonant into a syllable of its own, like "mode" -> "mo-de" or "connected" -> "co-ne-ti-de" with the second "c" mostly dropped). So the "ll" is almost silent. But you can clearly tell the difference between her other Ls and Rs; they're a bit closer than English ones but not the Japanese "there is no distinction".
Also, English final /l/ is pronounced [ɫ], so the Chinese interpretation of that may differ from the Chinese interpretation of an actual [l] sound. E.g. it's not uncommon for Bulgarian speakers to substitute [w] for the English [ɫ], while using [l] for the English [l].
I would imagine there's a lot more things get in the way of an adult learning a language, compared with a child. The study would probably only be completely useful if it compared adults who could spend all day in an immersive environment, going to school to learn all day etc, just like children do.
As an adult, you generally need a job or source of income to survive. If you are someone migrating to a richer country, you need to speak the local language or you'll be doing a job where nobody needs to speak to you. On the contrary, if you are at a higher-level role then you're probably going to a place where they speak your language/English. (both situations have negative effects on immersion). Maybe, however, you start your own business, in which case you're still only either going to be doing it in a field where your minimal language skills allow you to get by, or you're hiring multilingual speakers to do all the communication and paperwork for you. (your motivation to learn beyond this will probably be low, as running a business can be time-consuming). And of course, no matter where you are or what level of work you're doing...it's still a job that takes up a large part of your day, and if you have a family, you're going to have very little time to purposely learn a language on top of all those responsibilities.
Beyond that, kids will talk to almost anyone who is sitting next to them, whereas as an adult you're going to find it very difficult to make connections unless you can already hold a conversation, so that's another big negative against your exposure and acquisition pace.
My instinct would be there's not a big difference between adults and children when it comes to learning a language. Younger brains may have more neuroplasticity, sure, but their long-term memory is also weaker. It's mostly about the quality and length of daily opportunities, and we're usually more forgiving and patient with a 6 year old learning a language than we are with a 36 year old.
I've always found this theory compelling, though I'm not sure how it squares up with everything else.
The idea is that adults can learn just as well as children, the problem is that they cannot *forget* as well as children.
As a metaphor, imagine you are searching for the fastest route between home and work, but that every time you use any one route, that route become more habitual. At first you might explore quite a bit all the various routes to find which is most efficient. But as you start to identify the best path, you explore less and less because nothing you are finding is quicker than the familiar route. You exploit the efficiencies in the current route, and as a result, it gets more and efficient. Eventually you might get to the point where the old familiar route is so habitual that, even if you discover a quicker route, you can’t quite switch over to the newer route.
Similarly, in the bioeconomy of the brain, your brain is always trying to be more efficient in how it processes information. And when you are learning, your neurons are creating pathways in the brain, and new ways of “wiring together” that are, hopefully, more efficient than the old pathways. But as these pathways get established, the connections get stronger and stronger, and thus more and more efficient. It eventually gets to the point that, even if the brain could potentially be more efficient by going down a newly established pathway, the old route is so familiar/established/efficient/habitual that it cannot quite make the switch to the new route. And so the new route gets neglected, and eventually gets pruned out.
So the reason there is a critical period of learning is not because adults can’t learn (establish new routes), it is because the old knowledge (old routes) are so efficient and habitual that the new knowledge (new route) doesn’t get used and so dies from neglect.
Yes, this is absolutely the mechanism for differences in neuroplasticity, but by itself it doesn't answer the critical period question I think, because at a mechanistic level the critical period hypotheses are essentially that a brain region devoted to learning a particular domain gets overwritten with other content, making the brain less specialized at being able to learn that domain.
As someone who learned japanese to fluency as an adult, I subscribe to the theory of adults learning faster.
I absolutely learned to read kanji (japanese characters) faster than the average japanese child does. It takes them 12 years of rote learning throughout school to learn the roughly 2000 standard use characters whereas it took me only 3 (up to maybe 6 years if we're being less charitable about what it means to have learned a character). Part of this is because the japanese education system teaches through rote repetition whereas there are cognitive shortcuts you can use such as mnemonics and breaking characters down to their components.
So I think absolutely adults can learn faster in part because we've 'learned how to learn' - it's just that in the majority of cases we either don't have the time to focus, or don't have the benefit of an immersion environment that children do.
Reading/writing is an entirely separate skill from speaking/understanding, and no one claims that children have any advantage at the former.
It’s generally agreed that there are parts of the brain specifically dedicated to spoken language (eg Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas), and some linguists/psychologists/neurologists argue for additional “language instinct” (though I think this idea is less popular than it was when I was in college). But reading and writing are mostly just done with our general intelligence faculties, are require a lot of work to master, which smart, motivated adults are definitely better at than kids.
Looking just at speaking/understanding, I do still tend to think adults can learn faster - a 9 year old doesn't speak with adult level fluency, for example (maybe around 12-15 is when I think a bright kid can sound indistinguishable from an adult? subjective opinion), but it doesn't take 9 years for an adult learner to get there. That said, much of this depends on how we define fluency and on the adult in question.
A native Japanese child at say 8 years old doesn't know the 2000 standard use characters, but they could probably speak better Japanese than an adult who does (eg one who has studied for 3 years).
I started this by saying two points but it expanded and is now however many points I have.
Accent and idiomatic speaking are different from language lessons. Language teachers give you a little but you can be a fluent speaker but still have an accent or non-idiomatic habits. I know plenty of people who speak perfectly correct English but have accents and non-idiomatic habits. Often they don't consider it too much of an issue because they can be understood and there's nothing technically wrong with it. Sometimes even if there is it's close enough and people will work to understand them because adults often have some reason to interact. Even if it's as simple as making a purchase you'll fight through their weird pronunciation.
Adults and children speak differently and most adults are not willing to step down to more juvenile ways of speaking or to consume more juvenile media. Nor are most adults willing to correct an adult like they might a child. You might be a 40 year old master physician but if you're learning Spanish and you're at an A2 level then the way you should be speaking is the equivalent of a grade schooler. But how many physicians are going to read a Mexican children''s picture book?
Plus the usual things about time spent learning. Also it's worth noting a lot of people stagnate at a relatively low level of language ability and also that many children fail at foreign language acquisition. And I suppose I'll add in that language has a pretty strong cultural component. You notice this especially with ancient languages which have a lot of terms for things that are irrelevant to the modern world and lacks a lot of terms for things that are very important in the modern world. But it's true of other countries/cultures as well. If you exist in a different culture these nuances can be lost on you.
Also I'll throw in the anecdote that my personal experience is that adult language learning is more efficient (more learned per hour) but happens slower due to less hours. Also, it's extremely hard to help illiterate people to read. Much harder than teaching someone who simply learned a different form of literacy. Even if it's a non-alphabetic language like Chinese.
Interesting point about adults not correcting other adults. Whereas children will bully and tease each other if they pronounce things weirdly or speak non-idiomatically. Demanding teachers, children.
The "Spanish in 36 months" example is a bit unfair given that Spanish is one of the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn. Arabic or Chinese would be much tougher. I've studied Polish for about 34 months. I'm in Poland right now actually in vacation, and still I'm encountering a lot of unfamiliar words. In Spanish (which I studied in high school and achieved pretty good proficiency) most of the complicated words come from Latin and are basically the same as English, not so for Polish!
>4. The world around us is explained entirely by physics.
>Sean Carroll articulates a basic physicist worldview that quantum mechanics and the physics described by the Standard Model essentially explain everything around us.
Sean Carroll cannot even begin to conceptualize consciousness coherently (as evidenced by his discussion with David Chalmers on Carroll's podcast), so explaining it with physics (*at this stage*) seems off the table.
There is one obvious difference between adults and children: correcting adults is rude.
I have small kids. They make all sorts of pronunciation and grammar mistakes. Everybody corrects them all the time, because, that’s what you do.
English is my second language. Nobody ever corrects me. And this makes a huge difference. A two years ago I hired an accent coach over Zoom. I spent 10 hours with him. The amount of progress I made over those 10 hours was tremendous. I improved my pronunciation over those 10 hours more than I did over the last 15 years of daily usage, simply because he was correcting me.
I would greatly appreciate if people would correct my English, but no one does. Even if I request it, I guess it is just awkward to correct adults.
I sometimes tried to provide pronunciation feedback to my colleagues, knowing how much I would value it, but… All I got was kind of awkward reactions.
This might not be true; there's some research out there showing that little kids are really bad at learning from explicit correction (like telling them to repeat the correct way to phrase stuff) and as of my child language acquisition class a few years ago it was unclear if implicit correction (people then using the correct form of a word in a sentence) helps either.
> explicit correction (like telling them to repeat the correct way to phrase stuff)
What I do with my kids, instinctively, is that when they say something incorrectly, e.g. ask a question in a grammatically incorrect way, I quickly say what they should have said, but then I answer the question.
I do not insist that they repeat the correct version after me. I correct and forget. If they make the same mistake again, they will get corrected again; if they don't, mission accomplished.
I try to correct them in a minimally disruptive way, because I can imagine how incredibly frustrating it would feel for a child to ask about something they care about, and instead of an answer only receiving a lesson about grammar. Then I would expect them to hate being corrected, which would go against my goals.
This. Also, there are a lot of things that people learn about their native languages that aren’t explicitly taught at all.
For instance: take a sentence like “Alice said that Bob likes Charlie.” You can create questions based on this sentence by replacing nouns with question words, like so:
Who said that Bob likes Charlie?
Who did Alice say that Bob likes?
Who did Alice say that likes Charlie?
…whoops! That last one’s no good, actually. In the original declarative sentence, “that” is optional. Likewise in the first two questions, “that” sounds fine, or it can be omitted. But when the question word corresponds to the subject of the embedded clause, suddenly you can’t have “that” in there — “Who did Alice say likes Charlie?” is the only option.
When you tell native English speakers about this phenomenon, they usually say things like “huh, yeah, that’s true. I never thought about that before. I wonder why it works that way!” and not, for instance, “oh yeah, Mrs. Johnson taught me that in second-grade grammar class.” Because what Mrs. Johnson taught them in second-grade grammar class was stuff like “never ever split an infinitive” and maybe “even if you use ‘ain’t’ in casual speech, don’t use it in formal writing”.
(Cross-linguistically, subject questions tend to work differently from object questions, especially in embedded clauses. But this tends not to be something people think about in terms of whether it’s prescriptively “proper English” or not.)
"When you tell native English speakers about this phenomenon, they usually say things like “huh, yeah, that’s true. I never thought about that before. I wonder why it works that way!” and not, for instance, “oh yeah, Mrs. Johnson taught me that in second-grade grammar class.”
To quote Tolkien:
"I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language."
There's a lot about our native languages that we just go "Huh, okay" and accept and don't think about at all, it's only when we're consciously learning a new language that we go "Why is that?"
If only he knew then that he could tell her that "great" wasn't an adjective, it was part of the species name, "great dragon" as opposed to "lesser dragon."
I correct ESL speakers all the time! Granted, this is in a university environment, but they're not my students: they're my fellow grad students, or a few professors. Perhaps my general enthusiasm for language helps make it clear that there's no condescension going on, I just think language is neat!
"The authors wonder if it’s related to people learning languages better while still in school. But this is a high-functioning sample and you would expect many of them to go to college. Also, many of these people are immersion learners, and it’s not obvious why school would be better for immersion learning than whatever comes after (eg the workplace)."
I haven't looked at their analysis and I wouldn't understand the stats if I did, but I would imagine that if the effect were related to being at school, and even if "many of them" do go to college, the change exhibited by those who don't would still show up as a measurable step in the data.
This is spitballing, but at the most hand-wavy level you could come up with a mechanism where, while exposed to intense learning of any sort, the brain adapts in some way to optimise for learning, making all learning during that window more effective. An analogy would be an athlete's cardio fitness improving, which will have a flow on improvement on many physical activities. Once someone moves out of the classroom (or in non classroom-oriented societies, once they have learned most the of things they really need to know) the brain adapts back to optimise for something else - maybe energy usage, or lower stress levels, or something. I seem to recall some data suggesting that old people who maintain intricate hobbies in retirement have better rates of cognition in general, which definitely suggests something adaptive might be going on.
With an M.A. in foreign language teaching, I am humbled and honored by Scott's treatment of this 'silly' statement: "Children learn language more easily" (the first 5 words in that huge study co-authored by Steven Pinker). To make sense, you need to define first a) 'children' (what age!) b) 'learn' (acquiring or what? School twice a week or with parents/peers) c) 'language' (close to first language or not, A1 or C2, age-related vocabulary or perfect grammar or accent) d) 'more easily' (did it "feel hard" or do the results differ). In addition: most native speakers do never reach C2, some just B1.
My conclusion in the nineties was: shrug. What really matters are the practical implications and there I am shocked to see "Children learn language more easily" abused to introduce foreign languages in kindergarten/ primary school. While none of the studies argue for this. Not even high-school has to be the perfect place for it - at least not if done in those sub-par ways they teach languages there. (Good courses in case the language is important for the kids: sure. And for their parents too, I guess.)
Exactly. What bothered me in the article to which Scott is responding, and in his response, is that neither really specified what it means to learn a language. A kid learning their first language(s) is really just going with the flow. They are learning language as part of the experience of learning about their world. The extent to which a foreign language (not widely spoken in their environment) can be incorporated into that experience and continues to be a part of that experience will determine how proficient they become. Adults, on the other hand, tend to have pretty discreet motivations for learning a language: talking to in-laws, getting on in their career, or as in the case of my 70-year-old relative who is quickly learning Korean after never having learned a second language to any degree of fluency, an obsession with K-pop and Korean period dramas.
There is also a difference in what it means to be fluent in a language. I learned both Chinese and Japanese as an adult, but in neither language am I likely to ever be mistaken for a native speaker. That did not keep me from carrying out work-related tasks in Japanese, even though my grammar was pretty appalling. Later, I was a much-in-demand medical interpreterfor 8 years, not because I had a native-like knowledge of Mandarin, but because I knew how to negotiate meaning and recognize gaps in the communication between patient and provider and make sure they got filled.
The other muddy bit is "given the same form of instruction/immersion." Adults have no patience with letting the language roll over them, or immersing themselves, without judgement or hurry. Kids are in no hurry to turn to the written word. A lot of teaching to kids does indeed try to mimic the, in my opinion as a 40+ year teacher of foreign language, inferior teaching strategies that we use to placate impatient adults. This leads to unnecessary orthographic interference (avoidable, say, by teaching the Taiwanese bua pua mua fua instead of Hanyu Pinyin to adults), emphasis on overt explanations of grammar rather than letting students work out the grammar for themselves, and a tendency to ignore just how somatic the act of listening really is.
But the main problem for this discussion is the assumption that similar methods are suitable for children and adults. Getting too cerebral, or self-conscious, or analytical, isn't great for teaching adults, but it is poison for teaching children.
Agreed. 'Each course with the learner in mind' (tricky are those courses where each learner has a different aim/preference ...). That said, a very competent colleague complained once about teens in France demanding "more grammar, less talk" at school. ;)
Henry Kissinger arrived in the US at age 15 in 1938 with his brother Walter, who was a year or two younger:
"Another overt difference was that Walter shed his Bavarian accent while Henry notably retained his. When asked why this was the case, Walter would tell interviewers, “Because I am the Kissinger who listens.”"
I knew some older ladies who formed a social network in the community, one of whom was a still-beautiful, very voluble Spaniard. She was very kind and cheerful and everyone found her and her strong accent charming, though communication was pretty strictly listening to or asking questions of her.
All but one of my tart-tongued old lady friends, who once muttered something about "She's been here 45 years ..."
I met a 90 year old Basque lady who had arrived in America 83 years before. She still had an accent. I was interested in what a Basque accent sounds like, because Basque is a non-Indo-European language. But to me it just sounded generically European. But I have a very poor ear for accents.
Accents don't work that way; they aren't related at all to the grammatical structure or lexicon of the language and they change very quickly relative to either. Basque, while not an Indo-European language is certainly a European language, and its accent is similar to French and Spanish for the mundane reason that thy are next to each other. Similarly, the Hindi accent sounds infinitely more similar to the Telugu accent than it does to, say a German accent, even though Hindi is Indo European and Telugu is Dravidian.
Be interesting to know whether this has any consequences for verbal reasoning in adults. For instance, imagine a smart child with limited access to or little interest in written content up to age 18.
Would that child still have strong verbal reasoning scores on account of them just being smart?
Or would they have average verbal reasoning ability while their other abilities all remained strong?
People interested in this topic will very much enjoy reading Stanislas Deheane's *Reading in the Brain*. Some of the questions we have about language acquisition can be measured with MRI brain scans.
Note, if you buy the book and your copy has black and white copies of the illustrations instead of the original colour plates, download the colour plates here:
Wondering if native fluency would have anything to do with mouth development; if you aren't making those sounds in the growing phase, your mouth won't adjust to accommodate producing them.
Yeah, producing new phonemes is like learning to ride a bike or play the piano. You have to spend a lot of time practicing the muscle movements very intentionally before you reach the point where you can do it automatically. (Especially if you already have “bad habits” in the form of another almost-but-not-quite-identical phoneme in your native language.)
Just read the original post by Scott Young. Mostly ok, but "Children regularly become fluent in their home and classroom language, indistinguishable from native speakers; adults rarely do." Sorry?! Around the globe, hundreds of million of kids forced to take foreign language lessons will NEVER 'become fluent in their classroom language", my guess is "less than 10% if it is not English and not required for a job". I have seen them suffer. - And hardly 1 in a thousand will turn out "indistinguishable from native speakers".
I assume that “classroom language” means the language that schooling is delivered in, rather than a language explicitly taught as a subject for a few hours a week. Think of, say, Mexican-American kids who pick up Spanish from their parents but go to an English-speaking school, or indeed speakers of small indigenous languages in Latin America who go to a Spanish-speaking school, and end up fluent in both.
Oh, right, makes sense - though that is a "non-expert" use of the word, I'd say. In those cases, the peer group will usu. speak mostly in that language, too. And peers often have a bigger influence on language (esp. accent) than parents, even. (In many cultures, adults incl. parents do not communicate a lot with kids - why talk to 'em? they too dumb! - the kids go off to play as soon as they can walk.)
Gah, having studied the relationship between memory and language in my PhD, learning Spanish in high school and Chinese after meeting my wife (at 23), I think this is a pretty good summary, but!
1. Phonetic plasticity decreases with language exposure. This is the *primary* reason we think of kids as better at learning languages. A decline here isn't the same thing as "can never learn to say a Chinese/french/Spanish/japanese R (the asshole consonant)"
2. All plasticity decreases to some extent. How much this matters really depends on how committed you are to the language.
3. You need maybe 25% of your *total language exposure* to be in a language to be what most people would think of as fluent. This is simply easier for a baby or child, where fluency also has lower standards but total language exposure is much lower.
4. Linguistic plasticity often means making conpromises between various language features. This doesn't mean you'll be "worse" at your 'native' language, but you'll be measurably less native.
5. It's difficult to measure the 'need' vs. simple percentage of exposure. I highly lean toward the latter theoretically, but functionally they are not distinguishable.
So right, my issue with English R in some words (walk/work) make me think it would be better to just pronounce it as in French (my native langage), it will lead to less misunderstanding...
Anyway, no big deal as it seems it's variable even within a single language: in french you have at least 3 variants (soft like in most of France, harder in Belgium, rolling like in spanish for some dialects/older people). Same in English, R in Scotland sounds much more like the rolling french version than the American. So does the Indian version.
Big languages (English being the prime example) are spoken with so many different accents, as first or second language, that it's difficult to know if there is a right pronunciation when you learn them...maybe just pick the regional variant that is easiest, or even pick and mix 🤣
Yeah, I think English is relatively phonetically flexible. There are some regional variations in French, Spanish, or Chinese as well, but there are a lot of vowels in french/Chinese that are not interchangeable that are quite close phonetically (not to mention tones in Chinese), but I think there's also the learned skill of understanding phonetic 'errors' that English speakers typically get more practice at.
And yeah, probably! I only learned recently that final/hanging r's (like in louvre) aren't silent in French
Lol don't apologise: I am a native French speaker, that means a very high tolerance for the most confusing and exception ridden grammar and orthography you can imagine 🤣
I guess you are probably right: it's the vowel : thinking of it the confusion was more when speaking with Thais (which objectively spoke a much worse English than I do, very paradoxical ) than with native English speakers. Thai being strongly tonal, I guess they pick vowel difference as more significant than native speakers.
i have some feeling this issue will alleviate in the future: I am not linguist but I have the intuition that tonal langages get less and less so the more exposed to international tourism and a lot of english words, not to mention foreigners speaking a very simplified and largely tone deaf thai, like I do.
A little like English got hugely simplified as an exchange language or even in mainstream movie/TV/newspaper, compared to what you find in classic literature...this also happen in French, but not to the same extent....
A funny example: I love sf and started to read untranslated sf to improve my english... My first pick was Asimov and I though that I was in fact perfectly fluent, at least for reading, it was like I was reading it in French, a huge ego boost.
then I tried other author's like Banks, or even non sf classics. What a reality check, it was almost like a different language 🤣
"Recently, I wrote a defense of the uncontroversial-within-cognitive-science-but-widely-disbelieved idea that the mind is a computer."
We've been comparing the brain/mind to the latest Cool Tech since old gods' time. From clockwork to transistors to current tech, and if within ten years we get quantum whatever, it'll be "the brain/mind is an ansible". It's not so much 'widely disbelieved' as 'yet another one, what'll it be tomorrow?' fatigue of "metaphors that enthuse people who like to think that their hammer means all things are nails".
"So Scott says"
For a moment there, I was going "Why is Scott referring to himself in the third person?" 😀
"This isn’t really what anyone is asking, but it will help clarify some later questions: children need to learn some language before age 5 - 10, or they’ll lose the ability to learn languages at all."
Yeah, this is why 'enhancing language' is all part of childcare (for those who think daycares do nothng but change nappies and give bottles so why is it so expensive?):
"The quality of interactions between practitioners and babies and toddlers is important in developing non-verbal and verbal language skills and can impact on achievement later in life. Practitioners play a very important role in this language and communication development.
Babies are born ready to interact with people. They love being spoken to and played with, which helps their brains develop rapidly in the first two years of life. This interaction helps babies learn about language, turn-taking and listening.
Toddlers learn to interact with other children and adults, to express feelings and thoughts, to imagine and problem-solve. In a few short years, children are able to express themselves and use language for thinking, problemsolving, imagining, exploring, and can interact competently in a group of peers.
Below are some practical suggestions on how practitioners can help babies and toddlers to develop non-verbal and verbal skills.
Opportunities for language development occur throughout the day. Talk with babies and toddlers at every opportunity. Routine activities such as getting dressed, nappy-changing and snack-time, provide ideal opportunities for babies and toddlers to hear the same words in the same predictable steps.
Remember, children will learn to understand words before they can say them so give children lots of opportunities to hear new, interesting and varied words. This can be done in a number of ways.
From three to six years, children rapidly increase the number of words they use and change how they use language to communicate and to learn. A child turning three years may have a few hundred words and by the time he/she is six years, may have many thousand words. At that stage, children use complex language to interact, tell stories and describe past events, problemsolve, negotiate, imagine, co-operate and develop relationships. Here are some ideas to enhance language development.
Most importantly at this stage, expand on what children say. Make their sentences longer by adding words or adding another idea. For example, a three-year-old shows a practitioner his knee and comments, 'I have a sore knee'. A practitioner might respond with, 'Oh, you have a sore knee because you fell'.
Open-ended questions stimulate thinking and conversation, as they require more thought and more than a simple one-word answer. Closed questions can stop a conversation and should be used less frequently. Examples of closed questions include questions that test children, for example, 'What colour is that?' or questions that only have a yes/no answer, for example, 'Do you have a dog?'
Use more comments than questions and remember to wait for children to respond. Longer conversations which stimulate children to extend their thinking, are great for their language development."
And in the cases of developmental delay, especially in language acquistion, early intervention and support is vitally necessary or indeed the child will never catch up.
Most children become capable and confident users of language especially when helped by competent adults. However some children may progress at a different rate due to biological or environmental factors. Problems could arise in relation to a child’s capacity to articulate words or to process meaning. This could be due to a language specific impairment or to causes such as hearing loss, neurological impairment or emotional and behavioural difficulties. The term Language Delay is used to describe these cases in general. Children who are difficult to understand or show signs of being at a level of language development appropriate to a much younger child should be referred to a speech and language therapist for assessment."
Second Language Acquisition is the term used to describe the process of acquiring a second language in addition to a person’s first language (Baker 2011). The second language can be acquired at the same time as the first (simultaneous acquisition), or it can be acquired at a later stage, (sequential acquisition). In Ireland, some children acquire English and Irish at home simultaneously. Other children speak Irish or Polish at home and learn English sequentially when they attend an early years’ centre or go to school. Based on current understanding of sociocultural theories (Lantolf 2000), the context in which language learning takes place and the affordances and opportunities provided are of great significance in providing input and support to young children acquiring a second language.
Most children who are learning a second language have age-appropriate competency in their first language and know how to use language in a variety of ways, e.g. to make requests, describe events and express their feelings. It is of the utmost importance that they maintain and continue to develop their first language as this may be their main means of thinking, forming relationships with key people in their lives and expressing their emotions.
Bilingual babies follow the same basic pattern as monolingual babies in each of their languages. Both languages tend to be kept fairly separate with regard to grammar and sentence construction, but some mixing of words will be likely to occur. Mixing tends to follow the same pattern of language mixing that people around them use. By age three most bilingual children realise that they have two ways of speaking at their command and can move freely between the two languages. They can also judge which language to speak to which person and adjust their language accordingly.
Children who acquire a second language in addition to the first can use that language learning experience to good effect. They can already communicate through language in an age-appropriate way and can transfer this knowledge to the new language. Where their first language is recognised and valued the second language is regarded as an additional bonus (additive bilingualism). Children who speak a major European language at home, French or German, would be in this category.
Children who speak a less highly valued language such as a minority or regional language, could be in a subtractive situation, struggling to learn English, if society appears to place little value on their home language (subtractive bilingualism). This negative situation can have major implication for the child’s and the family’s self-image and self esteem. The transmission of family values and culture may be lost as the parents may not have sufficient English to pass on their beliefs and understandings in the new language. It may lessen the bonds with the extended family in their home country as the children may not be able to communicate with their grandparents and other family members in their native language.
Pattern of Second Language Acquisition
Many children acquiring English as a second language in an early years’ centre will go through a silent period. This is the time in which they pay attention to the sounds and meanings of the new language and try to work out the patterns for themselves. They may try 7 to speak in their first language and depending on how this is received, may continue to speak that language (English in a naíonra or gaelscoil, for example) or stop speaking Polish or Yoruba in the early years’ setting (Tabors 2008). This should not be confused with developmental delay as it is the natural path of progression in learning a second language. Children will continue to communicate through non-verbal means, gesture, signing, pointing, facial expression etc. They will observe what the other children are doing and imitate them, giving the impression that they know more than the actually do. Gradually they will begin to use single words and rote phrases, very often useful words and phrases to gain attention, request toys or express wishes. They may also use advertising slogans and jingles as they feature very often on children’s TV. Rote phrases that they have learned as a unit might include ‘My turn,’ ‘sharing is caring,’ ‘can’t do it.’ Other phrases that could be useful are sentences that have slots that can be filled with different words, such as ‘I want ----.’ These phrases are immediately useful and grammatically correct. When the child has built up a sufficient stock of these words and phrases, he/she can begin to speak more creatively but as they are now processing the language independently, they may appear to be making more mistakes than before. Over time they will acquire an age-appropriate level of competency in English. It is estimated that children can build up communicative competency in about three years but that it takes learners five to seven years to gain more academic competencies in a new language."
This bit is not just airy-fairy social sciences theorising:
"It may lessen the bonds with the extended family in their home country as the children may not be able to communicate with their grandparents and other family members in their native language."
I say that because of examples from my own life, e.g. my maternal grandfather was a native speaker of Irish from what was in his day a Gaeltacht area, his children never learned it/were not taught it by him, and the grandkids (myself included) are at the same level as the rest of the school-going population who learned the language in school and never attained competency. As part of that language-learning we had texts including autobiographies of people from such areas, and part of one was when the narrator went to work as a servant as a young girl for people living in the town. The grandmother in the house spoke only Irish, her son spoke Irish and English, and the grandchildren only spoke English. The grandmother was delighted with the new serving girl as she could speak Irish too and was able to communicate with her where her own grandchildren could not.
So it is a thing that really happens and does mean the loss of cultural transmission which you can't get back by later academic attempts to reconstruct what was lost.
That is all fine, just a bit one-sided in claiming how good it is too keep the "less highly valued language". Krashen famously advocated to put effort in teaching of (and in) Spanish to Hispanic kids in Californian schools, as proficiency-level in their first language should limit (or help) their future level of English. Turned out a disaster as those kids really needed as much instruction in English as possible. outside their homes. - That said: Sure, speak to your kids in your first language. They will get their new one from life/ new peer-group anyways.
"We've been comparing the brain/mind to the latest Cool Tech since old gods' time. From clockwork to transistors to current tech..."
Yeah, except that with those 3 (current tech is neural network, I think) you have explicitely cited all comparisons that were ever made AFAIK, and NN are implemented using transistors. Clockwork was used at the time the first mechanical adders appeared, and could be described as early non programmable computer, so again, it's not apple and orange, pear and apple at most.
Let's count 2 examples: not really great to imply we just placate current top tech to describe the brain without any better reason that they are trendy...
Estimates for AGI appearance based on comparing #neurons VS #transistors that exists since Turing seemed naive, and in retrospect the mini hype around expert systems and ELISA in the 80s was quite ridiculous.... So I understand why being cynical around current NN may be tempting.
But I am not, neither are most people including those working on AI, even when speaking privately without fund raising in mind...
You do not have to be a specialist to understand that what happen right now with chess, then go, image recognition and the current LLM, faster and faster, is a very different thing and much more likely to be the real deal than a new tech bubble...
Chess was to big for computer to rival chess master, then it was go, then it wad natural language that was too ambiguous and needed too much context, then it was art that was not according because deeply human and not only rational. Yeah right, nowadays a plumber is less easily imitated than Picasso 🤣🤣🤣
Previous hype was just that, but like for the boy shouting wolf, the real wolf came in the end 😜
So the real comparison is not "the mind is like a computer", it's "the computer is like a mind". That is the dream of AI, isn't it? Create something that can actually *think* instead of being a Big Dumb But Fast Machine.
We want the machine to be like us, to have a mind. That's not the same as reducing down the brain to a machine.
Well yes, but if by machine you mean something whose behavior/response are easy to predict and were very directly implemented by human designers, it's been a while our computers are not machines. Not all of them at least...
"The classic rhetorical trick amongst skeptics of this view is to point out the history of analogies for the brain. The ancient Greeks saw the mind as a chariot pulled by horses of reason and emotion. René Descartes viewed the brain as a system of hydraulics. Every age, it is argued, has fumbled for the best metaphor for the brain and ours is no different. Just as the idea that pressurized fluids manage the brain seems silly today, so will a future era see the computer analogy as quaint." - - SY
I see a lot of reports of people claiming that taking MDMA made them much more fluent in a foreign language. I know MDMA floods the brain with serotonin, and children have more serotonin than adults. Could this all be related?
Reasonably rigorous results seem to support this effect for moderate doses of alcohol. So @ryhime is almost certainly correct, it's about reduced inhibition.
There's a theory about second language learning I find interesting. It states that if you have never learnt a language in adulthood, and wish to learn a language very different from your native language, you're better off first learning a language very similar to your native language, in order to learn how to learn languages as an adult. E.g. a native English speaker would do better learning Spanish and then Mandarin than just Mandarin straight away. I've only seen anecdotal evidence in favour, but the idea seems interesting.
Nomenclatural differences can make discussions in this area hard for people with different backgrounds to productively share. In psychology, there are the explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) learning systems. In neuroscience, these two systems are generally captured by the terms declarative (hippocampal) and procedural (basal ganglia) systems respectively. I’ll refer to the procedural system here in the neuroscientific sense—meaning basal ganglia, (not step-by-step!)
There’s increasing evidence that conscious, working memory systems, which are at the heart of the declarative learning pathway, increasingly come online as children mature. (I wanted to paste a neat graph here after Gathercole & Alloway’s findings, but I couldn't find a way to paste it in--sorry!)
At the same time, there is evidence that the procedural system declines in ability as children mature. This makes a big difference because the procedural system is what captures the complex patterns of your native language and allows you to think and speak intuitively and in some sense, habitually—you don’t even need to think before blurting out what you want to say.
• K. Janacsek and D. Nemeth, "Chapter 2: Procedural memory: The role of competitive neurocognitive networks across development," in The Cognitive Unconscious: The First Half Century, A. Reber and R. Allen Eds.: Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. 22-36.
• F. S. Zwart et al., "Procedural learning across the lifespan: A systematic review with implications for atypical development," J Neuropsychol, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 149-182, Jun 2019.
Georgetown neuroscientist Michael Ullman’s work is highly relevant here:
• M. T. Ullman, "The declarative/procedural model: A neurobiologically motivated theory of first and second language," in Theories in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction, B. VanPatten, G. D. Keating, and S. Wulff Eds., 3rd ed.: Routledge, 2020, pp. 128-161.
• K. Morgan-Short and M. T. Ullman, "Declarative and procedural memory in second language learning: Psycholinguistic considerations," in The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Psycholinguistics, 2022.
See also
• D. Pili-Moss et al., "Contributions of declarative and procedural memory to accuracy and automatization during second language practice," Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 639-651, 2020.
• A. M. Graybiel and K. S. Smith, "Good habits, bad habits," Scientific American, vol. 310, no. 6, pp. 38-43, 2014. (This lovely piece on the basal ganglia procedural system also has an excellent explanatory image.)
The bottom line is that some or much of what we see in the differences between how children and how adults learn a language may be explained by the decline with maturity in the procedural system (it’s not all gone, it just takes a lot more repetition to do the trick) coupled with the improvement in declarative system explicit type learning.
I do agree with your bottom line. But I want to point out that not everything is gradual, and critical windows are a real concept. Some developmental learning events seem hardcoded to a certain age, and if it doesn't happen then, it will not happen later.
If you raise kitten for a few weeks in a world without horizontal lines, then they are literally blind for their remaining life to all horizontal lines. Put them on a walkway with a gap, and they will fall down because they don't perceive the gap. (That's a horizontal line.) Likewise, if they are raised in a world without vertical lines, then they are blind for all vertical lines and will go on bumping into legs of chairs. Hubel and Wiesel got a Nobel prize for this discovery.
An example for children is that they seem to have a critical window for binocular vision between 3 and 8 months. Either they learn it then, or not at all. No matter whether they get perfect binocular input later. That's more than jut a generic decline in procedural memory acquisition.
I very much agree with you. Interestingly, it seems that the brain "firms up" from back to front during development. This is why critical periods for vision occur early on as a critter is developing. I don't know how this relates to the declarative-procedural rampup-shutdowns.
This fall, Susan Barry has a new book coming out about her friendship with Oliver Sacks. Terry Sejnowski, my co-instructor in the Coursera online course "Learning How to Learn," knows Susan and spoke about her amazing experiences and personal discoveries in the course. https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
Interesting! No, I didn't know that. Then I guess I am one of those who "mistakenly extrapolated" the results of Huber and Wiesel, as wikipedia phrases it. Thanks for the correction!
Reagrding accents and speed to fluency (C2) the book fluent forever advocates a theory that both are tied to first learning to distinguish sublties in the target language which are otherwise imperceptable in the native language. Such as the different T sounds in Korean to an English speaker, or the different L and R sounds in English to a Korean speaker.
I suspect that children talking to other children and adults in a monolingual environment get pushed so the "good enough" level is higher.
If you're learning a second language as an adult you get to the point where most other adults can understand you, then the urge to keep listening and correcting your accent falls off.
There are some adults who can learn a second language and get to a native level (my father was one with English). But that works only if you are immersed in the second language and it helps a lot to have "perfect pitch" (so you *know* when you're not pronouncing things like those around you and you *care*, even if they don't).
How does this work with accents? That's a "native" level of proficiency, where you have (mostly) the same words, but pronounce them differently. Yet many English learn the RP accent, as it's not native.
For accent in English (my second language, with which I am comfortable for all pragmatic needs), I even have a suspicion that — lacking a perfect pitch — the cheapest way to reduce my original-language accent could move the articulation of some sounds closer to «correct» but also closer to each other, which might not even be a pragmatic win…
Everything I say here is just what I've experienced and heard from random people.
When you learn a second language what you're really doing is making a model of your first language and then constantly chipping away at it so that it resembles the second language. At some point you'll reach "good enough" and stop naturally remodelling the copy into the second language. What counts as "good enough" depends on your needs, and you can find this called the "okay plateau" in certain places. The "okay plateau" is when you've reached the point where you can function for your needs, and any further progress requires deliberate targeting of your deficiencies. So for example, there are many people who learn a language like Latin only so they can read. And then their speech is halting and bad. But considering that language, anybody who gets further than just reading has to do deliberate practice.
In still extant languages, usually most people hit an Okay Plateau somewhere around "completely functional but accented". This happens because the person's first language doesn't have the phonemes, or cadence, or pitch, or stress, of the second language, and so the person can't even hear what they're missing in order to fix it naturally. What they're missing gets filtered out by the brain as noise, similar to how background chatter gets filtered out in a conversation taking place in a crowded room. Your brain is focusing on the model of your first language which it is trying to change into the second language. It can't even begin to hear Chinese Tones from the model, it sees that as background information that doesn't match the first language and so must be unimportant. In Chinese specifically, English speakers tend to have to be taught tones first, or else their Chinese comes out completely incomprehensible.
Scott mentions mistaking L and R, and this happens in Japanese because the Japanese R isn't an L, and it isn't an English R either. It's closer to the Spanish "r" which English speakers can't properly distinguish either, but because Spanish has more R-like sounds, it matters more there. Japanese people practically can't tell if you pronounce a word like 古い (furui) with the wrong R sound. I've never tried it, but I'm curious if they could tell if you just outright replaced it with an L.
All this means that babies learn their first language in a way fundamentally different from an adult's second language. There is no model, there's some innate language acquisition ability that babies have, and then lose at some point. If you pass this point without acquiring a language at all, your brain is going to have to try and construct the language out of nothing, and apparently, it literally can't do this, it can only memorise words. Language is much more than words.
I will say however controversially, nobody learns languages from explicit rules. Learning rules can be a helpful addendum, a kind of way for your brain to "look" at a language "from another angle", but ultimately the process for acquiring a language is some kind of magic that is primarily driven from wanting to learn the language and being exposed to it enough that your brain can built its model from your first. This is why seriously hundreds of millions of people go through language classes in school and come out the other end knowing not the first thing about how to actually speak a language. The only exceptions are those who both have the will to learn, and get the exposure somewhere else (although I suppose theoretically having grammar books read to you is a strange exposure in itself). This happens a lot in Europe and with English for example, as lots of media is in English and isn't subtitled into Croatian or Turkish or what have you. It is entirely possible, though slow and taxing, to learn a language by foregoing any kind of explicit vocabulary or grammar, and just sitting in front of a television all day.
Speed of secondary language ability depends on the languages you have and the language you're going for. Going to Mandarin from English is a much slower process because the two are not very similar. Going from English to German is much faster. But if you already have a second language, it can help learn a third. If you have English and Spanish, French might be faster than if you had just one of them. On the other hand this still depends on the distance between what languages you have and what you're learning. I find it unlikely that knowing English and Arabic will help you learn Japanese much faster. There might be some kind of pliability thing going on though, where having the experience of learning a language in general can make the process easier a second time.
> I will say however controversially, nobody learns languages from explicit rules. Learning rules can be a helpful addendum, a kind of way for your brain to "look" at a language "from another angle", but ultimately the process for acquiring a language is some kind of magic that is primarily driven from wanting to learn the language and being exposed to it enough that your brain can built its model from your first. This is why seriously hundreds of millions of people go through language classes in school and come out the other end knowing not the first thing about how to actually speak a language. The only exceptions are those who both have the will to learn, and get the exposure somewhere else (although I suppose theoretically having grammar books read to you is a strange exposure in itself). This happens a lot in Europe and with English for example, as lots of media is in English and isn't subtitled into Croatian or Turkish or what have you. It is entirely possible, though slow and taxing, to learn a language by foregoing any kind of explicit vocabulary or grammar, and just sitting in front of a television all day.
This matches my anecdotal experience and intuition, and is a point I wanted to make before I found it already made :)
Furthermore, I think there is some confusion of what "learning a language" means for the purposes of discussion. If you learn all of your Spanish from sitting in front of the TV watching Spanish media, you probably don't know how to read or write or maybe even speak, but eventually you will understand it quite well.
I think there are people whose parents speak to them in different languages who perfectly understand both languages but don't necessarily speak more than a few words of at least one of them. I know that I understand Catalan pretty well after having lived in Catalonia for a few years, but I can't really speak it.
I wouldn't be surprised if learning to understand a language is, for example, equally easy at ~any age, but learning to speak is easier when young (the phonemes thing, but also possibly the need to be understood, which is less pressing when you can use some other language already), and learning to read and write is easier when older. (I haven't seen anyone claiming that 1 year old babies are sponges for written language, and yet reading and writing are sort of implied when one describes an adult as knowing a language.)
> I suppose theoretically having grammar books read to you is a strange exposure in itself
I do want to add that studying grammar and orthography is (probably, IMO) useful for the purposes of acquiring correct grammar and orthography. We did spend a lot of time learning those things for my native language when I was in school, and I doubt I would have learned many of them if I had never gone to school (I might, but only because my own family cares a lot about this). Similarly, I'm pretty sure I would have learned English even without school, but not necessarily correct grammar (or as correct as my grammar currently is). It's just that for most purposes one doesn't need to have completely correct grammar in order to use a language.
You probably need to have "incorrect" grammar to pass for a native speaker: the grammar (and vocabulary) you learn in school is usually too formal, outdated and focused on writing more than speaking. Speak like that, even without any accent (which is meaningless, as you always have regional/class variations) and you will immediately tagged as a foreigner (or maybe an old fashioned condescending snob who never get out of his fancy bibliothèque, or a poosh tv speaker at best)
> In Chinese specifically, English speakers tend to have to be taught tones first, or else their Chinese comes out completely incomprehensible.
I can relate to this. I have a mixed Slovak/Hungarian ancestry, so sometimes Slovak speaking people ask me: "hey, I heard that you speak Hungarian, could you tell me what XYZ means?" and they just say something that absolutely doesn't ring a bell, and doesn't even sound like Hungarian at all. But when they write it down (if they also saw it written) it often turns out to be something very simple.
And it probably seems like I'm showing off when I correct their pronunciation, but the fact is that if you say the Hungarian words using the Slovak accent, my brain just fails to parse it. From the opposite perspective, they think that I am nitpicking, and they swear that "ö" and "e" sound exactly the same; also "ü" and "i". Well, it sounds completely different to me; and if you replace one with the other, the word just doesn't make sense.
(It is even more mysterious to me, because those people often learned German at school, and German also has the "ö" and "ü" sounds. Were they pronouncing them also incorrectly at school? Did no one correct them? Or maybe the German language is more resilient against replacing the wovels? No idea, I don't speak German. Or maybe to the teacher it also sounded the same... which probably should not surprise me.)
Also if teaching a baby a language early is measurably better than later, can we teach a baby sign language? If the language learning bottleneck is voice, can we use hands?
Children who grow up in an environment where a sign language is used learn it as a native language. I have never heard that they would somehow learn to express themselves more quickly, but I don’t know much about it.
I know several parents that have had success with this: it's less frustrating for both the parents and the child if it can tell you *why* it's upset and what it wants you to do, rather than just crying until you figure it out.
In a couple of cases the child was reluctant to move from sign to words, since they were already able to communicate, but nudging from the parents ("you can only have what you're asking for if you ask for it out loud") did the trick in the end.
It's already been mentioned in several comments, but the common thread that seems to be getting overlooked here is that children, as a group, are operating in a reliably different learning context than their adult counterparts. I'm going to summarize the effect as being because, as a kid, it's your job to learn and, the younger you are, the more true this is.
It's just difficult to boil that down to a small set of metrics to measure the effect.
True. Young children are exploring their world and the language they find there. As Vygotsky noted, language learning is tied up with active perceptual and behavioral exploration of the physical environment, something which adults are generally done with by adulthood.
Morten Christiansen and others have argued that languages evolve to be easy for young children to learn, i.e., they have adapted to the population they need to "infect." Whether this makes them harder for adults to learn is not known AFAIK.
I speak excellent Spanish, mostly acquired as an adult by immersion in a couple of almost English free environments. My pronunciation and syntax will never be mistaken for a native speaker and although I understand grammatical gender perfectly, I cannot consistently make the correct reference. My daughters who grew up in a mixed Spanish-English home have native-language facility in both acquired in exactly the same amount of time. "How quickly" is not exactly the right question.
My girlfriend has been an English tutor for Russians. She's worked with both adults and kids. This experience made her confident that "children learn language faster" is a total myth. Children are stupider, less able to concentrate and pay attention, often forget things that they have just studied. Whatever advantage they have due to their brain placticity, it's completely compensated by everything else.
That's learning in a classroom environment, though. Stick me in a second language class, pull out the parts of grammar, and I'm going to be wabba-wabba as bad as the dumb, distracted, forgetful kids.
Her dumb kids managed to learn Russian - a grammatically complex language, I am given to understand - in three years to a level of fluency that went from babbling as a baby to speaking clearly and intelligibly. I don't think any of us learned our mother tongues by our parents going "Okay baby, this is a noun".
I think there is a meaningful difference between personal tuition and classroom environment. As I said she had a control group, as she taught both adults and children.
Children spend multiple years to learn their first language while being emerged into it 24/7. For the same timespan, adults can learn a second language while practising an hour or two a day.
I think the critical period for phonemic perception is probably more real than this indicates - possibly not that it's absolute, but at least that "learning" strange phonemes is incomparably harder . My experience with linguist geek friends in the con-lang world is that you can be coached to articulate whatever phoneme, but coaching efficacy plateaus when you can't hear the difference between the target phoneme and other nearby phonemes. Experiments that focus on accent (phoneme production) are missing this, and that's reasonable because the overwhelming majority of phonemes in dominant languages (which people are learning in experiment-tractable quantities) are pretty straightforwardly aurally perceptible, but con-langs get into weirder phoneme qualities.
Anyone that tried learning their 2nd or 3rd or Nth language as an adult knows that there is a big hurdle in acquiring a new language that is accepting that you will speak and think like a child for a long time. We feel frustrated, dumb and are tempted to revert to our native language to recover our self-image of a capable adult, thus squandering our acquisition efforts.
I often feel extremely frustrated communicating in English (my 3rd language). Even writing this post is a little painful; I'm much more eloquent in my head, and in my native language, than this!
Maybe because children don't have the same crystalized self-image as adults they will just soldier through the middle stages of a second language acquisition which is when adults often become frustated and lose motivation.
Yes, this is very important. Adults can be surprisingly stubborn about how they "shouldn't" practice something (often: the accent), because according to them it shouldn't matter -- the important thing is that they memorized the words from the dictionary, and of course the speakers of the other language should forgive them a little imperfection.
Which is ironic, that someone willing to memorize over 1000 words refuses to learn those 5 phonemes that are most different between their first and second languages. (Like, sometimes many phonemes are a little different, but 3 or 5 of them make the 80% or 90% of the overall difference. So just learn those, and ignore the rest.)
But it makes perfect sense from the status perspective. Learning words from dictionary is what adults do. Practicing speaking the vowels with the right accent is what babies do.
That's not how I experienced never learning the right accent.
Dictionary words kind of just stick on their own. You read them, you define them, you use them in writing, and then you naturally remember them. Accents aren't like that.
I tried those classes on tape, in college. I remember doing exercises where I went from AAAA to EEEE and back, and something about producing my AAAAs from somewhere in the middle of my mouth. Like, whut?
I asked people to correct my pronunciation, and it was frustrating for both sides. "Say cat." "Caht." "No, more like cAAAAt." "Caut. Cut. Caet. Cet." "cAAAAAAAAAAAAAt." "KEEEEEEEEEEET! It all sounds frigging same to me!" "No, you're getting better at it, just keep on practicing."
I've never worked with an actual teacher. Where do you even get an actual teacher? I can't imagine it's cheap, either. At one point, I had an idea to go to one of those call centers in India because supposedly they teach local US accents to Indians in high end customer support call centers. But then I heard Indians in high end customer support call centers and perished the thought.
I agree that it is frustrating. Unlike learning the dictionary, where you are free to choose whatever technique works for you best.
> Where do you even get an actual teacher?
At school -- depending on country, learning foreign languages can be a part of the curriculum (although sometimes the language *you* want to learn is not among the options your school provides).
As an adult -- this really depends on your location; I would try googling for "learn X in MY_CITY". Also depends on what language you want to learn; it is easier to find teachers for languages with more speakers. If it is a rare language, you might try to find something else related to the language, for example a restaurant, and just ask there if they know any teacher; you might get lucky. (My wife actually got a few free lessons in Korean, after she told a lady in an exotic shop that she likes their culture. The lady offered free lessons, my wife brought some of her friends, and they had about five lessons together. Then we were singing "gom se mari ga" at home.)
Had to skim the article so I could get to work, but I am a speech language pathologist. As well as making some of the points Scott makes (Adults who have no language exposure don't develop language fully, the deadline for a native speaker accent is puberty) my professors also argued that early language intervention for kiddos with delays and disorders actually saves money by reducing later services that child will need.
"my professors also argued that early language intervention for kiddos with delays and disorders actually saves money by reducing later services that child will need."
I've become an evangelist on this since working in an early intervention centre, particularly since coming from a DEIS school in a previous job 😁
In the secondary school, incoming kids were 12 and may have been first assessed upon applying/may have been on waiting lists for assessments with school child psychologist during primary school. For some kids, waiting until that age to get them any kind of service/treatment is too damn late, and you're just trying to play catch up and do what you can for the kid.
Ireland for a long time didn't have any money to spend on the likes of this, even if we wanted, and maybe we didn't want. That attitude, thank God, has changed and now the value of early intervention is known, and there are supports out there for parents and programmes.
The early intervention service caters for children aged 2-5 (the idea is to get them ready for mainstream education) and boy does it make a difference. I've seen over and over kids developing and changing in a way you can *tell* is a huge improvement. Parents are delighted with progress being made. Sometimes it's not going to be a huge amount of improvement, but the earlier the better. Seriously. Waiting even months at that age means retarding progress, and the money and resources you invest *now* does indeed save down the line when more extensive intervention would be needed.
I am glad you see evidence of this in the field! I am new, so I have seen anecdotal evidence to support that, but I always had it in the back of my mind "Will this kid just catch up without all these intensive services?"
Except augmentative and alternative communication. I have seen too many bad things happen if you wait too long to intro that!!
Oh yeah, it's a centre for kids with additional needs who get referred by the specialist team. Everything from speech and language delay, developmental delay, Downs Syndrome, wheelchair users. They have one-to-one with an assigned case worker as well as the therapy plan drawn up by the team.
I've seen it again and again, kids starting who are withdrawn and even non-verbal, and then after a while they come out of their shells, make friends, start speaking, start initiating interactions themselves (e.g. say "hello" without prompting) and really showing a difference in how they used to be.
The first year I worked there was one particular case where the parents couldn't stop praising the centre; their child was non-verbal and was getting the one-to-one attention until one day in the shopping centre they asked for 'ice cream' of their own accord. The parents couldn't believe it, kept asking the kid at home and in other places questions and what did they want and did they want this or that and the kid was slowly starting to use words, and eventually ended up a confident little chatterbox who blossomed and interacted happily with others. Real big difference, and early intervention makes a genuine improvement.
Sometimes it will only be a small improvement, depending on what the child's difficulties are and their capacities, but even a small improvement is noticeable.
EDIT: There's a modified form of sign language which is used as well for the very young children and the ones who have speech and language delays:
Some kids are just shyer and take a little longer to hit the developmental milestones, and they'll be the ones who "catch up without all these intensive services", but they are also the ones who aren't going to be referred by the specialist teams because they don't need that level of intervention. The ones who do, if you leave it too long or ignore it hoping they'll 'grow out of it', will be the ones losing out and falling behind.
I became friendly acquaintances with a woman from Russia who had moved to America with her husband and child. They liked it here, especially the shopping (Costco! She couldn't believe I had never been and insisted on taking me). Not exactly consumerism in the American "house proud" way, though. They lived a bit like college students, and indeed she retained an idealistic peacenik quality, the one thread remaining of "Communist youth". They were very bright - he though not having even owned a car in his life, quickly got into racing, I'm not sure what you call that sport - where you work on the car in your driveway, souping it up, then put it on a trailer and drive to races. He had a successful global business. I had the impression that though they had left with official imprimatur, even for the cat, after awhile it was not strictly advisable for them to return and I think they did so but once.
He never *seemed* to become very comfortable in English, though his taciturnity in my presence made it hard to tell. He may have found Americans (me) banal, and thus not bothered to reveal his comprehension outside of business.
The daughter thrived in school and was almost unimaginably quickly fluent in both language and kid culture.
My friend was interesting, though. Rarely pausing, when she spoke, though that may have been partly frustration borne of the language barrier - our conversations were generally sort of one way. I don't think she ever asked what my husband did for a living, for example, though it actually would have interested her, given what I soon learned were her sympathies. Maybe it was my fault. I *am* a good listener, eager to scavenge other people's lives, and it can be like undamming a stream. She was overflowing with things to say, me trying to unlock the meaning. (The other two would have moved on with an air of, this is boring, Mom, can we go?) What I found fascinating was that she routinely went to the library, from the very first, and checked out books that I would categorize as "difficult" in terms of reading level. Despite being scarcely able to utter a sentence and having learned no English in school. There was a used book store too which she pillaged in a way that suggested books had not been so surplus in Russia. She took home armloads, and read them. Once she came and fed my cat while we were away on vacation, and when I returned I found I had a new copy of "Master and Margarita" because for some reason she knew she didn't like the translation on my shelf.
(I didn't much like M&M, found it a bit of a mess, especially the last third, but keep it as a memento.)
But throughout our years of acquaintance, our conversations never fully evolved from pantomime and guesswork and misapprehension.
Once, for instance, I had casually asked her the name of the town she was from.
I became almost exasperated when despite a torrent of words five minutes later I still didn't have the name of her town.
Five minutes after that, she was chalk-rock drawing a map of the Soviet Union and I was beginning to understand the nature of her parent's work. "So *not* medicine, and the town had no name ...?"
I moved away and miss our " chats". (Though before that he'd rather improbably taught her to drive and bought her a German luxury sedan, and, American style, she ceased walking and biking everywhere.) She mentioned very early on - indicating the houses all shut up, TV screens flashing, that I was the only person in the neighborhood who did what was customary back home in the evening: stroll about the streets at leisure, ready to talk at length with people.
Hi Scott - did anyone contact you regarding the "Language Learning" idea posted on Reddit a few weeks ago? I've been trying it out on Don Quixote, but I'm 1) the world's least qualified person to implement it and 2) very slow at doing anything.
I'd still be interested in hearing your more complete thoughts.
I suppose I'm now in the minority, at least among admirers of Scott, in thinking that "Critical Periods For Languages" include those distinguishing abbreviations such as "et al." and "e.g." from entire words. Omission of the periods is a mental speed bump for me as a reader. On QWERTY keyboards, the period is easy to type.
For whatever it’s worth I’m a 32 year old who has been learning Chinese for almost exactly two years. I study about 20-30 hours a week. It’s remarkable how much easier it is to learn to read than it is to hear and speak.
I have no way of knowing for sure but I guess I’d estimate my CEFR level is around B2. I don’t have any particular reason to doubt I’ll be functionally fluent in the next two or three years at this pace. The Chinese people I speak to on italki and Preply tell me my progress has been pretty fast and I sound fine but honestly I have no way of knowing whether they’re just being kind.
I wish you would’ve spent some time exploring the effect of IQ on language learning. There’s some interesting research on this topic but I think it would be a fun topic to read your thoughts on.
As an aside: my experience has led me to doubt the idea of “critical periods” in language acquisition. Maybe there’s just a subset of the population that’s more or less talented at this, and I’m closer to that group than others, but one strong intuition this process has given me is that language is just a thing you can learn. With enough determination, there’s no reason you (or at least I) couldn’t acquire a high level of proficiency in any language.
Another aside: I wish there was more research on polyglots.
A third aside: you know how there are some people who can just do accents and voices? Like they’re just good at imitation? I think this skill is literally identical to the development of a better accent in your target language.
Not sure if someone addressed this, but learning a language after 30 is harder because your *entire life* is more “solidified”, for lack of a better term, in many ways that make it hard to drop everything and immerse yourself. I studied Russian and made little progress until my abroad semester, where my ability improved dramatically. But I was 20, and the important thing here may not have been my brain but being in a place in life where I was both able and expected to drop everything and devote myself fully to language learning. My programs also had tutors paid to talk to me.
After 25 most people don’t have those kinds of opportunities. At 30 I moved to the Netherlands, and noted that the only Americans I observed becoming genuinely fluent in Dutch had lived with Dutch partners, usually in their 20s. At 30 I had already met my (also American) husband. I had a job and faced the general difficulty 30-somethings feel in meeting new friends in new cities. The Dutch 30-somethings typically *had* enough friends and family to make them too busy to spend too much time with me, definitely not the kind of time where they might want to struggle through coaching me in halting Dutch. I paid for lessons, but only got so far.
At 40, with all of the above compounded by children and a home, it’s a wonder anyone even tries to put in the kind of effort needed to get proficient in another language. It might have less to do with our brains and a lot more to do with the shape of our lives.
Getting a native accent is a combination of listening, to yourself and others, and phonological competence. By phonological competence I mean the ability and awareness to make your organs of speech do new things.
I got to native accent in Japanese as an English speaker by recording myself, and a phonology class I took in college gave me the phonological competence to change my accent to sound more native. There are good resources about how to physically make the sounds of different languages, it's fun to stretch and exercise youf organs of speech so you can make them.
"Older research on this topic focused on feral children like Genie, who had been abandoned or abused and so never learned language. They had a hard time learning language even after being reintegrated into society; most never succeeded. But skeptics argued these children had lots of other problems besides lack of language exposure; maybe the abuse and neglect damaged their brains."
With Genie, a complication factor is that she might already have been mentally retarded before her abuse. From Wikipedia: "When she was 14 months old, she came down with a fever and pneumonitis, and her parents took her to a pediatrician who had not previously seen her. The pediatrician said that, although her illness prevented a definitive diagnosis, there was a possibility that she was mentally retarded and that the brain dysfunction kernicterus might be present, further amplifying her father's conclusion that she was severely retarded.[30][10][33]"
In fact, the conclusion that she was mentally retarded was partially why he started abusing and neglecting her.
Genie was also punished severely for trying to speak during her captivity, which might have conditioned her to avoid speaking even afterwards: "Researchers concluded that, if Genie vocalized or made any other noise, her father would beat her with a large plank that he kept in her room."
I think the missing element here is the incentives. Kids and teenagers are incredibly social. Some of these friendships will become life long bonds. They have a very high natural incentive to communicate well with peers, especially if they are new to the country and suddenly immersed in school and other native social life. Adults, however, only have an incentive to learn enough language to get by. Adults in general don't make as many new friends as children. They have an incentive to learn enough to be productive at work, but even that may be within a immigrant community where they can speak their native language part or most of the time. An adult all alone probably could learn as well as children if they had no choice, but in most cases the incentive is much weaker than for children.
"Meanwhile, 36-month-old Spanish children will still be barely saying their first complete sentences. Advantage: adults!"
This... doesn't match up with my experience around 3 year olds? I used to work in childcare and have known many. By that age, I can speak to most kids the same way I would speak to an adult in normal conversation (unless they've been raised on baby-talk...).
Especially if you give them a year to account for the fact their mouths are still forming and compare against 4 year olds, I'd assume higher level of fluency in the child than an adult with 900 hours practice 9/10 times.
It was a pleasure to see me linked in your newsletter this morning, even if it was just to disagree!
I'll admit I was a bit sloppy with the citations in the aforementioned essay. My context for the "adults seem to learn faster, but plateau earlier" comes from Lightbrown and Spada's How Languages are Learned (p. 165):
"In 1978, Catherine Snow and Marian Hoefnagel-Höhle published a study on a group of English speakers who were learning Dutch as a second language while living in the Netherlands. The learners included children as young as three years old as well as older children, adolescents, and adults. On tests administered when learners had been in the country for less than a year, adolescents were by far the most successful learners. They were ahead of everyone on nearly all of the tests. Furthermore, it was the adults, not the children, whose scores were second best. In other words, adolescents and adults learned faster than children in the first few months of exposure to Dutch."
And in Second Language Acquisition Myths, by Steven Brown and Jennifer Larson-Hall, the authors' #1 myth is "Children Learn Languages Quickly and Easily While Adults are Ineffective in Comparison." I take this as evidence that at least a substantial fraction of the SLA expert community believes that adult learning *speed* isn't slower than children, if we hold the environment and method of acquisition constant.
I'm not an SLA researcher myself, but from reading a few survey books on the topic, my sense is that this is a widely held view, if not universal among experts.
The problem I have had with acquiring fluency in other languages is that I think in English. I dream in English. My internal monologue is in English. Thus any other language I learn is halting to speak (though less to read) because it requires a mechanical internal translation process. I suspect those mental processes become calcified with age, even if the actual memorization and grammatical proficiency stay the same or improve. I can learn pronunciation moderately well, but actually speaking at a normal rate is the limiting factor due to my thoughts. I suppose immersion may be the only possible remedy, but I'm a little skeptical even of that. I once asked my cousin, a Frenchman who emigrated to the U.S. in college over 40 years ago (still has a pronounced accent though entirely fluent), whether he thinks and dreams in English or French. He said still mostly French, with just a smattering of English words.
Yes, there is a moment when your internal monologue switches to the other language. I think this is partially when you learn linking the foreign words *directly* to the concepts they represent (as opposed to their verbal translations). Like, instead of looking at an apple and thinking "this in an apple, that is 'une pomme' in French", you simply look at the apple and say internally "une pomme".
And the other part is that your "inner GPT" trains on the foreign language sufficiently so that instead of translating word by word, you just occasionally generate a sequence of words (that follow each other with high probability) before you even realize what you are doing.
I imagine that you could actually train yourself to do the former. For the moment, ignore the abstract words, and only take those that can be represented by a simple picture (such as "apple" or "dog"). Make the pictures. Then pick a random picture and say the French word as fast as possible. Associate the French words with the pictures, not with the corresponding English words.
I presume it can be done eventually, at least in some circumstances; but I think that specific process - decoupling the internal monologue etc. - is easier for kids than adults. Scott's piece suggests that adults are better or equal at the mechanics (memorization, etc.) and is confused why that doesn't translate (heh) to better fluency overall. But the thinking-in-a-language process may well be more fluid in younger children, accounting for the fluency advantage.
I didn’t start learning a second language till I was in my thirties. By that time 10 years of exposure to mining noise had caused some moderate hearing loss. There were some Russian phonemes that I just couldn’t distinguish. I was terrible at pronunciation but clever enough with the grammar that I managed to hold my own
It’s a pretty major regret that I’ve remained more or less monolingual all my life but I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate…
Oh wait, that was Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. Never mind.
I do like to hail the usually Hispanic building crews working in my neighborhood with a cheery “Oye como va!” though.
If they mistakenly think I actually speak Spanish I have to pull out my only other canned phrase.
“Ese y lo que estoy diciendo ahora son el único idioma español que conozco.”
If they know enough English, we might go on talk about how much I love Carlos Santana’s cover of the Tito Puente cha cha cha classic.
Okay, I put my headphones on and пять does kind of rhyme with yacht. Without it being channeled right into my ear I tend to hear it as something like ‘peat’.
Like I mentioned, I do have moderated hearing loss. I minored in Linguistics as an undergrad but I lacked a crucial ability to take that any further. At least in hearing/speaking environment. Give me 25 grammatical cases in print and I’m all over it, but these days I watch English language films with the closed captions on.
If I’m going to be in a noisy restaurant or similar environment I put my hearing aids in.
During my mining stint out of high school the old timers told the newbies that hearing protection wasn’t really necessary because “You’ll get used to the noise and after a while it won’t bother you.” They were kind of right I guess. You could get used to it but at the cost of hearing loss.
This was in the early days of OSHA before mandatory hearing protection was aggressively enforced.
"This doesn’t seem to match experiment, where the “critical period” for having a perfect accent lasts until age 10 - 12. Also, sometimes talented people who try really hard can have good pronunciation even if they start after that time."
My mother emigrated to the US from Ukraine in 1935 when she was 12 years 11 months old. They went directly to the small town in southeastern Ohio where her uncle lived and owned a couple of prosperous businesses. She went to public school in that town.
When she arrived she did not know any English. She spoke, read, and wrote Russian and could understand and speak Yiddish. She had never been exposed to any language that used the Latin Alphabet.
She was placed in first grade in her public school when she arrived, but graduated high school on time. She went to Ohio State, majored in Chemistry, received a BS, and married my father (a strictly monolingual American who had no interest in or aptitude for foreign languages). They stayed in Ohio where my two brothers and I were borne and raised. She never spoke to us in Russian nor did she attempt to teach us Russian.
In the late 1950s, Ohio State, like other R1 universities began a program in Slavic Studies (Cold War I, people). My mother enrolled in the program and earned a PhD. She thereafter taught Russian language and Russian civilization to undergraduates. Beyond her dissertation she did no academic writing, but she did do public outreach work for the Slavic department via a weekly radio show.
How good was her English? It was almost perfect General American. She could teach college courses and do radio programs in Ohio with out being misunderstood. The only trace of an accent was in the pronunciation of certain words. E.g. the oo in book came out more like boot than like look.
Her brother, who was 6 years younger than she was (6 when he emigrated), had no accent different than the Americans who grew up in the Ohio town where he went to school.
Effort and teaching have a lot to do with it. Hugh Laurie who played Dr. House on TV for 8 seasons with an impeccable American accent, was born in Oxford England, went to university at Cambridge, and played the ultimate upper class English twit Bertie Wooster in the Jeeves TV series. Daniel Craig, who played James Bond in several 007 movies. When he played a detective from the southern US in the first Knives Out movie his accent was unrecognizable. He was better in the 2nd one.
I recall Letterman asking Emma Watson about being able to turn on a standard American English accent at will. “It’s called acting, Dave.” was her response.
Or have you ever heard Matthew Rhys speak in a non acting situation? His mother tongue Welch accent is way, way different than his American English.
That reminds me, I heard people recommend to "act" when you learn a foreign language. Like, if you learn Japanese, pretend that you are a ninja. (The sillier, the better. Make it playful.)
I suppose this removes some emotional obstacle. Like, with accent, I think people naturally do too little of it, perhaps because it feels embarrassing. But when you pretend to be a ninja or whatever, you try to exaggerate everything. Later you tone it down and it's perfect. (Also, if it is fun, it is easier to remember.)
I think in part the advantage of youth may come down to opportunity. My family moved to a Spanish speaking country for 2 years, during which time my 6 year old attended a local, all-Spanish school. By the end of the two years she sounded just like a local. At this point I had been studying Spanish for about 15 years, having started in my 20s, and she now spoke better than me.
Besides her age, the other big difference between us was that she got to spend 7 hours a day, 5 days per week, completely immersed in Spanish. The most I ever got was an hour of class a couple times a week, a few passing conversations during the week, and 3-4 continuous hours on the weekends - I worked in English the entire time.
But during my time living in Spanish speaking countries I met two adults who had started learning in their 20s who sounded just like local speakers (according to locals). One of them went to a Spanish speaking college full time for 5 years, and the other worked in a Spanish speaking office for around 8, so they both had tons of exposure. I think the older you get, the more likely it is your life and livelihood are kind of stuck in your native language, and the harder it gets to absorb many hours of a new language.
Remember Franzisco Pizzaro's first expedition to South America picked up few boys so they would pick up Spanish quickly and serve as interpreters for future second expedition, an important implication of the theory. (Note that Incas failed to use the Spanish they captured, and sacrificed them instead)
> if you try to teach adults and children the same fake language, adults learn faster whether it’s taught implicitly or explicitly.
This seems to be explained than fake languages are designed by adults and natural languages evolve, shaped by our biological instinct, largely in critical period (many grammar or morphology features that a programmer could have invented, wouldn't stick. yes, there's a problem with conlangs that features don't "stick"), so natural languages are easier for children who are in critical period.
I have to imagine there are some studies coming out of places that focus solely on adult language learners and intensive language training, such as the Foreign Service Institute (U.S. State Department) or Defense Language Institute (U.S. Military), that could inform this question some more. These organizations have a mandate to teach languages to professional proficiency in a defined amount of time. There should be some differences in results as well, as I believe the students attending DLI have already been evaluated for language learning ability while students at FSI have not - they are "forced" to learn a language regardless of their evaluated "ability to learn."
Regarding the tension in accent/pronunciation critical windows of months-old vs 12ish-yo, it seems to me like both can be true: it can be that you do start out capable of distinguishing all phonemes, lose "unused" ones within months, but are able to "recover" most of them until a later age.
My own anecdotal experience supports this in that I was unable to distinguish the sounds of b/v until I learnt how to write, but was then able to painstakingly learn this distinction (probably around age 5-6)
Regarding the tension in accent/pronunciation critical windows of months-old vs 12ish-yo, it seems to me like both can be true: it can be that you do start out capable of distinguishing all phonemes, lose "unused" ones within months, but are able to "recover" most of them until a later age.
My own anecdotal experience supports this in that I was unable to distinguish the sounds of b/v until I learnt how to write, but was then able to painstakingly learn this distinction (probably around age 5-6)Q
This is really interesting, bearing in mind that language acquisition isn't the only "critical window" theory out there. Basically any stage theory of the development of a psychological trait will include critical periods. An important one is the Schema theory of intellectual development by Jean Piaget. Schema theory informed Prototype Theory, one of the leading theories regarding how human beings learn and encode information into the Long Term Memory. A schema is a method of actively searching out specific types of information in one's environment, which then forms the basis of what types of categories and concepts one has. Piaget proposed that children begin learning by actively seeking out sensori-motor schema (give a baby an object and they will put it in their mouths, then throw it at the wall). When they pass through this stage they enter the next one, which uses a different set of schemas.
Language, at least to my understanding, is supposed to develop the same way. Babies learn to discriminate between phonemes before they can emit them, they babble using phonemes they hear the adults using around them before they can speak single words, single words before simple two word sentences, etc.
Each of these stages functions much like a critical window, in that an individual must master the earlier stage to some minimum level before they have the skills to even begin the next stage. All this is supposed to be based on brain development, which doesn't occur evenly and incrementally, but in spurts, by different regions.
But whether young children have some sort of advantage over adults in acquiring these sets of skills isn't actually predicted by Piaget's theory, at least to my recollection. Perhaps brain plasticity declines with age?
Children also have an enormous comparative advantage in learning language i think. This is not the question that everyone asks but is probably more important in making life choices.
If you take school as a given, i think its clear doing immersion languages is way more productive than most other things a school might realistically be capable of.
And as an adult there are many useful skills other than language you could spend three years honing that you have the prereqs for but children dont.
Why do so many native English speaker believe that learning languages is important? They don't have to learn any language. The world already speaks theirs.
I'm asking this as someone who speaks English as a second language. Had it been my first, I never would have taken the trouble to learn another.
I imagine it can make traveling to another country a more intense experience. Local people are probably more spontaneous in their native language; you do not signal "I am a rich tourist" at shops, etc.
Is this worth the effort spent to learn the language? Probably not. Unless you are really obsessed with some specific foreign country and plan to spend a lot of time there. (Maybe you have some relatives there.)
Then again, people have different talents. For some, learning languages may be very easy.
A very long while ago, when I was studying psycholinguistics and language acquisition, I remember reading that a very young child acquiring their first language is actually learning about the world -- they are learning to categorize the things they see and experience, put them into similar groups, distinguish among non-similar groups and make connections between things. The way they do this is through language: they name things and concepts and the links between things and concepts. This is the related to why children seem to learn language slower than adults. Children are not just learning language; they're learning about the world at the same time. Adults have already learned about the world so learning language is just putting new labels[1] onto things they're already learned about when they acquired their first language.
[1] I don't mean to imply that learning a foreign language is just a matter of memorizing vocabulary. Of course, it's much more complicated that that.
What about the phenomenon where adult learners tend to forget languages as soon as they stop using them (though they come back with use), while they remain constantly available to child learners?
There does seem to be strong evidence for a "critical period" for first language acquisition in early childhood. Cases like Chelsea and Genie suggest a lack of early language exposure leads to permanent deficiencies in grammar and fluency. For second languages, the picture is more complex. Adults and older children can learn quickly in the short term due to their more developed explicit learning abilities. But long-term, older learners plateau at lower proficiency levels.
Children can develop perfect pitch while adults can’t. The best adults can do is learn relative pitch really well. Can’t help but think there is something similar going on with language acquisition/accent as well.
I wonder if there are two effects going on. The first is biological, your brain gets old.
The second is social/exposure. In high school there is a lot of pressure to fit in, and probably not many if any immigrants who speak your native language so you probably end up listening to American music, watching American tv, and spending time talking to American friends.
College is a less communal experience that is typically large enough to have enough foreign students you can hang out with. So you get far less exposure to American culture and language.
One very important factor is how eager your interlocutors are to teach you their language. Obviously parents are extremely motivated here -- you're their child, and they want to communicate with you! But as an adult learner, I found it easier (and more fun) to learn Hungarian, where they were delighted to see me struggling with their language, than German, where they just switched to English at the first sign of difficulty.
Tangentially, it appears that for learning "perfect pitch" (as commonly known), there IS a critical period, and more tantalizingly, that period can be re-opened with certain drugs!
Warning, anecdata incoming: I am a fully proficient (C2) English speaker. I have learned English in primary and high school and I am using it at work daily. My son spent three years (5yo to 8yo) in the USA and he is fully bilingual. I definitely see a qualitative difference between us. For me, speaking English is more effort even when I am doing it fluently. For him there is no difference. For example, I have to explicitly listen to understand lyrics in a song in English, while it just happens in the background for a song in my primary language. For my son, both languages are processed in the background.
This was a great post, but I looked at this guy’s list and I annoyed by #4. “The world around us is explained entirely by physics”. This might be trivially true in the sense that fundamental physics describes the basic stuff of which the world is made up of, but by that logic so does Democritus’s theory of atoms. Tell me how the standard model explains the specific behavior biological organisms (let alone human society) in a way that doesn’t render the word “explain” pretty much meaningless?
Adults are extremely unlikely to get a native accent, and they may plateau around 99.9% on grammar. But they can otherwise get good enough to do university-level work or hold down a white collar job. Adults can also massively outperform children who are raised from birth in bilingual households, but who are otherwise living in a monolingual community.
Most people, child or adult, learn exactly as much as they need to function.
Source: I learned French in my 30s, and I have a certificate from the French government which says I'm tolerably good at it—good enough to go to a French speaking university, at least. I personally know other adults who worked even harder and who are officially qualified to go to law school. After that level or proficiency, the French government stops testing.
One thing that children have a big advantage on is a fully native accent. That window starts closing around 6, and is gone for virtually everyone by 10 or 12. The other thing that children have an advantage on is the last, say, 0.1% of grammatical accuracy. Even extremely good non-native French speakers make a higher level of gender errors than natives. (There's a super neat paper on this but it's in French.)
But if you'd be happy merely being able to take university classes or work a white collar job, then that's a totally achieveable goal. For fun, I've done long pair-programming sessions in French and it's totally doable.
Schooling from age 12-21 is one critical factor. You're required to read, to interact with your peers, and to write. All of those term papers and dorm-room bull sessions make a huge difference. And of course, that many years of schooling will build you a peer group of native speakers.
Where most adults fail is that they build themselves a "native-language bubble" and only leave it when forced to do so. Learning a language to a high level is hard work. Never underestimate the ability of a resourceful adult to avoid doing that work.
My main challenge in my 40s is keeping my academic French alive. I simply don't use it enough. My "household" French is entirely automatic and doesn't really feel much different than my English at this point.
Interestingly, the "bubble" technique works in reverse. You can build a bubble of your target language. And most rapid learning techniques do some variation of this. Once all other possibilities are exhausted, adult brains will finally give in and learn the damn language.
The key question is one of goals: Do you want to be statistically indistinguishable from an educated native adult? Or would you be happy being able to do professional work, socialize easily, and maybe even give an entertaining presentation? All of the latter are achievable, at a price.
Have I invented this, or did I read the headline findings of a study which said that kids who grow up bilingual turn out practically immune to Alzheimer's? Or it may have been Parkinson's.
I knew a family with two kids who were quad lingual. English, Urdu, Farsi and French.
This was a good post, but it should be pointed out that you clipped the quote in a somewhat misleading manner. The full belief in the original post is "Children don’t learn languages faster than adults, but they do reach higher levels of mastery." This neatly sums up the issue and the last part is just as relevant when making educational choices. Far more dubious is point 5, The reason that calorie-based dieting doesn't work isn't because 'your brain has specific neural circuitry designed to avoid starvation and, by extension, any rapid weight-loss'. It's relatively easy for fat people to lose weight fast. What they struggle to do is not to put this weight back on straight away after they stop starving themselves and this is fundamentally a hormone imbalance issue.
I feel like this seriously misinterprets the main claims about the "additional magic language ability" but don't feel the energy to write it up so just register it.
I am related to a man who served in the US army as military intelligence. He got recruited out of college specifically due to his proficiency picking up languages.
He tells me that over his career, he learned 11 different languages, all of which he used to great effect in all his different postings. He also tells me, that he forgot all of them very quickly after he stopped using them.
Meanwhile, I haven’t spoken French except sporadically in 15 years but slip back into it with some very brief rustiness whenever I must speak it. It’s a language I learned in childhood.
Also, I don't think that Scott is avoiding the topic of intelligence (or other cancel magnets).
It's just that the topic of this article is "who learns languages faster, *children* or *adults*, and why?" rather than "who learns languages faster, geniuses or idiots? because I have absolutely no idea why that could possibly be, considering that intelligence is not even real".
We talk about IQ and intelligence elsewhere, and will probably do so again. As has been pointed out, this post is about language acquisition. It's got nothing to do with "Scott is too chicken to accept HBD is real, and not just that, but the hardcore version where black people are just genetically inferior subhumans".
If you're spoiling for a fight, you can get one online easily elsewhere, and indeed pick your time and you'll get one here. But you're complaining that the dish of the day is not beef, you wanted beef, where's the beef? on the Seafood Saturday Special menu.
I would not be surprised to find out that half of the readers here mostly agree with this. And the other half does not, such is life.
Also, you are at zero risk of getting banned for what you wrote now, but at non-zero risk of getting banned for the comment that started this thread. Not because of insufficient wokeness or something like that, but simply because it is a *cheap* attack, and we do not do such things here.
Instead, you could have written a paragraph or two about how *you* believe intelligence is related to language acquisition (and maybe even make it relevant to the current topic of "kids vs adults"). If you want your point to be better represented, you could start by making it rather than merely insinuating.
tl;dr -- calm down, don't do personal attacks
Which Scott you meant, SY or SA?
If SA, then SA didn't pick #2 because he agrees with SY on this one, and chose to write on #6 where he disagrees (to my impression).
Seeing "~1000 possible phonemes" casually written like that made me think—how on earth would you even count that? Is 1000 very close? It feels rather high.
Is this some weird thing where aspiration is along this "Voice Onset Time" dimension for voiceless consonants but NOT for voiced ones?
If you define 'aspiration' as the delay between the release of a consonant and the onset of modal (regular) voicing, you can subsume 'voiced aspirates' (i.e. South Asian /bh, dh, gh/ sounds such as in Hindi, Bengali etc.) under the general category of 'aspirated'. This is what most phonologists, such as myself do. And research has shown that humans (and chinchillas) generally divide what should be a smooth continuum into distinct categories (Google Peter Eimas for references.
Actually, most Indo-Europeanists I know believe the voiced aspirates of IE are the same as the 'voiced aspirates' of the Indic languages. And it's certainly the case that Grassman's law (which applied to aspirates in Indo-European, and to Greek and Sanskrit) treats murmured (voiced aspirated) and long VOT (voiceless aspirates) as belonging to the same category.
> because aspiration is the natural result of having the VOT start *after* the vowel has already started being articulated
This isn't right. Aspiration gives you a very rough waveform. It looks nothing like a vowel, or a voiceless vowel. It's a feature that has to be specifically added.
The number is not 'arbitrary'. Languages have distinct phonemics, which are either prototype or exemplar categories (depending on your religion) but have identifiable centers, so that the number of phonemes for any language is a simple number. If not, it would be impossible to learn to spell, even for languages like Indonesian and Spanish, where the phoneme/grapheme correspondance is very simple. You are welcome to consult, just as one of many dozens of references, my book: https://benjamins.com/catalog/clip.3
There is considerable research on how phoneme systems vary among languages of the world. You can start here: https://phoible.org/
I agree that the number of phonemes is arbitrary, but the fact that there are discrete categories (and thus countable) is not. As for the phoneme model, I'm one of the school of linguists who continues to believe that there are segments as well as syllables, but I'm a little less confident in the existence of features as real mental categories.
Nonetheless, the fact that the vowel systems of the languages of the world cluster around a 5-vowel model (accidentally) reflected in the vowel system we inherited from Latin cannot be a coincidence. The virtual identity between Hawaiian, Zulu, and Spanish vowel systems reflects spikes in human perceptual systems--there is no possible contact explanation.
The same facts apply to consonant systems--despite languages with dozens of consonants (like !Xoo), all languages have columns centering around bilabial, coronal (dental or alveolar) and velar. And Ken Stevens (Stevens, Kenneth. “On the Quantal Nature of Speech.” Journal of Phonetics 17, no. 1–2 (1989): 3–46).showed this is not arbitrary either.
I thought there are often at least a few phonemes in many languages that are somewhat unclear. Because of things like "cot"-"caught" merger, some English speakers clearly have one phoneme here, while others clearly have two, and there are likely a good number of English speakers who have some ambiguous number of phonemes.
For any particular speaker there's probably a finite number, but between dialects of course the number will vary. And there are cases where the merger is ongoing even within a particular speaker. But overall for any particular dialect the number is pretty stable, and it's rare for more than one phoneme to be fuzzy enough to be unclear. In French, for pretty much all speakers /ø/ 'peu' and /œ/ 'peur' are pretty much allophones now, but /e/ 'mes' and /ɛ/ 'mais' are still distinct for older speakers. and /o/ 'faute' and /ɔ/ 'sotte' are distinct for most standard speakers, but have merged in some dialects and some younger speakers. Again, this is just a small corner of the phonology.
A lower bound would be the union of the phonemes in all the world's languages. Throw in an ad hoc factor of two, and that might be a reasonable estimate.
One thing to note is that while you can count the number of phonemes in an individual language discretely, and you can sort of classify consonants into common discrete phonemes cross-linguistically, vowels are actually just a continuous spectrum so any number of “total phonemes across languages” is meaningless. Here is a great video on that https://youtu.be/FdldD0-kEcc?si=xJ2e25Sy3WAPM8GK
In the same sense that the number of colors is meaningless, sure. But like with colors, you can still reasonably partition the perception space, despite it being continuous.
The issue is that (I believe, not a linguist but from things I’ve read) every language “partitions” the vowel space slightly differently, it’s rare for two languages to have vowels that align exactly (not to mention all the dialectal variation). If you tried to do a count of all partitions of the vowel space found in all languages you will pretty much just be counting how many languages there are in the world rather than anything meaningful
Different accents will divide up the vowel space differently too, so there's no such thing as the "English" division of vowel space, it's going to look very different in Aberdeen versus Alabama, or Kingston vs Queenstown.
Worse still, there's pretty continuous transitions between these vowel sounds; pick any point on the "cot-caught" spectrum and I can find you a speaker somewhere in the world who uses that particular version of the short "o".
That is not a problem specific to vowels. Different languages also partition the consonant space differently. (Many consonants have obvious discrete differences between them, but many others don't, and even when those differences are physically present, languages often don't perceive them.)
Examples:
1. /n/ and /l/ are both sonorants (speech sounds that can be maintained indefinitely; compare /m/ with /b/) with an alveolar place of articulation. In one of them the air flows out of your mouth, and in the other it flows out of your nose, but that might not matter.
2. /θ/ (the consonant at the beginning of "thick") is a "dental fricative", meaning a sound produced by a tightly restricted continuous airflow that is articulated against the back of the teeth (in other words, near the back of the teeth is _where_ the tight restriction on airflow is located). It is a rare sound if you're counting by languages, though not if you're counting by people. This gives us a lot of data for how languages divide the consonant space around it:
2a. English-speaking children take longer than usual to learn this sound. When they start to speak, they produce an /f/ instead, a labiodental fricative that doesn't even involve the tongue. (I believe this is the closest available match to the physical waveform.) Russian in the past (and possibly still in the present) also drew this equivalence, as seen in the conversion of e.g. "Timothy" to "Timofei". Cantonese speakers perceive this equivalence today.
2b. Mandarin speakers do not perceive /θ/ as being similar to /f/. Instead, they perceive it as being /s/, an alveolar (the gum ridge just behind the teeth) fricative. It is notable that both Cantonese and Mandarin recognize both /f/ and /s/, so this is not a question of what sounds are available in the target language.
2c. Most Germanic languages have lost the sound /θ/, replacing it with /t/ or /d/. /t/ and /d/ are not fricatives at all, but their place of articulation is close to /θ/. This is another equivalence option, though I'm not sure how common it is to perceive the sound this way. (Historical development is a slightly different, but related, kind of thing.)
3. There is a continuum (directly corresponding to "how far back along the roof of your mouth are you restricting the airflow?", a nicely analogue quantity) from alveolar /s/ through "post-alveolar" /ʃ/ through "palato-alveolar" /ɕ/ to "palatal" /ç/ and "retroflex" /ʂ/ . How do we decide which symbol(s) to use in a given language? (No language draws the contrast this finely.) We don't, really; it's arbitrary.
Hello again. M.I. answer is more competent, still one more example: Russians write "o" and "a" but when I was at a loss how the ones in хорошо (= ok) are pronounced. They are all different and none a German "o" for sure. A friend helped me: "It is neither o nor a. Something in between." Also colors: In Japanese the sun is 'red' and the grass is 'blue'. And snow in Moscow is just dirty-as-snow ;)
Right, so neither the names for colors nor the symbols for vowels capture the entirety of their respective perceptual spaces. I wouldn't put the number of vowels at, say, six, any more than I would the number of colors at a dozen. But I don't think the fact that these spaces are continuous precludes an estimate how many essentially different (where figuring out what that means precisely is the problem) ones there are.
"Also colors: In Japanese the sun is 'red' and the grass is 'blue'."
In Irish, especially in older texts, there's a word "glas" which can translate as "green" *or* "grey", and sometimes "blue":
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glas#Irish
There's an old poem translated as "there is a grey eye weeping" but the eye colour might be grey-blue or even blue:
"(of eyes) grey(-blue); light blue"
So I wonder if Japanese 'blue' grass (as distinct from Kentucky bluegrass) has a similar derivation?
In modern usage, "glas" is green and "gorm" is blue, though there is a little-used distinction that "uaine" should mean green for objects where "glas" is for vegetation; and if we're speaking of black people then that is "duine gorm" (literally 'blue person') rather than "dubh" (black) because references to 'black man' mean a supernatural entity or the Devil.
Unsure, Japanese grass may be of a slightly darker version - or referring to older, not-spring-fresh grass. I assume, it comes down more to where languages (their speakers) put their color-boundaries on the spectrum. For Russians, light-blue (goluboi - also: gay) is a different color than dark-blue (zeeny) , not mere shades. That the "sky is blue" is neither a trivial nor an ancient statement, I read once. Dunno where, but https://zeteojournal.com/2015/03/02/blue/
Both are likely derived from the color of the sea. Japanese aoi means blue, green, some grey as well.
The Japanese blue-green conflation had the fun effect of producing their famous blue stoplights:
https://www.rd.com/article/heres-japan-blue-traffic-lights/
This seems like a good time to mention that, although the exact range of wavelengths assigned to each color name can vary and overlap quite differently from language to language, there is actually a fairly consistent pattern in the order in which languages develop color terms over time, and what colors a language will have if it has x color terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Color_term_hierarchy.
Also, in this vein, the understanding of color in old Greek texts is quite different from our contemporary colors, hence the famous "wine-dark sea." Would you describe the ocean (blue-green, perhaps) and wine (dark red-purple, maybe) as being the same color? The Greeks did.
I think the wine-dark sea thing is a myth.
I'm not 100% sure. But as far as I can tell, the Greek just says that the sea looks like wine. It doesn't specify that what the sea has in common with wine is the color.
I think that translators of Homer into English decided that the similarity of the sea to wine must refer to its darkness, hence "wine-dark sea" (I don't think Homer says "dark"). Translators tend to copy one another, so the phrase has become the standard translation, and readers tend to interpret it as meaning that the sea and the wine are similar in color, even though even the translation doesn't say that.
But it's true that Homer didn't use a word for blue, and that the word cyanos, which to later Greeks means blue, in Homer means dark. So, for example, Zeus has cyanos eyebrows - surely his eyebrows aren't blue. This has led to many mistranslations in the past, for example, everybody having blue eyes, instead of dark (I think that, in all Homer, the only character who actually has bright eyes is Athena).
One hilarious case of translators copying a mistake from one another is Dante's leopard always being "parti-colored" or "multi-colored" instead of speckled or spotted, that is, how a normal leopard looks like. Because of this mistranslation, William Blake drew a hilarious leopard of many colors in his illustrations for Dante's poem.
I think just like with color, you *can't* reasonable partition the perception space.
Okay, for concreteness, here's one way of counting the number of colors:
1. Pick a basis for your color space. Something three dimensional should do.
2. For each point in this space, find the volume around that point that your test subject(s) cannot perceive as different from it. (EDIT: You'll need some threshold, like "95% of subjects don't perceive a difference 95% of the time.")
3. Integrate the reciprocal of this "indistinguishability volume" over the entire space.
You might be limited by the resolution of your measurements of imperceptible differences, but I expect this procedure to converge as it gets fine enough. (This works for vowels as well, using formant frequencies as a basis; three should do.)
So even if you find any particular partition arbitrary, you should be able to agree on the NUMBER of perceptually distinct entities.
This seems like a good rough first approximation, but I think there's two main problems.
One is that this sort of "just noticeable difference" isn't going to be clear-cut. There are some differences that you notice 99% of the time, some differences that you notice 1% of the time, some differences that you notice 50% of the time, and these are likely to be different enough that you'll get substantially different estimates.
I think the more important problem is that you're very unlikely to pick a basis for the space in which the "just noticeable differences" are of the same size (and shape) throughout the space. For instance, it seems to be easier to tell apart similar shades of yellow than similar shades of blue, so a simple and symmetric representation of color space will be very non-homogeneous, and you need to use an odd shape (https://munsell.com/about-munsell-color/how-color-notation-works/munsell-color-space-and-solid/) to get a representation with something like equal perceptibility differences.
If you settle on some threshold probability of successful discrimination, and do the painstaking research with subjects throughout the feature space, you might well get a number that is relatively reproducible. This number may well also give you some meaningful difference between the "size" of color space and vowel space and other perceptual spaces. But I still don't think the number is going to be meaningful as a "number of possible phonemes" or a "number of possible colors". It's going to be more like a "size of discretization that will generally get close enough for most subjects not to tell the difference most of the time".
I remember back in the day when they described different computer graphics codings as being 4 color, 16 color, 256 color, 65,536 color, and "millions of colors". I suspect that the method you're describing isn't likely to get a number of distinguishable colors in the millions, but I think it turned out to be useful to discretize that way anyway, partly because of how we are sensitive to these things at larger scales than just distinguishing isolated colors. (I think a similar thing is true with the way we distinguish accents, even though everyone is recognizably using the same phonemes.)
Just for a context, I checked on Google the language with most phonemes, and it cited Guiness Book of records saying that it is Xóõ (also known as Ta'a; formerly called "southern Khoisan") with about 130 consonants, 28 vowels and three different tones. Rather unsurprisingly it is spoken by about 3000 people. Also apparently counting phonemes is not a strict science and various authors differ in their estimates (hence the "about" above).
There's not really a good way to count that. Phonemes can be counted *within* a language, but not really *across* languages.
Both English and Spanish have phonemes represented with the same alphabet. It seems reasonable to say that the phonemes they both commonly represent with the letter "s" is the same phoneme (because they are usually pronounced so similarly), while the phonemes they both commonly represent with the letter "r" is a different phoneme (because they are usually pronounced so differently), but what about the phonemes they both commonly represent with the letter "t"? The default pronunciations of those phonemes are pretty different (think about how differently the word "Latino" sounds when spoken by someone who is trying to keep the Spanish sound, versus someone who is not - the difference is an aspiration after the release of the tongue from the dental region) but you do get something very similar to the default pronunciation of the Spanish phoneme in the English word "stop".
Vowel phonemes can be particularly problematic. Consider the vowel phonemes that differ in the English words "feather" and "father". There's another vowel phoneme in English somewhat between the two, in the word "fatter". German has phonemes that we might have thought of as corresponding to the first two, in words like "Fest" and "fast", but they don't have one corresponding to the third. Interestingly, German has borrowed some words from English that originally used this third vowel, like "Handy", for cell phone, but they merge it with the -e- vowel rather than with the -a- vowel, as an English speaker might have guessed.
Whoa, hold on! When you say "English", I think you must mean "establishment AmericanEnglish", or whatever it's called these days. My British "fatter" is way beyond my "father".
Good point - and of course this just makes it even harder to identify phonemes across languages, since different regional versions will realize them differently, in ways that perhaps "correspond" differently to phonemes in other languages.
That said, I'm struggling to imagine the accent you're mentioning. For me, "feather" is pretty far forward (but not as far forward as "fit" or "feet") while "father" is farther back (though not as far back as "forth", "foot", or "food"), and "fatter" is between "feather" and "father". I pronounce "chance" and "castle" with the "fat" vowel, but I've heard some accents (maybe Australian?) in which they have the "father" vowel.
I think there are also foreign borrowings like "taco" and "pasta" that Americans tend to produce with something like the "father" vowel while I think British people (and my Canadian mother) pronounce with the "fat" vowel. (I suspect Americans once did this too, which is why the states "Nevada" and "Colorado" tend to be pronounced differently by locals, whose ancestors probably did it the way British people would today, and other Americans, who tend to treat these like modern borrowings).
Presumably your "fatter" is close to /ɛ/, while my "fatter" is pure /æ/.
I just realized that it could be that it's really the "father" vowel that is different! I'm thinking of it as pretty much the lowest central vowel, close to the /a/ in the /i/-/a/-/u/ system that many languages have. But I think I have heard some British accents in which it's more in the vicinity of an /æ/.
There must also be an element of available time for older learners. I started learning a very different language (Croatian) at c.30 and with a demanding job, exercise, work on the house, and a social life it is very hard to fit the lessons and home study in. God knows how it would be with a kid in the mix.
Exactly, the kind of learning children do is qualitatively different than what adults generally do.
Children are spending up to their entire waking day learning to some degree or another. An adult, even living in a foreign country, is not likely learning more than half the time - likely much less.
Absolutely. On another qualitative level, the child likely doesn't realise how bad they are as they practice. While on the other hand the adult is painfully aware!
Somewhat tangential, just out of curiosity - what drove you to learn Croatian? Was it a personal connection?
I speak it fluently, born in Canada to immigrant parents. From observing family there seems to be a huge resistance to even attempting to learn "very different" languages. One of my (Croatian) cousins just married an American guy, who seems completely uninterested in learning any Croatian. He lived in Croatia for at least a year, but aside from basic things to get around (please, thank you, cheers, phrase book stuff) doesn't seem to have put any effort into properly learning the language.
I think available time must have a huge influence - I remember reading somewhere that those who learn languages most effectively devote way more time to learning the language than the "average" struggling learner, something in the order of 10x as much time, maybe more. Unfortunately I don't remember the source so this may be off.
I imagine the motivation has to be really high if you are going to commit a large chunk of your time to learning a language. Often it simply isn't worth it - in the case of my cousin and her husband, as far as I know they haven't decided whether to settle in Croatia or elsewhere. Perhaps if they settled there he would learn, but as he has so far "coasted" by mainly interacting with English-speaking expats, I'm not so sure.
I mean, I can't imagine I would ever seriously try to learn a language as different from English as Chinese. Logosyllabic with thousands of characters, tonal, deeply different cultural history and associated concepts and literary references...it would be extremely difficult and take an immense amount of time to do properly. Whereas, knowing English natively and Spanish okay (brief elementary school education during the supposed critical window, and high school and college education up to advanced intermediate level and some literature courses), I imagine I could tackle most Germanic or Romance languages without too much trouble. Nordic ones with weird sounds might be tricky.
Bok! I have a simple connection - my partner's parents are Croatian. Speaking to your example, I think I could have gotten away with only learning a "coasting" level. For me though, there were respectively altruistic, pragmatic, and selfish reasons. In order:
Altruistic - I'm very fond of her mother, who speaks good English but prefers Croatian. Learning to converse with her was in my mind a way of showing her my respect. We're here now and just the other day she kissed me on the head when I successfully complimented her sister's cooking in Croatian - it was a lovely moment.
Pragmatic - I'm in Croatia at least two weeks every August in a smaller city where most tourists are Italian/German, so it's useful for getting around.
Selfish - I've always had a very global outlook and a deep love of language but the fact I could only speak English embarrassed me. As an adult I've had a desire to learn another language, and so this felt like an opportunity to "prove" myself and learn something I valued.
Thanks for sharing!
Warms my heart to hear the cooking story.
If Scott is correct, does that suggest particular strategies that later language learning should purse to best counteract the effects seemingly observed in the data?
I don't know if it's implied from this necessarily, but he's written a lot about learning languages and his advice is overwhelmingly 'immersion' - learn the basics from a book and then visit somwhere that speaks that language and never speak in English while you're there.
> never speak in English while you're there
Yes, anecdotally, this makes a huge difference between people who spend 2 months abroad and learn the language fluently, and those who spend 2 months abroad and don't improve much.
Not being able to speak your native language *at all* sounds like a horrible experience, but maybe that's exactly the mechanism how it works: a survival instinct makes learning the language a high priority (as opposed to mere hobby).
The Middlebury Summer Language Program (https://www.middlebury.edu/language-schools/) does this in a good way. Even though you're studying on campus in Vermont, rather than in a country where the language is spoken, all students in the program sign a pledge at the beginning of the month that states that they will not speak in English, and will try, as far as possible, to only speak in the language they are trying to learn. You basically limit your social life for a month to other people in this program, and so everyone is very patient with each other as they struggle for words, and helps them remember when it's clear what word or grammar they are struggling to get. It's much more effective than going to a country where people speak the language, but will often just switch to English when they hear you struggling and want to help.
Yeah I studied abroad and spent too much time in my room or with other study abroad students who spoke English and my Spanish did not improve nearly as much as it should have as a result.
I am not even sure about what are the relevant "effects seemingly observed in the data". That said, good courses pursue (very) slightly different approaches for kids resp. adults. (Bad courses do very different things, that is why they are bad.) But it is all "direct method", even if the amount of explicit grammar/ consciously contrasting L1 and L2 / learning 'strategies'/ use of L1 in class-room etc. may differ. Also, use of songs: great for kids and most adults, teens often go: 'Eeeh, childish/ awkward, won't do!' ;) In short, main difference: The younger the kids, the slower the progress. Much sloooooower. (Similar to elderly learners, but then: once a week is never enough.)
"Aside from saying that learning rate seems high in youth, probably stays high for a while, and then seems to go down in some kind of plausibly-continuous way most marked between 20 and 30, I’m pretty stumped here."
Brains vary widely, and do life circumstances, so it makes sense if there is enormous variation in how and when our language learning skills deteriorate. It would be very surprising if we all lost our language learning ability in a similar way.
There also may be an effect where older learners consider they speak the second language "good enough" and don't bother going for complete fluency/speak it like a native.
When you're a child and an adult corrects you, you generally take it.
Many adults will not.
Complementing this: it's often considered rude to correct an adult's grammar, but ok to condescend to children.
That's partly because with children, we assume mistakes are from ignorance, but with adults, it's due to stupidity, and it's considered lacking in tact to tell someone to their face that they're stupid.
I think that should be the null hypothesis here: children and adults are equal at language learning, and all differences in outcome are due to adults not wanting to learn languages because it is so painful, shameful, embarrassing, costly in time and effort, avoidable by lifestyle changes and niche-seeking, steeply diminishing in returns*, and conflicting with one's personal identity. Even adults who should know better will avoid immersion and retreat to ineffective-but-comfy tools like Duolingo or Rosetta Stone instead.
* maybe even negative at points? I wonder if there's a 'valley of bad language skills' where you are too good at the new language for natives to judge you tolerantly or be amazed by your skills because they take you for a native speaker, but not yet average for a native speaker - so they take you for a kinda dumb native speaker...
I'd love to see some kind of analysis (more fine-grained than the Big Five, etc.) of an adult's personality vs their ease of language acquisition. Not sure how one would begin to go about it, but I think it would be instructive.
I have an intuition that children are simply happier to keep making funny sounds and getting things wrong in practice, in the same way that they're happy enough to produce amateurish art, etc. A sillier adult is probably in many respects a better language learner.
You see this in older adults who take up an activity with heavy kinaesthetic demands, like a martial art. Many are embarrassment-averse, and it takes them quite a while to loosen up and become at ease with the occasional slapstick results. And this in an area not nearly as central to self-image as good communication.
Here's a study comparing personality types and language learning success for learners that had "maximum" motivation to learn a language - required to learn for their job and given 100% dedicated work time to learn it.
> One-way ANOVAs and Spearman's rho correlations suggested that Intuitive type Ss had a small advantage in FSI classrooms in both speaking and reading. Thinking type Ss led Feeling type Ss in reading. Perceptive type Ss enjoyed an edge in the kind of flexibility needed to cope with the unstructured or ambiguous input common in FSI language classes.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1995-09432-001
Much appreciated - just noticed you'd linked it earlier in another comment and I missed it.
Ehrman's other papers are interesting, too.
Generally I agree.
>> It would be very surprising if we all lost our language learning ability in a similar way.
Well, very surprising given that there isn't a critical period for learning. The premise of the post was to interrogate that rather than assume it away, though.
Utterly tangential, what does your screenname mean? I'm picking up 'dorsal', or possibly a deliberate twist from 'drosophila' like the flies?
You are spot on....I was hoping a little twist on drosophila makes the name my own, but it is also memorable, and wont be confused with all the other fruit flies out there when I search for it.
It may also be that the knowledge of one's first language actively hinders the acquisition of the second to native levels: calquing might be so effective that one just does that instead. Basically "thinking in English" instead of Spanish or whatever.
Maybe, but while my english is far from perfect (it is my second language) I think in english as often as in my native tongue. In fact, I find it sometimes difficult to translate not just native->english, but also english->native even if I understand the sentence to translate perfectly. So I do not think that calquing is unlikely in my case (though, frankly, I am not the best person to judge it)
Calquing is about words, right(?) - would not really work if the languages are un-related. But "interferences" are a common problem, ie grammar et al from the first language gets (mis)used in the new language: I am cooking - Ich bin kochen (wrong, no 'continuous' in German, correct: Ich koche.)
No, also for phrases. It was a term I knew that was close enough to what I meant that I decided to abuse it figuring I would be understood perfectly. Which incidentally illustrates my point rather well. Your example is good too.
And yes, this probably doesn't work as well when the languages are too far apart, but you might be surprised how far you can push it.
I heard a lot of calquing when speakers of a minority language learn the new dominant language with new expressions for tech or admin-speak that did not exist in their old language ('Russian Germans' in Russia/ Russians in Germany). But they do that among their people, mostly. Anyways, "interference" covers all ways a language known interferes with the new language: "Language interference is the effect of language learners' first language on their production of the language they learn, or the learners' first language influences their second or/and their foreign language. The effect can be in any aspects of language, such as grammar, vocabulary, accent, spelling and so on." Also a 2nd language interfering with a third: Japanese learning German after English might say "Hallo" in formal situations, struggle with "R" or mix up "must not" and "nicht müssen"(=not have to).
I'm a native English speaker who at various times in her life has been fluent in Arabic, German, and Spanish, and had decent in understanding written Latin - so obvs I have some experience and thoughts about learning to speak in other languages.
Imho, learning other languages as an adult is a grind (so it takes real effort, time, practice) and my experience has been that as my proficiency in my native language increased (so as I grew older) and my English-speaking became more complex (so larger vocabulary) my English-precision would get in the way of saying it in the moment in another language. It's a second order kind of thing, first I have to dumb down what I wish to express from my complex English to something more basic, and then think how to say it in the other language. Basically, it's an extra step and it gets in the way, slows me down, makes me trip over my tongue, etc.
And then there are aspects that are just me-related. I value precision in speaking, so I'm less willing to open my mouth and sound dumb in another language, when the optimal strategy to learn is to speak, speak, speak and let others correct you. I also need to understand grammatical rules etc. because that's how I think about language. My Spanish language training was by full immersion, no grammar explained, and it was the hardest language for me to learn despite its reputation as one of the easiest.
Both of my comments go toward why an adult would find it harder to learn versus a child. Children think/speak simply in their native language and when learning another just weigh in and go for it with much less inhibition - both aspects make language acquisition easier and quicker. I've witnessed adults who have those same two qualities (don't care about precision, not very inhibited in speaking) have a much easier time learning a new language too.
This chimes with me a lot. John Pasden, who does a lot of work teaching Chinese, has written about how it can be very useful to adopt a new personality in the second language - a bit dumber and happier and more gregarious, essentially - because it enables lots of conversations. And I'm sure he's right, but I've never been able to do it.
It still interferes with my ability to raise my reading speed. There's more stuff I'm interested in in English, and even when I find something good in Chinese, reading it at my slow pace is too much like hard work; so I don't practice reading much; so I don't get better; and so on, in a vicious cycle.
I have to point out the misuse of the word "phoneme" at the end here.
The term in linguistics that gets used for raw individual linguistic sounds (considered as discrete things) is "phones". (To the extent that this is meaningful, of course. Some phoneticists would likely insist that we shouldn't be thinking in such discrete terms and that perhaps "phone" is not such a good concept; but I'm going to ignore such concerns.) The thing is, in any given language, lots of sounds are considered equivalent. E.g., the sounds in English that are "r" and "l" would be considered equivalent to a Japanese speaker, while English makes no distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants as many languages do. It's these equivalence classes of sounds that are called "phonemes".
Thus, it makes no sense to talk about "the total number of possible phonemes", across languages, because phonemes are not meaningful across languages; the differing equivalences will conflict with one another. (Is voicing significant and aspiration irrelevant? Or perhaps it's aspiration that's significant and voicing that's irrelevant?) What you mean is phones, not phonemes.
Hmm, when I took some linguistics, we used "phoneme" for the sounds, and "allophone" for an equivalence class of sounds. These equivalence classes also relate to orthography ("t" appearing as /t/, /d/, or other sounds in various words), so might be different than the equivalence classes to which you are referring
I think you're misremembering. "Allophone" refers to the phones *within* the equivalence classes. Two say that two allophones in a given language is the same as to say that they are the same phoneme in that lanugage.
Ah, right. What I get from 2 Ling classes 6 years ago.
I went to the first piano recital I've ever been to of any kind two weekends ago with my niece and nephew ages 7 and 5. There were about 10 other kids of about the same age and I understand most had been playing for 6 months to 3 years.
They were terrible.
The first thing I said to my wife after was that I have a hot take -- I think we start teaching kids piano way too early. They had absolutely zero grasp of what a piano song is supposed to sound like or the rhythm required. I bet a ton of kids get discouraged that after so much practice they still suck and quit at ages 8-10 -- if only they started at 11 or 12 instead, I bet they would be much better and enjoy it much more!
I am quite sure that the average adult with zero piano playing experience would have done much better than these kids with the same amount of practice time.
On the other hand there is also a grammar in music (especially important if you want to go into composing). So maybe if you want just to learn the instrument, it does not matter so much to start very early, but if you want more advanced use of music you really need to start early to develop appropriate processing areas in the brain
I think for the tiny fraction of people who go into music as a profession, there is probably some advantage to have started very young, but I think for the reasons typically cited by parents for encouraging it (broadening horizons, appreciation of the art, physical/mental activity, etc.), the kids would be better served waiting a lot longer to learn (unless they were clearly precocious).
It's not just grammar, there's also ~sensory discernment ("ear" for pitch, "feel" for rhythm).
There are a lot of music programs marketed to (parents for their) young kids that are pedagogically inappropriate, as @Jack described - kids need to learn almost entirely through games and direct interpersonal interaction, not rote practice - but acquiring relative and absolute pitch etc is absolutely an advantageous musical skill that kids will be more likely to achieve if they are getting practice at it from younger ages, for similar reasons to language acquisition even if there isn't a relevant critical period.
Related citation - perfect pitch observed more commonly in native speakers of tonal languages https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/speaking-tonal-languages/
I suspect you're right about this. I also suspect that the reason kids do most of the world's music learning is because they're small enough that we can bully them into it easily.
The upside to the current state of affairs is that you get a bunch of kids who at age 14/15/whenever they get into music, already have some mechanical ability on their instruments.
I read a great piece of writing once on talent, which was saying that for almost everyone there's a period where you start enjoying an artform, want to have a go at it yourself, try, and notice that you suck. Like, you want to try drawing because you like other people's beautiful pictures; you draw one; it's terrible; so you stop.
Forcing kids to learn stuff is how we get over that hump, I think.
I don't think bullying is always necessary. I think kids might be (a) easier to trick into thinking they're not terrible, so they keep going longer; (b) genuinely more easily amused, so that they can tolerate only being able to do very easy things for longer.
Part of it is that they hear about some prodigy that can play Mozart at 6 and think their kids can approach that level. If you look at professional level classical musicians, they all started around that age or younger. You basically have to, there's no way kids can compete for selective music programs in their early teens if the competition started earlier and has a 1000 hour advantage in practice time
As a mostly self-taught guitarist, I found I really only got better via internal motivation of wanting to play like musicians I admired on records or in songs I enjoyed. Most of my formal guitar lessons had none of that. I suspect most children when learning music are playing songs they do not enjoy or only marginally tolerate.
This feels right, but I think there's some hope that kids might be more easily amused, and might genuinely enjoy some less complicated stuff. Plus, kids might enjoy just the process of "I'm making sheet music turn to sound" in a way that's a bit harder as an adult.
I think I see a bit of this with my son reading: he's 4 so he's obviously not going to read continental philosophy, but he doesn't *want* to read continental philosophy; he gets some kick just from the fact that letters turn to sounds, and some more if the story is simple and funny. This seems like the wrong level to be enjoyable to an adult.
As much a fun puzzle to solve as a book to read. I can appreciate that.
>(eg monolingual Asians who cannot distinguish “R” and “L”)
Isn't that mostly Japanese? I know the distinction fully exists in Chinese, and WP says it exists to some extent in Vietnamese and Korean.
I haven't looked up what the professional linguists say on the matter, but I would see Korean "r" and "l" are allophonic in native and Sino-Korean vocabulary, but contrastive in loanwords from English, at least in medial positions. (e.g. "fried" and "flied" would be pronounced differently and written differently in Hangul, whereas In Japanese they would be pronounced the same and written the same in katakana.)
>"more like the the "s" in "pleasure"."
I find it interesting that you would say that, since I have noticed many Chinese speakers (mostly from the PRC) have trouble pronouncing words like "pleasure" and are clearly attempting to approximate the sound using the Mandarin phoneme that is represented as "r" in Hanyu pinyin. The two sound qualitatively very different to me, although other people must also perceive them similarly — the old Wade-Giles romanization represented the sound as "j", presumably based on the phonetic value of that letter in French.
Not quite. In Korean, when the consonant r/l is geminate (doubled), it is pronounced l, so you have a difference intervocalically: tari 'bridge' vs. talli- 'to run'. English r and l are usually treated the same way; r gets realized as the singlet consonant, l as the geminate. They are thus no more contrastive in loanwords than in native words.
Ah, that makes sense. I was wondering why I couldn't come up with any contrastive pairs in native words — turns out I just wasn't thinking hard enough.
"Like the s in pleasure" was standard description in my Mandarin classes in college, because it's the closest English approximation. It's one of four retroflex consonents, with the tip of the tongue at the top of the palate. The others are ch/zh/sh. It's kinda like a gentler and voiced English "sh" with the tongue curled back.
Here's a Chinese word with r: https://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/translation-ri_day.htm
It's not the same as an English r, but it's much closer to an English r than to "s".
I do not know in this case, but Japanese have additional problem of having just about 100 syllabes, hence those silly sounding renditions of english words in Japanese.
this is nitpicky, but the ~100 number is the number of mora, not syllables. long vowels and diphthongs, syllable-ending n, plus a few subtleties push the number of syllables up to at least the mid-hundreds if not more
I did not know that, thank you.
This video ('incoming call') suggests otherwise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRhmus2BdKc&ab_channel=EurodanceForever
That's an issue of her only knowing how to do Chinese syllables (which are set up as consonant + vowel; a final "n" or "ng" is allowed but most other consonants aren't) and representing "call" as "cou" rather than "cou-lu" (notice how in many of the other cases she does convert the final consonant into a syllable of its own, like "mode" -> "mo-de" or "connected" -> "co-ne-ti-de" with the second "c" mostly dropped). So the "ll" is almost silent. But you can clearly tell the difference between her other Ls and Rs; they're a bit closer than English ones but not the Japanese "there is no distinction".
Also, English final /l/ is pronounced [ɫ], so the Chinese interpretation of that may differ from the Chinese interpretation of an actual [l] sound. E.g. it's not uncommon for Bulgarian speakers to substitute [w] for the English [ɫ], while using [l] for the English [l].
I would imagine there's a lot more things get in the way of an adult learning a language, compared with a child. The study would probably only be completely useful if it compared adults who could spend all day in an immersive environment, going to school to learn all day etc, just like children do.
As an adult, you generally need a job or source of income to survive. If you are someone migrating to a richer country, you need to speak the local language or you'll be doing a job where nobody needs to speak to you. On the contrary, if you are at a higher-level role then you're probably going to a place where they speak your language/English. (both situations have negative effects on immersion). Maybe, however, you start your own business, in which case you're still only either going to be doing it in a field where your minimal language skills allow you to get by, or you're hiring multilingual speakers to do all the communication and paperwork for you. (your motivation to learn beyond this will probably be low, as running a business can be time-consuming). And of course, no matter where you are or what level of work you're doing...it's still a job that takes up a large part of your day, and if you have a family, you're going to have very little time to purposely learn a language on top of all those responsibilities.
Beyond that, kids will talk to almost anyone who is sitting next to them, whereas as an adult you're going to find it very difficult to make connections unless you can already hold a conversation, so that's another big negative against your exposure and acquisition pace.
My instinct would be there's not a big difference between adults and children when it comes to learning a language. Younger brains may have more neuroplasticity, sure, but their long-term memory is also weaker. It's mostly about the quality and length of daily opportunities, and we're usually more forgiving and patient with a 6 year old learning a language than we are with a 36 year old.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/learning-and-aging-2013-1
I've always found this theory compelling, though I'm not sure how it squares up with everything else.
The idea is that adults can learn just as well as children, the problem is that they cannot *forget* as well as children.
As a metaphor, imagine you are searching for the fastest route between home and work, but that every time you use any one route, that route become more habitual. At first you might explore quite a bit all the various routes to find which is most efficient. But as you start to identify the best path, you explore less and less because nothing you are finding is quicker than the familiar route. You exploit the efficiencies in the current route, and as a result, it gets more and efficient. Eventually you might get to the point where the old familiar route is so habitual that, even if you discover a quicker route, you can’t quite switch over to the newer route.
Similarly, in the bioeconomy of the brain, your brain is always trying to be more efficient in how it processes information. And when you are learning, your neurons are creating pathways in the brain, and new ways of “wiring together” that are, hopefully, more efficient than the old pathways. But as these pathways get established, the connections get stronger and stronger, and thus more and more efficient. It eventually gets to the point that, even if the brain could potentially be more efficient by going down a newly established pathway, the old route is so familiar/established/efficient/habitual that it cannot quite make the switch to the new route. And so the new route gets neglected, and eventually gets pruned out.
So the reason there is a critical period of learning is not because adults can’t learn (establish new routes), it is because the old knowledge (old routes) are so efficient and habitual that the new knowledge (new route) doesn’t get used and so dies from neglect.
Yes, this is absolutely the mechanism for differences in neuroplasticity, but by itself it doesn't answer the critical period question I think, because at a mechanistic level the critical period hypotheses are essentially that a brain region devoted to learning a particular domain gets overwritten with other content, making the brain less specialized at being able to learn that domain.
As someone who learned japanese to fluency as an adult, I subscribe to the theory of adults learning faster.
I absolutely learned to read kanji (japanese characters) faster than the average japanese child does. It takes them 12 years of rote learning throughout school to learn the roughly 2000 standard use characters whereas it took me only 3 (up to maybe 6 years if we're being less charitable about what it means to have learned a character). Part of this is because the japanese education system teaches through rote repetition whereas there are cognitive shortcuts you can use such as mnemonics and breaking characters down to their components.
So I think absolutely adults can learn faster in part because we've 'learned how to learn' - it's just that in the majority of cases we either don't have the time to focus, or don't have the benefit of an immersion environment that children do.
Reading/writing is an entirely separate skill from speaking/understanding, and no one claims that children have any advantage at the former.
It’s generally agreed that there are parts of the brain specifically dedicated to spoken language (eg Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas), and some linguists/psychologists/neurologists argue for additional “language instinct” (though I think this idea is less popular than it was when I was in college). But reading and writing are mostly just done with our general intelligence faculties, are require a lot of work to master, which smart, motivated adults are definitely better at than kids.
Fair point! Thanks for raising it.
Looking just at speaking/understanding, I do still tend to think adults can learn faster - a 9 year old doesn't speak with adult level fluency, for example (maybe around 12-15 is when I think a bright kid can sound indistinguishable from an adult? subjective opinion), but it doesn't take 9 years for an adult learner to get there. That said, much of this depends on how we define fluency and on the adult in question.
A native Japanese child at say 8 years old doesn't know the 2000 standard use characters, but they could probably speak better Japanese than an adult who does (eg one who has studied for 3 years).
I started this by saying two points but it expanded and is now however many points I have.
Accent and idiomatic speaking are different from language lessons. Language teachers give you a little but you can be a fluent speaker but still have an accent or non-idiomatic habits. I know plenty of people who speak perfectly correct English but have accents and non-idiomatic habits. Often they don't consider it too much of an issue because they can be understood and there's nothing technically wrong with it. Sometimes even if there is it's close enough and people will work to understand them because adults often have some reason to interact. Even if it's as simple as making a purchase you'll fight through their weird pronunciation.
Adults and children speak differently and most adults are not willing to step down to more juvenile ways of speaking or to consume more juvenile media. Nor are most adults willing to correct an adult like they might a child. You might be a 40 year old master physician but if you're learning Spanish and you're at an A2 level then the way you should be speaking is the equivalent of a grade schooler. But how many physicians are going to read a Mexican children''s picture book?
Plus the usual things about time spent learning. Also it's worth noting a lot of people stagnate at a relatively low level of language ability and also that many children fail at foreign language acquisition. And I suppose I'll add in that language has a pretty strong cultural component. You notice this especially with ancient languages which have a lot of terms for things that are irrelevant to the modern world and lacks a lot of terms for things that are very important in the modern world. But it's true of other countries/cultures as well. If you exist in a different culture these nuances can be lost on you.
Also I'll throw in the anecdote that my personal experience is that adult language learning is more efficient (more learned per hour) but happens slower due to less hours. Also, it's extremely hard to help illiterate people to read. Much harder than teaching someone who simply learned a different form of literacy. Even if it's a non-alphabetic language like Chinese.
Interesting point about adults not correcting other adults. Whereas children will bully and tease each other if they pronounce things weirdly or speak non-idiomatically. Demanding teachers, children.
The "Spanish in 36 months" example is a bit unfair given that Spanish is one of the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn. Arabic or Chinese would be much tougher. I've studied Polish for about 34 months. I'm in Poland right now actually in vacation, and still I'm encountering a lot of unfamiliar words. In Spanish (which I studied in high school and achieved pretty good proficiency) most of the complicated words come from Latin and are basically the same as English, not so for Polish!
Also Polish grammar is really annoying... https://denovo.substack.com/p/making-polish-count
And I've heard Arabic and Chinese are even harder languages. See also: https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages a list of languages by difficulty
>4. The world around us is explained entirely by physics.
>Sean Carroll articulates a basic physicist worldview that quantum mechanics and the physics described by the Standard Model essentially explain everything around us.
Sean Carroll cannot even begin to conceptualize consciousness coherently (as evidenced by his discussion with David Chalmers on Carroll's podcast), so explaining it with physics (*at this stage*) seems off the table.
That might be because the concept is fundamentally incoherent. Since you mention Chalmers, p-zombies are the perfect illustration.
There is one obvious difference between adults and children: correcting adults is rude.
I have small kids. They make all sorts of pronunciation and grammar mistakes. Everybody corrects them all the time, because, that’s what you do.
English is my second language. Nobody ever corrects me. And this makes a huge difference. A two years ago I hired an accent coach over Zoom. I spent 10 hours with him. The amount of progress I made over those 10 hours was tremendous. I improved my pronunciation over those 10 hours more than I did over the last 15 years of daily usage, simply because he was correcting me.
I would greatly appreciate if people would correct my English, but no one does. Even if I request it, I guess it is just awkward to correct adults.
I sometimes tried to provide pronunciation feedback to my colleagues, knowing how much I would value it, but… All I got was kind of awkward reactions.
So, maybe this might be a little factor?
This might not be true; there's some research out there showing that little kids are really bad at learning from explicit correction (like telling them to repeat the correct way to phrase stuff) and as of my child language acquisition class a few years ago it was unclear if implicit correction (people then using the correct form of a word in a sentence) helps either.
> explicit correction (like telling them to repeat the correct way to phrase stuff)
What I do with my kids, instinctively, is that when they say something incorrectly, e.g. ask a question in a grammatically incorrect way, I quickly say what they should have said, but then I answer the question.
I do not insist that they repeat the correct version after me. I correct and forget. If they make the same mistake again, they will get corrected again; if they don't, mission accomplished.
I try to correct them in a minimally disruptive way, because I can imagine how incredibly frustrating it would feel for a child to ask about something they care about, and instead of an answer only receiving a lesson about grammar. Then I would expect them to hate being corrected, which would go against my goals.
This. Also, there are a lot of things that people learn about their native languages that aren’t explicitly taught at all.
For instance: take a sentence like “Alice said that Bob likes Charlie.” You can create questions based on this sentence by replacing nouns with question words, like so:
Who said that Bob likes Charlie?
Who did Alice say that Bob likes?
Who did Alice say that likes Charlie?
…whoops! That last one’s no good, actually. In the original declarative sentence, “that” is optional. Likewise in the first two questions, “that” sounds fine, or it can be omitted. But when the question word corresponds to the subject of the embedded clause, suddenly you can’t have “that” in there — “Who did Alice say likes Charlie?” is the only option.
When you tell native English speakers about this phenomenon, they usually say things like “huh, yeah, that’s true. I never thought about that before. I wonder why it works that way!” and not, for instance, “oh yeah, Mrs. Johnson taught me that in second-grade grammar class.” Because what Mrs. Johnson taught them in second-grade grammar class was stuff like “never ever split an infinitive” and maybe “even if you use ‘ain’t’ in casual speech, don’t use it in formal writing”.
(Cross-linguistically, subject questions tend to work differently from object questions, especially in embedded clauses. But this tends not to be something people think about in terms of whether it’s prescriptively “proper English” or not.)
"When you tell native English speakers about this phenomenon, they usually say things like “huh, yeah, that’s true. I never thought about that before. I wonder why it works that way!” and not, for instance, “oh yeah, Mrs. Johnson taught me that in second-grade grammar class.”
To quote Tolkien:
"I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language."
There's a lot about our native languages that we just go "Huh, okay" and accept and don't think about at all, it's only when we're consciously learning a new language that we go "Why is that?"
If only he knew then that he could tell her that "great" wasn't an adjective, it was part of the species name, "great dragon" as opposed to "lesser dragon."
I correct ESL speakers all the time! Granted, this is in a university environment, but they're not my students: they're my fellow grad students, or a few professors. Perhaps my general enthusiasm for language helps make it clear that there's no condescension going on, I just think language is neat!
"The authors wonder if it’s related to people learning languages better while still in school. But this is a high-functioning sample and you would expect many of them to go to college. Also, many of these people are immersion learners, and it’s not obvious why school would be better for immersion learning than whatever comes after (eg the workplace)."
I haven't looked at their analysis and I wouldn't understand the stats if I did, but I would imagine that if the effect were related to being at school, and even if "many of them" do go to college, the change exhibited by those who don't would still show up as a measurable step in the data.
This is spitballing, but at the most hand-wavy level you could come up with a mechanism where, while exposed to intense learning of any sort, the brain adapts in some way to optimise for learning, making all learning during that window more effective. An analogy would be an athlete's cardio fitness improving, which will have a flow on improvement on many physical activities. Once someone moves out of the classroom (or in non classroom-oriented societies, once they have learned most the of things they really need to know) the brain adapts back to optimise for something else - maybe energy usage, or lower stress levels, or something. I seem to recall some data suggesting that old people who maintain intricate hobbies in retirement have better rates of cognition in general, which definitely suggests something adaptive might be going on.
With an M.A. in foreign language teaching, I am humbled and honored by Scott's treatment of this 'silly' statement: "Children learn language more easily" (the first 5 words in that huge study co-authored by Steven Pinker). To make sense, you need to define first a) 'children' (what age!) b) 'learn' (acquiring or what? School twice a week or with parents/peers) c) 'language' (close to first language or not, A1 or C2, age-related vocabulary or perfect grammar or accent) d) 'more easily' (did it "feel hard" or do the results differ). In addition: most native speakers do never reach C2, some just B1.
My conclusion in the nineties was: shrug. What really matters are the practical implications and there I am shocked to see "Children learn language more easily" abused to introduce foreign languages in kindergarten/ primary school. While none of the studies argue for this. Not even high-school has to be the perfect place for it - at least not if done in those sub-par ways they teach languages there. (Good courses in case the language is important for the kids: sure. And for their parents too, I guess.)
Exactly. What bothered me in the article to which Scott is responding, and in his response, is that neither really specified what it means to learn a language. A kid learning their first language(s) is really just going with the flow. They are learning language as part of the experience of learning about their world. The extent to which a foreign language (not widely spoken in their environment) can be incorporated into that experience and continues to be a part of that experience will determine how proficient they become. Adults, on the other hand, tend to have pretty discreet motivations for learning a language: talking to in-laws, getting on in their career, or as in the case of my 70-year-old relative who is quickly learning Korean after never having learned a second language to any degree of fluency, an obsession with K-pop and Korean period dramas.
There is also a difference in what it means to be fluent in a language. I learned both Chinese and Japanese as an adult, but in neither language am I likely to ever be mistaken for a native speaker. That did not keep me from carrying out work-related tasks in Japanese, even though my grammar was pretty appalling. Later, I was a much-in-demand medical interpreterfor 8 years, not because I had a native-like knowledge of Mandarin, but because I knew how to negotiate meaning and recognize gaps in the communication between patient and provider and make sure they got filled.
The other muddy bit is "given the same form of instruction/immersion." Adults have no patience with letting the language roll over them, or immersing themselves, without judgement or hurry. Kids are in no hurry to turn to the written word. A lot of teaching to kids does indeed try to mimic the, in my opinion as a 40+ year teacher of foreign language, inferior teaching strategies that we use to placate impatient adults. This leads to unnecessary orthographic interference (avoidable, say, by teaching the Taiwanese bua pua mua fua instead of Hanyu Pinyin to adults), emphasis on overt explanations of grammar rather than letting students work out the grammar for themselves, and a tendency to ignore just how somatic the act of listening really is.
But the main problem for this discussion is the assumption that similar methods are suitable for children and adults. Getting too cerebral, or self-conscious, or analytical, isn't great for teaching adults, but it is poison for teaching children.
Agreed. 'Each course with the learner in mind' (tricky are those courses where each learner has a different aim/preference ...). That said, a very competent colleague complained once about teens in France demanding "more grammar, less talk" at school. ;)
Henry Kissinger arrived in the US at age 15 in 1938 with his brother Walter, who was a year or two younger:
"Another overt difference was that Walter shed his Bavarian accent while Henry notably retained his. When asked why this was the case, Walter would tell interviewers, “Because I am the Kissinger who listens.”"
I knew some older ladies who formed a social network in the community, one of whom was a still-beautiful, very voluble Spaniard. She was very kind and cheerful and everyone found her and her strong accent charming, though communication was pretty strictly listening to or asking questions of her.
All but one of my tart-tongued old lady friends, who once muttered something about "She's been here 45 years ..."
I met a 90 year old Basque lady who had arrived in America 83 years before. She still had an accent. I was interested in what a Basque accent sounds like, because Basque is a non-Indo-European language. But to me it just sounded generically European. But I have a very poor ear for accents.
Accents don't work that way; they aren't related at all to the grammatical structure or lexicon of the language and they change very quickly relative to either. Basque, while not an Indo-European language is certainly a European language, and its accent is similar to French and Spanish for the mundane reason that thy are next to each other. Similarly, the Hindi accent sounds infinitely more similar to the Telugu accent than it does to, say a German accent, even though Hindi is Indo European and Telugu is Dravidian.
Be interesting to know whether this has any consequences for verbal reasoning in adults. For instance, imagine a smart child with limited access to or little interest in written content up to age 18.
Would that child still have strong verbal reasoning scores on account of them just being smart?
Or would they have average verbal reasoning ability while their other abilities all remained strong?
People interested in this topic will very much enjoy reading Stanislas Deheane's *Reading in the Brain*. Some of the questions we have about language acquisition can be measured with MRI brain scans.
Note, if you buy the book and your copy has black and white copies of the illustrations instead of the original colour plates, download the colour plates here:
https://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/figures.htm
You won't be able to make sense of many of the plates if you only have black and white.
Wondering if native fluency would have anything to do with mouth development; if you aren't making those sounds in the growing phase, your mouth won't adjust to accommodate producing them.
Yeah, producing new phonemes is like learning to ride a bike or play the piano. You have to spend a lot of time practicing the muscle movements very intentionally before you reach the point where you can do it automatically. (Especially if you already have “bad habits” in the form of another almost-but-not-quite-identical phoneme in your native language.)
Just read the original post by Scott Young. Mostly ok, but "Children regularly become fluent in their home and classroom language, indistinguishable from native speakers; adults rarely do." Sorry?! Around the globe, hundreds of million of kids forced to take foreign language lessons will NEVER 'become fluent in their classroom language", my guess is "less than 10% if it is not English and not required for a job". I have seen them suffer. - And hardly 1 in a thousand will turn out "indistinguishable from native speakers".
I assume that “classroom language” means the language that schooling is delivered in, rather than a language explicitly taught as a subject for a few hours a week. Think of, say, Mexican-American kids who pick up Spanish from their parents but go to an English-speaking school, or indeed speakers of small indigenous languages in Latin America who go to a Spanish-speaking school, and end up fluent in both.
Oh, right, makes sense - though that is a "non-expert" use of the word, I'd say. In those cases, the peer group will usu. speak mostly in that language, too. And peers often have a bigger influence on language (esp. accent) than parents, even. (In many cultures, adults incl. parents do not communicate a lot with kids - why talk to 'em? they too dumb! - the kids go off to play as soon as they can walk.)
Gah, having studied the relationship between memory and language in my PhD, learning Spanish in high school and Chinese after meeting my wife (at 23), I think this is a pretty good summary, but!
1. Phonetic plasticity decreases with language exposure. This is the *primary* reason we think of kids as better at learning languages. A decline here isn't the same thing as "can never learn to say a Chinese/french/Spanish/japanese R (the asshole consonant)"
2. All plasticity decreases to some extent. How much this matters really depends on how committed you are to the language.
3. You need maybe 25% of your *total language exposure* to be in a language to be what most people would think of as fluent. This is simply easier for a baby or child, where fluency also has lower standards but total language exposure is much lower.
4. Linguistic plasticity often means making conpromises between various language features. This doesn't mean you'll be "worse" at your 'native' language, but you'll be measurably less native.
5. It's difficult to measure the 'need' vs. simple percentage of exposure. I highly lean toward the latter theoretically, but functionally they are not distinguishable.
"R (the asshole consonant)"
So right, my issue with English R in some words (walk/work) make me think it would be better to just pronounce it as in French (my native langage), it will lead to less misunderstanding...
Anyway, no big deal as it seems it's variable even within a single language: in french you have at least 3 variants (soft like in most of France, harder in Belgium, rolling like in spanish for some dialects/older people). Same in English, R in Scotland sounds much more like the rolling french version than the American. So does the Indian version.
Big languages (English being the prime example) are spoken with so many different accents, as first or second language, that it's difficult to know if there is a right pronunciation when you learn them...maybe just pick the regional variant that is easiest, or even pick and mix 🤣
Yeah, I think English is relatively phonetically flexible. There are some regional variations in French, Spanish, or Chinese as well, but there are a lot of vowels in french/Chinese that are not interchangeable that are quite close phonetically (not to mention tones in Chinese), but I think there's also the learned skill of understanding phonetic 'errors' that English speakers typically get more practice at.
And yeah, probably! I only learned recently that final/hanging r's (like in louvre) aren't silent in French
I suspect it might be your vowel sounds that are tripping you up in walk/work, rather than the l/r.
In 'standard' / home counties British English, neither the L nor the R is pronounced in this particular case:
- Walk: /wɔːk/
- Work: /wɜːk/
In American English, the R is pronounced (rhotically) but the L still isn't:
- Walk: /wɑːk/
‐ Work: /wɝːk/
So in both UK and US English, the vowels are the key distinction between the two words, with the addition of rhoticism for 'work' in US English.
In either accent, pronouncing the 'L' at all sounds very strange, and would probably out you as a non native speaker: it should be entirely silent.
I can only apologise for our orthography.
Lol don't apologise: I am a native French speaker, that means a very high tolerance for the most confusing and exception ridden grammar and orthography you can imagine 🤣
I guess you are probably right: it's the vowel : thinking of it the confusion was more when speaking with Thais (which objectively spoke a much worse English than I do, very paradoxical ) than with native English speakers. Thai being strongly tonal, I guess they pick vowel difference as more significant than native speakers.
i have some feeling this issue will alleviate in the future: I am not linguist but I have the intuition that tonal langages get less and less so the more exposed to international tourism and a lot of english words, not to mention foreigners speaking a very simplified and largely tone deaf thai, like I do.
A little like English got hugely simplified as an exchange language or even in mainstream movie/TV/newspaper, compared to what you find in classic literature...this also happen in French, but not to the same extent....
A funny example: I love sf and started to read untranslated sf to improve my english... My first pick was Asimov and I though that I was in fact perfectly fluent, at least for reading, it was like I was reading it in French, a huge ego boost.
then I tried other author's like Banks, or even non sf classics. What a reality check, it was almost like a different language 🤣
From the linked piece, insert eye-rolling here:
"Recently, I wrote a defense of the uncontroversial-within-cognitive-science-but-widely-disbelieved idea that the mind is a computer."
We've been comparing the brain/mind to the latest Cool Tech since old gods' time. From clockwork to transistors to current tech, and if within ten years we get quantum whatever, it'll be "the brain/mind is an ansible". It's not so much 'widely disbelieved' as 'yet another one, what'll it be tomorrow?' fatigue of "metaphors that enthuse people who like to think that their hammer means all things are nails".
"So Scott says"
For a moment there, I was going "Why is Scott referring to himself in the third person?" 😀
"This isn’t really what anyone is asking, but it will help clarify some later questions: children need to learn some language before age 5 - 10, or they’ll lose the ability to learn languages at all."
Yeah, this is why 'enhancing language' is all part of childcare (for those who think daycares do nothng but change nappies and give bottles so why is it so expensive?):
https://www.aistearsiolta.ie/en/play/resources-for-sharing/enhancing-language-birth-3-years-.pdf
"The quality of interactions between practitioners and babies and toddlers is important in developing non-verbal and verbal language skills and can impact on achievement later in life. Practitioners play a very important role in this language and communication development.
Babies are born ready to interact with people. They love being spoken to and played with, which helps their brains develop rapidly in the first two years of life. This interaction helps babies learn about language, turn-taking and listening.
Toddlers learn to interact with other children and adults, to express feelings and thoughts, to imagine and problem-solve. In a few short years, children are able to express themselves and use language for thinking, problemsolving, imagining, exploring, and can interact competently in a group of peers.
Below are some practical suggestions on how practitioners can help babies and toddlers to develop non-verbal and verbal skills.
Opportunities for language development occur throughout the day. Talk with babies and toddlers at every opportunity. Routine activities such as getting dressed, nappy-changing and snack-time, provide ideal opportunities for babies and toddlers to hear the same words in the same predictable steps.
Remember, children will learn to understand words before they can say them so give children lots of opportunities to hear new, interesting and varied words. This can be done in a number of ways.
From three to six years, children rapidly increase the number of words they use and change how they use language to communicate and to learn. A child turning three years may have a few hundred words and by the time he/she is six years, may have many thousand words. At that stage, children use complex language to interact, tell stories and describe past events, problemsolve, negotiate, imagine, co-operate and develop relationships. Here are some ideas to enhance language development.
Most importantly at this stage, expand on what children say. Make their sentences longer by adding words or adding another idea. For example, a three-year-old shows a practitioner his knee and comments, 'I have a sore knee'. A practitioner might respond with, 'Oh, you have a sore knee because you fell'.
Open-ended questions stimulate thinking and conversation, as they require more thought and more than a simple one-word answer. Closed questions can stop a conversation and should be used less frequently. Examples of closed questions include questions that test children, for example, 'What colour is that?' or questions that only have a yes/no answer, for example, 'Do you have a dog?'
Use more comments than questions and remember to wait for children to respond. Longer conversations which stimulate children to extend their thinking, are great for their language development."
And in the cases of developmental delay, especially in language acquistion, early intervention and support is vitally necessary or indeed the child will never catch up.
https://arrow.tudublin.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&context=aaschsslbk
"Language Delay
Most children become capable and confident users of language especially when helped by competent adults. However some children may progress at a different rate due to biological or environmental factors. Problems could arise in relation to a child’s capacity to articulate words or to process meaning. This could be due to a language specific impairment or to causes such as hearing loss, neurological impairment or emotional and behavioural difficulties. The term Language Delay is used to describe these cases in general. Children who are difficult to understand or show signs of being at a level of language development appropriate to a much younger child should be referred to a speech and language therapist for assessment."
Relevant to the post:
"Second Language Acquisition
Second Language Acquisition is the term used to describe the process of acquiring a second language in addition to a person’s first language (Baker 2011). The second language can be acquired at the same time as the first (simultaneous acquisition), or it can be acquired at a later stage, (sequential acquisition). In Ireland, some children acquire English and Irish at home simultaneously. Other children speak Irish or Polish at home and learn English sequentially when they attend an early years’ centre or go to school. Based on current understanding of sociocultural theories (Lantolf 2000), the context in which language learning takes place and the affordances and opportunities provided are of great significance in providing input and support to young children acquiring a second language.
Most children who are learning a second language have age-appropriate competency in their first language and know how to use language in a variety of ways, e.g. to make requests, describe events and express their feelings. It is of the utmost importance that they maintain and continue to develop their first language as this may be their main means of thinking, forming relationships with key people in their lives and expressing their emotions.
Bilingual babies follow the same basic pattern as monolingual babies in each of their languages. Both languages tend to be kept fairly separate with regard to grammar and sentence construction, but some mixing of words will be likely to occur. Mixing tends to follow the same pattern of language mixing that people around them use. By age three most bilingual children realise that they have two ways of speaking at their command and can move freely between the two languages. They can also judge which language to speak to which person and adjust their language accordingly.
Children who acquire a second language in addition to the first can use that language learning experience to good effect. They can already communicate through language in an age-appropriate way and can transfer this knowledge to the new language. Where their first language is recognised and valued the second language is regarded as an additional bonus (additive bilingualism). Children who speak a major European language at home, French or German, would be in this category.
Children who speak a less highly valued language such as a minority or regional language, could be in a subtractive situation, struggling to learn English, if society appears to place little value on their home language (subtractive bilingualism). This negative situation can have major implication for the child’s and the family’s self-image and self esteem. The transmission of family values and culture may be lost as the parents may not have sufficient English to pass on their beliefs and understandings in the new language. It may lessen the bonds with the extended family in their home country as the children may not be able to communicate with their grandparents and other family members in their native language.
Pattern of Second Language Acquisition
Many children acquiring English as a second language in an early years’ centre will go through a silent period. This is the time in which they pay attention to the sounds and meanings of the new language and try to work out the patterns for themselves. They may try 7 to speak in their first language and depending on how this is received, may continue to speak that language (English in a naíonra or gaelscoil, for example) or stop speaking Polish or Yoruba in the early years’ setting (Tabors 2008). This should not be confused with developmental delay as it is the natural path of progression in learning a second language. Children will continue to communicate through non-verbal means, gesture, signing, pointing, facial expression etc. They will observe what the other children are doing and imitate them, giving the impression that they know more than the actually do. Gradually they will begin to use single words and rote phrases, very often useful words and phrases to gain attention, request toys or express wishes. They may also use advertising slogans and jingles as they feature very often on children’s TV. Rote phrases that they have learned as a unit might include ‘My turn,’ ‘sharing is caring,’ ‘can’t do it.’ Other phrases that could be useful are sentences that have slots that can be filled with different words, such as ‘I want ----.’ These phrases are immediately useful and grammatically correct. When the child has built up a sufficient stock of these words and phrases, he/she can begin to speak more creatively but as they are now processing the language independently, they may appear to be making more mistakes than before. Over time they will acquire an age-appropriate level of competency in English. It is estimated that children can build up communicative competency in about three years but that it takes learners five to seven years to gain more academic competencies in a new language."
This bit is not just airy-fairy social sciences theorising:
"It may lessen the bonds with the extended family in their home country as the children may not be able to communicate with their grandparents and other family members in their native language."
I say that because of examples from my own life, e.g. my maternal grandfather was a native speaker of Irish from what was in his day a Gaeltacht area, his children never learned it/were not taught it by him, and the grandkids (myself included) are at the same level as the rest of the school-going population who learned the language in school and never attained competency. As part of that language-learning we had texts including autobiographies of people from such areas, and part of one was when the narrator went to work as a servant as a young girl for people living in the town. The grandmother in the house spoke only Irish, her son spoke Irish and English, and the grandchildren only spoke English. The grandmother was delighted with the new serving girl as she could speak Irish too and was able to communicate with her where her own grandchildren could not.
So it is a thing that really happens and does mean the loss of cultural transmission which you can't get back by later academic attempts to reconstruct what was lost.
That is all fine, just a bit one-sided in claiming how good it is too keep the "less highly valued language". Krashen famously advocated to put effort in teaching of (and in) Spanish to Hispanic kids in Californian schools, as proficiency-level in their first language should limit (or help) their future level of English. Turned out a disaster as those kids really needed as much instruction in English as possible. outside their homes. - That said: Sure, speak to your kids in your first language. They will get their new one from life/ new peer-group anyways.
"We've been comparing the brain/mind to the latest Cool Tech since old gods' time. From clockwork to transistors to current tech..."
Yeah, except that with those 3 (current tech is neural network, I think) you have explicitely cited all comparisons that were ever made AFAIK, and NN are implemented using transistors. Clockwork was used at the time the first mechanical adders appeared, and could be described as early non programmable computer, so again, it's not apple and orange, pear and apple at most.
Let's count 2 examples: not really great to imply we just placate current top tech to describe the brain without any better reason that they are trendy...
Estimates for AGI appearance based on comparing #neurons VS #transistors that exists since Turing seemed naive, and in retrospect the mini hype around expert systems and ELISA in the 80s was quite ridiculous.... So I understand why being cynical around current NN may be tempting.
But I am not, neither are most people including those working on AI, even when speaking privately without fund raising in mind...
You do not have to be a specialist to understand that what happen right now with chess, then go, image recognition and the current LLM, faster and faster, is a very different thing and much more likely to be the real deal than a new tech bubble...
Chess was to big for computer to rival chess master, then it was go, then it wad natural language that was too ambiguous and needed too much context, then it was art that was not according because deeply human and not only rational. Yeah right, nowadays a plumber is less easily imitated than Picasso 🤣🤣🤣
Previous hype was just that, but like for the boy shouting wolf, the real wolf came in the end 😜
So the real comparison is not "the mind is like a computer", it's "the computer is like a mind". That is the dream of AI, isn't it? Create something that can actually *think* instead of being a Big Dumb But Fast Machine.
We want the machine to be like us, to have a mind. That's not the same as reducing down the brain to a machine.
Well yes, but if by machine you mean something whose behavior/response are easy to predict and were very directly implemented by human designers, it's been a while our computers are not machines. Not all of them at least...
"The classic rhetorical trick amongst skeptics of this view is to point out the history of analogies for the brain. The ancient Greeks saw the mind as a chariot pulled by horses of reason and emotion. René Descartes viewed the brain as a system of hydraulics. Every age, it is argued, has fumbled for the best metaphor for the brain and ours is no different. Just as the idea that pressurized fluids manage the brain seems silly today, so will a future era see the computer analogy as quaint." - - SY
Said someone who never heard of hydraulic computers. 🤣🤣🤣
Are Scott Young's books (his blog really wants to give me FIVE OF MY BOOKS FOR FREE) worth reading?
I see a lot of reports of people claiming that taking MDMA made them much more fluent in a foreign language. I know MDMA floods the brain with serotonin, and children have more serotonin than adults. Could this all be related?
Does the drug actually make them more fluent, or does it just make them think they're more fluent?
If they are already understandable but still inhibited, it can be the latter leading to the former!
Reasonably rigorous results seem to support this effect for moderate doses of alcohol. So @ryhime is almost certainly correct, it's about reduced inhibition.
There's a theory about second language learning I find interesting. It states that if you have never learnt a language in adulthood, and wish to learn a language very different from your native language, you're better off first learning a language very similar to your native language, in order to learn how to learn languages as an adult. E.g. a native English speaker would do better learning Spanish and then Mandarin than just Mandarin straight away. I've only seen anecdotal evidence in favour, but the idea seems interesting.
You could also for a second language learn a constructed language, which is way easier (more regular) than the natural ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method
Nomenclatural differences can make discussions in this area hard for people with different backgrounds to productively share. In psychology, there are the explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) learning systems. In neuroscience, these two systems are generally captured by the terms declarative (hippocampal) and procedural (basal ganglia) systems respectively. I’ll refer to the procedural system here in the neuroscientific sense—meaning basal ganglia, (not step-by-step!)
There’s increasing evidence that conscious, working memory systems, which are at the heart of the declarative learning pathway, increasingly come online as children mature. (I wanted to paste a neat graph here after Gathercole & Alloway’s findings, but I couldn't find a way to paste it in--sorry!)
At the same time, there is evidence that the procedural system declines in ability as children mature. This makes a big difference because the procedural system is what captures the complex patterns of your native language and allows you to think and speak intuitively and in some sense, habitually—you don’t even need to think before blurting out what you want to say.
• K. Janacsek and D. Nemeth, "Chapter 2: Procedural memory: The role of competitive neurocognitive networks across development," in The Cognitive Unconscious: The First Half Century, A. Reber and R. Allen Eds.: Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. 22-36.
• F. S. Zwart et al., "Procedural learning across the lifespan: A systematic review with implications for atypical development," J Neuropsychol, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 149-182, Jun 2019.
Georgetown neuroscientist Michael Ullman’s work is highly relevant here:
• M. T. Ullman, "The declarative/procedural model: A neurobiologically motivated theory of first and second language," in Theories in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction, B. VanPatten, G. D. Keating, and S. Wulff Eds., 3rd ed.: Routledge, 2020, pp. 128-161.
• K. Morgan-Short and M. T. Ullman, "Declarative and procedural memory in second language learning: Psycholinguistic considerations," in The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Psycholinguistics, 2022.
See also
• D. Pili-Moss et al., "Contributions of declarative and procedural memory to accuracy and automatization during second language practice," Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 639-651, 2020.
• A. M. Graybiel and K. S. Smith, "Good habits, bad habits," Scientific American, vol. 310, no. 6, pp. 38-43, 2014. (This lovely piece on the basal ganglia procedural system also has an excellent explanatory image.)
The bottom line is that some or much of what we see in the differences between how children and how adults learn a language may be explained by the decline with maturity in the procedural system (it’s not all gone, it just takes a lot more repetition to do the trick) coupled with the improvement in declarative system explicit type learning.
I do agree with your bottom line. But I want to point out that not everything is gradual, and critical windows are a real concept. Some developmental learning events seem hardcoded to a certain age, and if it doesn't happen then, it will not happen later.
If you raise kitten for a few weeks in a world without horizontal lines, then they are literally blind for their remaining life to all horizontal lines. Put them on a walkway with a gap, and they will fall down because they don't perceive the gap. (That's a horizontal line.) Likewise, if they are raised in a world without vertical lines, then they are blind for all vertical lines and will go on bumping into legs of chairs. Hubel and Wiesel got a Nobel prize for this discovery.
An example for children is that they seem to have a critical window for binocular vision between 3 and 8 months. Either they learn it then, or not at all. No matter whether they get perfect binocular input later. That's more than jut a generic decline in procedural memory acquisition.
I very much agree with you. Interestingly, it seems that the brain "firms up" from back to front during development. This is why critical periods for vision occur early on as a critter is developing. I don't know how this relates to the declarative-procedural rampup-shutdowns.
Have you heard of Susan Barry ("Stereo Sue")? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_R._Barry She learned stereo vision as an adult, and wrote a book about it.
This fall, Susan Barry has a new book coming out about her friendship with Oliver Sacks. Terry Sejnowski, my co-instructor in the Coursera online course "Learning How to Learn," knows Susan and spoke about her amazing experiences and personal discoveries in the course. https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
Interesting! No, I didn't know that. Then I guess I am one of those who "mistakenly extrapolated" the results of Huber and Wiesel, as wikipedia phrases it. Thanks for the correction!
Reagrding accents and speed to fluency (C2) the book fluent forever advocates a theory that both are tied to first learning to distinguish sublties in the target language which are otherwise imperceptable in the native language. Such as the different T sounds in Korean to an English speaker, or the different L and R sounds in English to a Korean speaker.
Most people will work until it's "good enough".
I suspect that children talking to other children and adults in a monolingual environment get pushed so the "good enough" level is higher.
If you're learning a second language as an adult you get to the point where most other adults can understand you, then the urge to keep listening and correcting your accent falls off.
There are some adults who can learn a second language and get to a native level (my father was one with English). But that works only if you are immersed in the second language and it helps a lot to have "perfect pitch" (so you *know* when you're not pronouncing things like those around you and you *care*, even if they don't).
How does this work with accents? That's a "native" level of proficiency, where you have (mostly) the same words, but pronounce them differently. Yet many English learn the RP accent, as it's not native.
For accent in English (my second language, with which I am comfortable for all pragmatic needs), I even have a suspicion that — lacking a perfect pitch — the cheapest way to reduce my original-language accent could move the articulation of some sounds closer to «correct» but also closer to each other, which might not even be a pragmatic win…
Everything I say here is just what I've experienced and heard from random people.
When you learn a second language what you're really doing is making a model of your first language and then constantly chipping away at it so that it resembles the second language. At some point you'll reach "good enough" and stop naturally remodelling the copy into the second language. What counts as "good enough" depends on your needs, and you can find this called the "okay plateau" in certain places. The "okay plateau" is when you've reached the point where you can function for your needs, and any further progress requires deliberate targeting of your deficiencies. So for example, there are many people who learn a language like Latin only so they can read. And then their speech is halting and bad. But considering that language, anybody who gets further than just reading has to do deliberate practice.
In still extant languages, usually most people hit an Okay Plateau somewhere around "completely functional but accented". This happens because the person's first language doesn't have the phonemes, or cadence, or pitch, or stress, of the second language, and so the person can't even hear what they're missing in order to fix it naturally. What they're missing gets filtered out by the brain as noise, similar to how background chatter gets filtered out in a conversation taking place in a crowded room. Your brain is focusing on the model of your first language which it is trying to change into the second language. It can't even begin to hear Chinese Tones from the model, it sees that as background information that doesn't match the first language and so must be unimportant. In Chinese specifically, English speakers tend to have to be taught tones first, or else their Chinese comes out completely incomprehensible.
Scott mentions mistaking L and R, and this happens in Japanese because the Japanese R isn't an L, and it isn't an English R either. It's closer to the Spanish "r" which English speakers can't properly distinguish either, but because Spanish has more R-like sounds, it matters more there. Japanese people practically can't tell if you pronounce a word like 古い (furui) with the wrong R sound. I've never tried it, but I'm curious if they could tell if you just outright replaced it with an L.
All this means that babies learn their first language in a way fundamentally different from an adult's second language. There is no model, there's some innate language acquisition ability that babies have, and then lose at some point. If you pass this point without acquiring a language at all, your brain is going to have to try and construct the language out of nothing, and apparently, it literally can't do this, it can only memorise words. Language is much more than words.
I will say however controversially, nobody learns languages from explicit rules. Learning rules can be a helpful addendum, a kind of way for your brain to "look" at a language "from another angle", but ultimately the process for acquiring a language is some kind of magic that is primarily driven from wanting to learn the language and being exposed to it enough that your brain can built its model from your first. This is why seriously hundreds of millions of people go through language classes in school and come out the other end knowing not the first thing about how to actually speak a language. The only exceptions are those who both have the will to learn, and get the exposure somewhere else (although I suppose theoretically having grammar books read to you is a strange exposure in itself). This happens a lot in Europe and with English for example, as lots of media is in English and isn't subtitled into Croatian or Turkish or what have you. It is entirely possible, though slow and taxing, to learn a language by foregoing any kind of explicit vocabulary or grammar, and just sitting in front of a television all day.
Speed of secondary language ability depends on the languages you have and the language you're going for. Going to Mandarin from English is a much slower process because the two are not very similar. Going from English to German is much faster. But if you already have a second language, it can help learn a third. If you have English and Spanish, French might be faster than if you had just one of them. On the other hand this still depends on the distance between what languages you have and what you're learning. I find it unlikely that knowing English and Arabic will help you learn Japanese much faster. There might be some kind of pliability thing going on though, where having the experience of learning a language in general can make the process easier a second time.
> I will say however controversially, nobody learns languages from explicit rules. Learning rules can be a helpful addendum, a kind of way for your brain to "look" at a language "from another angle", but ultimately the process for acquiring a language is some kind of magic that is primarily driven from wanting to learn the language and being exposed to it enough that your brain can built its model from your first. This is why seriously hundreds of millions of people go through language classes in school and come out the other end knowing not the first thing about how to actually speak a language. The only exceptions are those who both have the will to learn, and get the exposure somewhere else (although I suppose theoretically having grammar books read to you is a strange exposure in itself). This happens a lot in Europe and with English for example, as lots of media is in English and isn't subtitled into Croatian or Turkish or what have you. It is entirely possible, though slow and taxing, to learn a language by foregoing any kind of explicit vocabulary or grammar, and just sitting in front of a television all day.
This matches my anecdotal experience and intuition, and is a point I wanted to make before I found it already made :)
Furthermore, I think there is some confusion of what "learning a language" means for the purposes of discussion. If you learn all of your Spanish from sitting in front of the TV watching Spanish media, you probably don't know how to read or write or maybe even speak, but eventually you will understand it quite well.
I think there are people whose parents speak to them in different languages who perfectly understand both languages but don't necessarily speak more than a few words of at least one of them. I know that I understand Catalan pretty well after having lived in Catalonia for a few years, but I can't really speak it.
I wouldn't be surprised if learning to understand a language is, for example, equally easy at ~any age, but learning to speak is easier when young (the phonemes thing, but also possibly the need to be understood, which is less pressing when you can use some other language already), and learning to read and write is easier when older. (I haven't seen anyone claiming that 1 year old babies are sponges for written language, and yet reading and writing are sort of implied when one describes an adult as knowing a language.)
> I suppose theoretically having grammar books read to you is a strange exposure in itself
I do want to add that studying grammar and orthography is (probably, IMO) useful for the purposes of acquiring correct grammar and orthography. We did spend a lot of time learning those things for my native language when I was in school, and I doubt I would have learned many of them if I had never gone to school (I might, but only because my own family cares a lot about this). Similarly, I'm pretty sure I would have learned English even without school, but not necessarily correct grammar (or as correct as my grammar currently is). It's just that for most purposes one doesn't need to have completely correct grammar in order to use a language.
You probably need to have "incorrect" grammar to pass for a native speaker: the grammar (and vocabulary) you learn in school is usually too formal, outdated and focused on writing more than speaking. Speak like that, even without any accent (which is meaningless, as you always have regional/class variations) and you will immediately tagged as a foreigner (or maybe an old fashioned condescending snob who never get out of his fancy bibliothèque, or a poosh tv speaker at best)
Shades of Pygmalion (or My Fair Lady, for the movie). Eliza is seen as a foreigner, perhaps a princess, because her English is *too* good.
> In Chinese specifically, English speakers tend to have to be taught tones first, or else their Chinese comes out completely incomprehensible.
I can relate to this. I have a mixed Slovak/Hungarian ancestry, so sometimes Slovak speaking people ask me: "hey, I heard that you speak Hungarian, could you tell me what XYZ means?" and they just say something that absolutely doesn't ring a bell, and doesn't even sound like Hungarian at all. But when they write it down (if they also saw it written) it often turns out to be something very simple.
And it probably seems like I'm showing off when I correct their pronunciation, but the fact is that if you say the Hungarian words using the Slovak accent, my brain just fails to parse it. From the opposite perspective, they think that I am nitpicking, and they swear that "ö" and "e" sound exactly the same; also "ü" and "i". Well, it sounds completely different to me; and if you replace one with the other, the word just doesn't make sense.
(It is even more mysterious to me, because those people often learned German at school, and German also has the "ö" and "ü" sounds. Were they pronouncing them also incorrectly at school? Did no one correct them? Or maybe the German language is more resilient against replacing the wovels? No idea, I don't speak German. Or maybe to the teacher it also sounded the same... which probably should not surprise me.)
Also if teaching a baby a language early is measurably better than later, can we teach a baby sign language? If the language learning bottleneck is voice, can we use hands?
Yes, this is a thing that has been done; I don't think is the study I saw initially about it but it goes into additional detail about it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1868823/
Children who grow up in an environment where a sign language is used learn it as a native language. I have never heard that they would somehow learn to express themselves more quickly, but I don’t know much about it.
This is definitely a trendy thing in some social circles: https://babysignlanguage.com/
Anecdotally, it does seem to work.
I know several parents that have had success with this: it's less frustrating for both the parents and the child if it can tell you *why* it's upset and what it wants you to do, rather than just crying until you figure it out.
In a couple of cases the child was reluctant to move from sign to words, since they were already able to communicate, but nudging from the parents ("you can only have what you're asking for if you ask for it out loud") did the trick in the end.
It's already been mentioned in several comments, but the common thread that seems to be getting overlooked here is that children, as a group, are operating in a reliably different learning context than their adult counterparts. I'm going to summarize the effect as being because, as a kid, it's your job to learn and, the younger you are, the more true this is.
It's just difficult to boil that down to a small set of metrics to measure the effect.
Related: https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity?language=en
True. Young children are exploring their world and the language they find there. As Vygotsky noted, language learning is tied up with active perceptual and behavioral exploration of the physical environment, something which adults are generally done with by adulthood.
Morten Christiansen and others have argued that languages evolve to be easy for young children to learn, i.e., they have adapted to the population they need to "infect." Whether this makes them harder for adults to learn is not known AFAIK.
I speak excellent Spanish, mostly acquired as an adult by immersion in a couple of almost English free environments. My pronunciation and syntax will never be mistaken for a native speaker and although I understand grammatical gender perfectly, I cannot consistently make the correct reference. My daughters who grew up in a mixed Spanish-English home have native-language facility in both acquired in exactly the same amount of time. "How quickly" is not exactly the right question.
My girlfriend has been an English tutor for Russians. She's worked with both adults and kids. This experience made her confident that "children learn language faster" is a total myth. Children are stupider, less able to concentrate and pay attention, often forget things that they have just studied. Whatever advantage they have due to their brain placticity, it's completely compensated by everything else.
That's learning in a classroom environment, though. Stick me in a second language class, pull out the parts of grammar, and I'm going to be wabba-wabba as bad as the dumb, distracted, forgetful kids.
Her dumb kids managed to learn Russian - a grammatically complex language, I am given to understand - in three years to a level of fluency that went from babbling as a baby to speaking clearly and intelligibly. I don't think any of us learned our mother tongues by our parents going "Okay baby, this is a noun".
I think there is a meaningful difference between personal tuition and classroom environment. As I said she had a control group, as she taught both adults and children.
Children spend multiple years to learn their first language while being emerged into it 24/7. For the same timespan, adults can learn a second language while practising an hour or two a day.
I think the critical period for phonemic perception is probably more real than this indicates - possibly not that it's absolute, but at least that "learning" strange phonemes is incomparably harder . My experience with linguist geek friends in the con-lang world is that you can be coached to articulate whatever phoneme, but coaching efficacy plateaus when you can't hear the difference between the target phoneme and other nearby phonemes. Experiments that focus on accent (phoneme production) are missing this, and that's reasonable because the overwhelming majority of phonemes in dominant languages (which people are learning in experiment-tractable quantities) are pretty straightforwardly aurally perceptible, but con-langs get into weirder phoneme qualities.
Anyone that tried learning their 2nd or 3rd or Nth language as an adult knows that there is a big hurdle in acquiring a new language that is accepting that you will speak and think like a child for a long time. We feel frustrated, dumb and are tempted to revert to our native language to recover our self-image of a capable adult, thus squandering our acquisition efforts.
I often feel extremely frustrated communicating in English (my 3rd language). Even writing this post is a little painful; I'm much more eloquent in my head, and in my native language, than this!
Maybe because children don't have the same crystalized self-image as adults they will just soldier through the middle stages of a second language acquisition which is when adults often become frustated and lose motivation.
Yes, this is very important. Adults can be surprisingly stubborn about how they "shouldn't" practice something (often: the accent), because according to them it shouldn't matter -- the important thing is that they memorized the words from the dictionary, and of course the speakers of the other language should forgive them a little imperfection.
Which is ironic, that someone willing to memorize over 1000 words refuses to learn those 5 phonemes that are most different between their first and second languages. (Like, sometimes many phonemes are a little different, but 3 or 5 of them make the 80% or 90% of the overall difference. So just learn those, and ignore the rest.)
But it makes perfect sense from the status perspective. Learning words from dictionary is what adults do. Practicing speaking the vowels with the right accent is what babies do.
That's not how I experienced never learning the right accent.
Dictionary words kind of just stick on their own. You read them, you define them, you use them in writing, and then you naturally remember them. Accents aren't like that.
I tried those classes on tape, in college. I remember doing exercises where I went from AAAA to EEEE and back, and something about producing my AAAAs from somewhere in the middle of my mouth. Like, whut?
I asked people to correct my pronunciation, and it was frustrating for both sides. "Say cat." "Caht." "No, more like cAAAAt." "Caut. Cut. Caet. Cet." "cAAAAAAAAAAAAAt." "KEEEEEEEEEEET! It all sounds frigging same to me!" "No, you're getting better at it, just keep on practicing."
I've never worked with an actual teacher. Where do you even get an actual teacher? I can't imagine it's cheap, either. At one point, I had an idea to go to one of those call centers in India because supposedly they teach local US accents to Indians in high end customer support call centers. But then I heard Indians in high end customer support call centers and perished the thought.
I agree that it is frustrating. Unlike learning the dictionary, where you are free to choose whatever technique works for you best.
> Where do you even get an actual teacher?
At school -- depending on country, learning foreign languages can be a part of the curriculum (although sometimes the language *you* want to learn is not among the options your school provides).
As an adult -- this really depends on your location; I would try googling for "learn X in MY_CITY". Also depends on what language you want to learn; it is easier to find teachers for languages with more speakers. If it is a rare language, you might try to find something else related to the language, for example a restaurant, and just ask there if they know any teacher; you might get lucky. (My wife actually got a few free lessons in Korean, after she told a lady in an exotic shop that she likes their culture. The lady offered free lessons, my wife brought some of her friends, and they had about five lessons together. Then we were singing "gom se mari ga" at home.)
> I can't imagine it's cheap, either.
Cheaper in groups than individually, but yeah.
Had to skim the article so I could get to work, but I am a speech language pathologist. As well as making some of the points Scott makes (Adults who have no language exposure don't develop language fully, the deadline for a native speaker accent is puberty) my professors also argued that early language intervention for kiddos with delays and disorders actually saves money by reducing later services that child will need.
"my professors also argued that early language intervention for kiddos with delays and disorders actually saves money by reducing later services that child will need."
I've become an evangelist on this since working in an early intervention centre, particularly since coming from a DEIS school in a previous job 😁
In the secondary school, incoming kids were 12 and may have been first assessed upon applying/may have been on waiting lists for assessments with school child psychologist during primary school. For some kids, waiting until that age to get them any kind of service/treatment is too damn late, and you're just trying to play catch up and do what you can for the kid.
Ireland for a long time didn't have any money to spend on the likes of this, even if we wanted, and maybe we didn't want. That attitude, thank God, has changed and now the value of early intervention is known, and there are supports out there for parents and programmes.
The early intervention service caters for children aged 2-5 (the idea is to get them ready for mainstream education) and boy does it make a difference. I've seen over and over kids developing and changing in a way you can *tell* is a huge improvement. Parents are delighted with progress being made. Sometimes it's not going to be a huge amount of improvement, but the earlier the better. Seriously. Waiting even months at that age means retarding progress, and the money and resources you invest *now* does indeed save down the line when more extensive intervention would be needed.
I am glad you see evidence of this in the field! I am new, so I have seen anecdotal evidence to support that, but I always had it in the back of my mind "Will this kid just catch up without all these intensive services?"
Except augmentative and alternative communication. I have seen too many bad things happen if you wait too long to intro that!!
Oh yeah, it's a centre for kids with additional needs who get referred by the specialist team. Everything from speech and language delay, developmental delay, Downs Syndrome, wheelchair users. They have one-to-one with an assigned case worker as well as the therapy plan drawn up by the team.
I've seen it again and again, kids starting who are withdrawn and even non-verbal, and then after a while they come out of their shells, make friends, start speaking, start initiating interactions themselves (e.g. say "hello" without prompting) and really showing a difference in how they used to be.
The first year I worked there was one particular case where the parents couldn't stop praising the centre; their child was non-verbal and was getting the one-to-one attention until one day in the shopping centre they asked for 'ice cream' of their own accord. The parents couldn't believe it, kept asking the kid at home and in other places questions and what did they want and did they want this or that and the kid was slowly starting to use words, and eventually ended up a confident little chatterbox who blossomed and interacted happily with others. Real big difference, and early intervention makes a genuine improvement.
Sometimes it will only be a small improvement, depending on what the child's difficulties are and their capacities, but even a small improvement is noticeable.
EDIT: There's a modified form of sign language which is used as well for the very young children and the ones who have speech and language delays:
https://www.lamh.org/
Some kids are just shyer and take a little longer to hit the developmental milestones, and they'll be the ones who "catch up without all these intensive services", but they are also the ones who aren't going to be referred by the specialist teams because they don't need that level of intervention. The ones who do, if you leave it too long or ignore it hoping they'll 'grow out of it', will be the ones losing out and falling behind.
I became friendly acquaintances with a woman from Russia who had moved to America with her husband and child. They liked it here, especially the shopping (Costco! She couldn't believe I had never been and insisted on taking me). Not exactly consumerism in the American "house proud" way, though. They lived a bit like college students, and indeed she retained an idealistic peacenik quality, the one thread remaining of "Communist youth". They were very bright - he though not having even owned a car in his life, quickly got into racing, I'm not sure what you call that sport - where you work on the car in your driveway, souping it up, then put it on a trailer and drive to races. He had a successful global business. I had the impression that though they had left with official imprimatur, even for the cat, after awhile it was not strictly advisable for them to return and I think they did so but once.
He never *seemed* to become very comfortable in English, though his taciturnity in my presence made it hard to tell. He may have found Americans (me) banal, and thus not bothered to reveal his comprehension outside of business.
The daughter thrived in school and was almost unimaginably quickly fluent in both language and kid culture.
My friend was interesting, though. Rarely pausing, when she spoke, though that may have been partly frustration borne of the language barrier - our conversations were generally sort of one way. I don't think she ever asked what my husband did for a living, for example, though it actually would have interested her, given what I soon learned were her sympathies. Maybe it was my fault. I *am* a good listener, eager to scavenge other people's lives, and it can be like undamming a stream. She was overflowing with things to say, me trying to unlock the meaning. (The other two would have moved on with an air of, this is boring, Mom, can we go?) What I found fascinating was that she routinely went to the library, from the very first, and checked out books that I would categorize as "difficult" in terms of reading level. Despite being scarcely able to utter a sentence and having learned no English in school. There was a used book store too which she pillaged in a way that suggested books had not been so surplus in Russia. She took home armloads, and read them. Once she came and fed my cat while we were away on vacation, and when I returned I found I had a new copy of "Master and Margarita" because for some reason she knew she didn't like the translation on my shelf.
(I didn't much like M&M, found it a bit of a mess, especially the last third, but keep it as a memento.)
But throughout our years of acquaintance, our conversations never fully evolved from pantomime and guesswork and misapprehension.
Once, for instance, I had casually asked her the name of the town she was from.
I became almost exasperated when despite a torrent of words five minutes later I still didn't have the name of her town.
Five minutes after that, she was chalk-rock drawing a map of the Soviet Union and I was beginning to understand the nature of her parent's work. "So *not* medicine, and the town had no name ...?"
I moved away and miss our " chats". (Though before that he'd rather improbably taught her to drive and bought her a German luxury sedan, and, American style, she ceased walking and biking everywhere.) She mentioned very early on - indicating the houses all shut up, TV screens flashing, that I was the only person in the neighborhood who did what was customary back home in the evening: stroll about the streets at leisure, ready to talk at length with people.
I guess I miss Russia.
Hi Scott - did anyone contact you regarding the "Language Learning" idea posted on Reddit a few weeks ago? I've been trying it out on Don Quixote, but I'm 1) the world's least qualified person to implement it and 2) very slow at doing anything.
I'd still be interested in hearing your more complete thoughts.
I suppose I'm now in the minority, at least among admirers of Scott, in thinking that "Critical Periods For Languages" include those distinguishing abbreviations such as "et al." and "e.g." from entire words. Omission of the periods is a mental speed bump for me as a reader. On QWERTY keyboards, the period is easy to type.
For whatever it’s worth I’m a 32 year old who has been learning Chinese for almost exactly two years. I study about 20-30 hours a week. It’s remarkable how much easier it is to learn to read than it is to hear and speak.
I have no way of knowing for sure but I guess I’d estimate my CEFR level is around B2. I don’t have any particular reason to doubt I’ll be functionally fluent in the next two or three years at this pace. The Chinese people I speak to on italki and Preply tell me my progress has been pretty fast and I sound fine but honestly I have no way of knowing whether they’re just being kind.
I wish you would’ve spent some time exploring the effect of IQ on language learning. There’s some interesting research on this topic but I think it would be a fun topic to read your thoughts on.
As an aside: my experience has led me to doubt the idea of “critical periods” in language acquisition. Maybe there’s just a subset of the population that’s more or less talented at this, and I’m closer to that group than others, but one strong intuition this process has given me is that language is just a thing you can learn. With enough determination, there’s no reason you (or at least I) couldn’t acquire a high level of proficiency in any language.
Another aside: I wish there was more research on polyglots.
A third aside: you know how there are some people who can just do accents and voices? Like they’re just good at imitation? I think this skill is literally identical to the development of a better accent in your target language.
Not sure if someone addressed this, but learning a language after 30 is harder because your *entire life* is more “solidified”, for lack of a better term, in many ways that make it hard to drop everything and immerse yourself. I studied Russian and made little progress until my abroad semester, where my ability improved dramatically. But I was 20, and the important thing here may not have been my brain but being in a place in life where I was both able and expected to drop everything and devote myself fully to language learning. My programs also had tutors paid to talk to me.
After 25 most people don’t have those kinds of opportunities. At 30 I moved to the Netherlands, and noted that the only Americans I observed becoming genuinely fluent in Dutch had lived with Dutch partners, usually in their 20s. At 30 I had already met my (also American) husband. I had a job and faced the general difficulty 30-somethings feel in meeting new friends in new cities. The Dutch 30-somethings typically *had* enough friends and family to make them too busy to spend too much time with me, definitely not the kind of time where they might want to struggle through coaching me in halting Dutch. I paid for lessons, but only got so far.
At 40, with all of the above compounded by children and a home, it’s a wonder anyone even tries to put in the kind of effort needed to get proficient in another language. It might have less to do with our brains and a lot more to do with the shape of our lives.
Getting a native accent is a combination of listening, to yourself and others, and phonological competence. By phonological competence I mean the ability and awareness to make your organs of speech do new things.
I got to native accent in Japanese as an English speaker by recording myself, and a phonology class I took in college gave me the phonological competence to change my accent to sound more native. There are good resources about how to physically make the sounds of different languages, it's fun to stretch and exercise youf organs of speech so you can make them.
In the opposite direction, the video of rugby coach Ronan O'Gara giving a team talk in Cork-accented French:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/video/2023/aug/11/ronan-ogaras-expletive-laden-irish-french-rugby-union-team-talk-goes-viral-video
"Older research on this topic focused on feral children like Genie, who had been abandoned or abused and so never learned language. They had a hard time learning language even after being reintegrated into society; most never succeeded. But skeptics argued these children had lots of other problems besides lack of language exposure; maybe the abuse and neglect damaged their brains."
With Genie, a complication factor is that she might already have been mentally retarded before her abuse. From Wikipedia: "When she was 14 months old, she came down with a fever and pneumonitis, and her parents took her to a pediatrician who had not previously seen her. The pediatrician said that, although her illness prevented a definitive diagnosis, there was a possibility that she was mentally retarded and that the brain dysfunction kernicterus might be present, further amplifying her father's conclusion that she was severely retarded.[30][10][33]"
In fact, the conclusion that she was mentally retarded was partially why he started abusing and neglecting her.
Genie was also punished severely for trying to speak during her captivity, which might have conditioned her to avoid speaking even afterwards: "Researchers concluded that, if Genie vocalized or made any other noise, her father would beat her with a large plank that he kept in her room."
I think the missing element here is the incentives. Kids and teenagers are incredibly social. Some of these friendships will become life long bonds. They have a very high natural incentive to communicate well with peers, especially if they are new to the country and suddenly immersed in school and other native social life. Adults, however, only have an incentive to learn enough language to get by. Adults in general don't make as many new friends as children. They have an incentive to learn enough to be productive at work, but even that may be within a immigrant community where they can speak their native language part or most of the time. An adult all alone probably could learn as well as children if they had no choice, but in most cases the incentive is much weaker than for children.
"Meanwhile, 36-month-old Spanish children will still be barely saying their first complete sentences. Advantage: adults!"
This... doesn't match up with my experience around 3 year olds? I used to work in childcare and have known many. By that age, I can speak to most kids the same way I would speak to an adult in normal conversation (unless they've been raised on baby-talk...).
Especially if you give them a year to account for the fact their mouths are still forming and compare against 4 year olds, I'd assume higher level of fluency in the child than an adult with 900 hours practice 9/10 times.
But aren't the children being exposed to the language a lot more than 900 hours in 4 years? That's about 40min / day on average.
Yeah they probably are; just referencing Scott’s direct comparison of three year olds to the table shown
Hi Scott!
It was a pleasure to see me linked in your newsletter this morning, even if it was just to disagree!
I'll admit I was a bit sloppy with the citations in the aforementioned essay. My context for the "adults seem to learn faster, but plateau earlier" comes from Lightbrown and Spada's How Languages are Learned (p. 165):
"In 1978, Catherine Snow and Marian Hoefnagel-Höhle published a study on a group of English speakers who were learning Dutch as a second language while living in the Netherlands. The learners included children as young as three years old as well as older children, adolescents, and adults. On tests administered when learners had been in the country for less than a year, adolescents were by far the most successful learners. They were ahead of everyone on nearly all of the tests. Furthermore, it was the adults, not the children, whose scores were second best. In other words, adolescents and adults learned faster than children in the first few months of exposure to Dutch."
And in Second Language Acquisition Myths, by Steven Brown and Jennifer Larson-Hall, the authors' #1 myth is "Children Learn Languages Quickly and Easily While Adults are Ineffective in Comparison." I take this as evidence that at least a substantial fraction of the SLA expert community believes that adult learning *speed* isn't slower than children, if we hold the environment and method of acquisition constant.
I'm not an SLA researcher myself, but from reading a few survey books on the topic, my sense is that this is a widely held view, if not universal among experts.
The problem I have had with acquiring fluency in other languages is that I think in English. I dream in English. My internal monologue is in English. Thus any other language I learn is halting to speak (though less to read) because it requires a mechanical internal translation process. I suspect those mental processes become calcified with age, even if the actual memorization and grammatical proficiency stay the same or improve. I can learn pronunciation moderately well, but actually speaking at a normal rate is the limiting factor due to my thoughts. I suppose immersion may be the only possible remedy, but I'm a little skeptical even of that. I once asked my cousin, a Frenchman who emigrated to the U.S. in college over 40 years ago (still has a pronounced accent though entirely fluent), whether he thinks and dreams in English or French. He said still mostly French, with just a smattering of English words.
Yes, there is a moment when your internal monologue switches to the other language. I think this is partially when you learn linking the foreign words *directly* to the concepts they represent (as opposed to their verbal translations). Like, instead of looking at an apple and thinking "this in an apple, that is 'une pomme' in French", you simply look at the apple and say internally "une pomme".
And the other part is that your "inner GPT" trains on the foreign language sufficiently so that instead of translating word by word, you just occasionally generate a sequence of words (that follow each other with high probability) before you even realize what you are doing.
I imagine that you could actually train yourself to do the former. For the moment, ignore the abstract words, and only take those that can be represented by a simple picture (such as "apple" or "dog"). Make the pictures. Then pick a random picture and say the French word as fast as possible. Associate the French words with the pictures, not with the corresponding English words.
I presume it can be done eventually, at least in some circumstances; but I think that specific process - decoupling the internal monologue etc. - is easier for kids than adults. Scott's piece suggests that adults are better or equal at the mechanics (memorization, etc.) and is confused why that doesn't translate (heh) to better fluency overall. But the thinking-in-a-language process may well be more fluid in younger children, accounting for the fluency advantage.
I didn’t start learning a second language till I was in my thirties. By that time 10 years of exposure to mining noise had caused some moderate hearing loss. There were some Russian phonemes that I just couldn’t distinguish. I was terrible at pronunciation but clever enough with the grammar that I managed to hold my own
It’s a pretty major regret that I’ve remained more or less monolingual all my life but I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate…
Oh wait, that was Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. Never mind.
I do like to hail the usually Hispanic building crews working in my neighborhood with a cheery “Oye como va!” though.
If they mistakenly think I actually speak Spanish I have to pull out my only other canned phrase.
“Ese y lo que estoy diciendo ahora son el único idioma español que conozco.”
If they know enough English, we might go on talk about how much I love Carlos Santana’s cover of the Tito Puente cha cha cha classic.
>There were some Russian phonemes that I just couldn’t distinguish
Curious, what were they?
ы in particular. You can say ты 5 times and I’m going to hear twee at least 4 times.
Even the seemingly straightforward vowel in пять. I know it’s not supposed to rhyme with yacht but that’s how it seems to come out of my mouth.
OK, ы/и etc. I understand, English native speakers don't do soft/hard the same way etc.
But пять… I mean, it does rhyme with Yacht, but with the German one… But isn't yarn/yacht vowel difference rather similar to пять / Пётр ?
Okay, I put my headphones on and пять does kind of rhyme with yacht. Without it being channeled right into my ear I tend to hear it as something like ‘peat’.
Like I mentioned, I do have moderated hearing loss. I minored in Linguistics as an undergrad but I lacked a crucial ability to take that any further. At least in hearing/speaking environment. Give me 25 grammatical cases in print and I’m all over it, but these days I watch English language films with the closed captions on.
If I’m going to be in a noisy restaurant or similar environment I put my hearing aids in.
During my mining stint out of high school the old timers told the newbies that hearing protection wasn’t really necessary because “You’ll get used to the noise and after a while it won’t bother you.” They were kind of right I guess. You could get used to it but at the cost of hearing loss.
This was in the early days of OSHA before mandatory hearing protection was aggressively enforced.
"This doesn’t seem to match experiment, where the “critical period” for having a perfect accent lasts until age 10 - 12. Also, sometimes talented people who try really hard can have good pronunciation even if they start after that time."
My mother emigrated to the US from Ukraine in 1935 when she was 12 years 11 months old. They went directly to the small town in southeastern Ohio where her uncle lived and owned a couple of prosperous businesses. She went to public school in that town.
When she arrived she did not know any English. She spoke, read, and wrote Russian and could understand and speak Yiddish. She had never been exposed to any language that used the Latin Alphabet.
She was placed in first grade in her public school when she arrived, but graduated high school on time. She went to Ohio State, majored in Chemistry, received a BS, and married my father (a strictly monolingual American who had no interest in or aptitude for foreign languages). They stayed in Ohio where my two brothers and I were borne and raised. She never spoke to us in Russian nor did she attempt to teach us Russian.
In the late 1950s, Ohio State, like other R1 universities began a program in Slavic Studies (Cold War I, people). My mother enrolled in the program and earned a PhD. She thereafter taught Russian language and Russian civilization to undergraduates. Beyond her dissertation she did no academic writing, but she did do public outreach work for the Slavic department via a weekly radio show.
How good was her English? It was almost perfect General American. She could teach college courses and do radio programs in Ohio with out being misunderstood. The only trace of an accent was in the pronunciation of certain words. E.g. the oo in book came out more like boot than like look.
Her brother, who was 6 years younger than she was (6 when he emigrated), had no accent different than the Americans who grew up in the Ohio town where he went to school.
Effort and teaching have a lot to do with it. Hugh Laurie who played Dr. House on TV for 8 seasons with an impeccable American accent, was born in Oxford England, went to university at Cambridge, and played the ultimate upper class English twit Bertie Wooster in the Jeeves TV series. Daniel Craig, who played James Bond in several 007 movies. When he played a detective from the southern US in the first Knives Out movie his accent was unrecognizable. He was better in the 2nd one.
I recall Letterman asking Emma Watson about being able to turn on a standard American English accent at will. “It’s called acting, Dave.” was her response.
Or have you ever heard Matthew Rhys speak in a non acting situation? His mother tongue Welch accent is way, way different than his American English.
> “It’s called acting, Dave.”
That reminds me, I heard people recommend to "act" when you learn a foreign language. Like, if you learn Japanese, pretend that you are a ninja. (The sillier, the better. Make it playful.)
I suppose this removes some emotional obstacle. Like, with accent, I think people naturally do too little of it, perhaps because it feels embarrassing. But when you pretend to be a ninja or whatever, you try to exaggerate everything. Later you tone it down and it's perfect. (Also, if it is fun, it is easier to remember.)
Accents involve the use of specific muscles, so those, at least, are acquired young and are hard to change.
I think in part the advantage of youth may come down to opportunity. My family moved to a Spanish speaking country for 2 years, during which time my 6 year old attended a local, all-Spanish school. By the end of the two years she sounded just like a local. At this point I had been studying Spanish for about 15 years, having started in my 20s, and she now spoke better than me.
Besides her age, the other big difference between us was that she got to spend 7 hours a day, 5 days per week, completely immersed in Spanish. The most I ever got was an hour of class a couple times a week, a few passing conversations during the week, and 3-4 continuous hours on the weekends - I worked in English the entire time.
But during my time living in Spanish speaking countries I met two adults who had started learning in their 20s who sounded just like local speakers (according to locals). One of them went to a Spanish speaking college full time for 5 years, and the other worked in a Spanish speaking office for around 8, so they both had tons of exposure. I think the older you get, the more likely it is your life and livelihood are kind of stuck in your native language, and the harder it gets to absorb many hours of a new language.
Remember Franzisco Pizzaro's first expedition to South America picked up few boys so they would pick up Spanish quickly and serve as interpreters for future second expedition, an important implication of the theory. (Note that Incas failed to use the Spanish they captured, and sacrificed them instead)
> if you try to teach adults and children the same fake language, adults learn faster whether it’s taught implicitly or explicitly.
This seems to be explained than fake languages are designed by adults and natural languages evolve, shaped by our biological instinct, largely in critical period (many grammar or morphology features that a programmer could have invented, wouldn't stick. yes, there's a problem with conlangs that features don't "stick"), so natural languages are easier for children who are in critical period.
I have to imagine there are some studies coming out of places that focus solely on adult language learners and intensive language training, such as the Foreign Service Institute (U.S. State Department) or Defense Language Institute (U.S. Military), that could inform this question some more. These organizations have a mandate to teach languages to professional proficiency in a defined amount of time. There should be some differences in results as well, as I believe the students attending DLI have already been evaluated for language learning ability while students at FSI have not - they are "forced" to learn a language regardless of their evaluated "ability to learn."
Here's a study on how personality differences affected results at FSI, for example: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1995-09432-001
Regarding the tension in accent/pronunciation critical windows of months-old vs 12ish-yo, it seems to me like both can be true: it can be that you do start out capable of distinguishing all phonemes, lose "unused" ones within months, but are able to "recover" most of them until a later age.
My own anecdotal experience supports this in that I was unable to distinguish the sounds of b/v until I learnt how to write, but was then able to painstakingly learn this distinction (probably around age 5-6)
Regarding the tension in accent/pronunciation critical windows of months-old vs 12ish-yo, it seems to me like both can be true: it can be that you do start out capable of distinguishing all phonemes, lose "unused" ones within months, but are able to "recover" most of them until a later age.
My own anecdotal experience supports this in that I was unable to distinguish the sounds of b/v until I learnt how to write, but was then able to painstakingly learn this distinction (probably around age 5-6)Q
This is really interesting, bearing in mind that language acquisition isn't the only "critical window" theory out there. Basically any stage theory of the development of a psychological trait will include critical periods. An important one is the Schema theory of intellectual development by Jean Piaget. Schema theory informed Prototype Theory, one of the leading theories regarding how human beings learn and encode information into the Long Term Memory. A schema is a method of actively searching out specific types of information in one's environment, which then forms the basis of what types of categories and concepts one has. Piaget proposed that children begin learning by actively seeking out sensori-motor schema (give a baby an object and they will put it in their mouths, then throw it at the wall). When they pass through this stage they enter the next one, which uses a different set of schemas.
Language, at least to my understanding, is supposed to develop the same way. Babies learn to discriminate between phonemes before they can emit them, they babble using phonemes they hear the adults using around them before they can speak single words, single words before simple two word sentences, etc.
Each of these stages functions much like a critical window, in that an individual must master the earlier stage to some minimum level before they have the skills to even begin the next stage. All this is supposed to be based on brain development, which doesn't occur evenly and incrementally, but in spurts, by different regions.
But whether young children have some sort of advantage over adults in acquiring these sets of skills isn't actually predicted by Piaget's theory, at least to my recollection. Perhaps brain plasticity declines with age?
Children also have an enormous comparative advantage in learning language i think. This is not the question that everyone asks but is probably more important in making life choices.
If you take school as a given, i think its clear doing immersion languages is way more productive than most other things a school might realistically be capable of.
And as an adult there are many useful skills other than language you could spend three years honing that you have the prereqs for but children dont.
Why do so many native English speaker believe that learning languages is important? They don't have to learn any language. The world already speaks theirs.
I'm asking this as someone who speaks English as a second language. Had it been my first, I never would have taken the trouble to learn another.
I imagine it can make traveling to another country a more intense experience. Local people are probably more spontaneous in their native language; you do not signal "I am a rich tourist" at shops, etc.
Is this worth the effort spent to learn the language? Probably not. Unless you are really obsessed with some specific foreign country and plan to spend a lot of time there. (Maybe you have some relatives there.)
Then again, people have different talents. For some, learning languages may be very easy.
A very long while ago, when I was studying psycholinguistics and language acquisition, I remember reading that a very young child acquiring their first language is actually learning about the world -- they are learning to categorize the things they see and experience, put them into similar groups, distinguish among non-similar groups and make connections between things. The way they do this is through language: they name things and concepts and the links between things and concepts. This is the related to why children seem to learn language slower than adults. Children are not just learning language; they're learning about the world at the same time. Adults have already learned about the world so learning language is just putting new labels[1] onto things they're already learned about when they acquired their first language.
[1] I don't mean to imply that learning a foreign language is just a matter of memorizing vocabulary. Of course, it's much more complicated that that.
The first time you learn a programming language, you are learning programming. The second time , you are just learning a language.
What about the phenomenon where adult learners tend to forget languages as soon as they stop using them (though they come back with use), while they remain constantly available to child learners?
What do you mean? I've forgotten large chunks of the first language I learned.
There does seem to be strong evidence for a "critical period" for first language acquisition in early childhood. Cases like Chelsea and Genie suggest a lack of early language exposure leads to permanent deficiencies in grammar and fluency. For second languages, the picture is more complex. Adults and older children can learn quickly in the short term due to their more developed explicit learning abilities. But long-term, older learners plateau at lower proficiency levels.
Children can develop perfect pitch while adults can’t. The best adults can do is learn relative pitch really well. Can’t help but think there is something similar going on with language acquisition/accent as well.
Does anyone know if the old Valproate studies have been reproduced?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/
I wonder if there are two effects going on. The first is biological, your brain gets old.
The second is social/exposure. In high school there is a lot of pressure to fit in, and probably not many if any immigrants who speak your native language so you probably end up listening to American music, watching American tv, and spending time talking to American friends.
College is a less communal experience that is typically large enough to have enough foreign students you can hang out with. So you get far less exposure to American culture and language.
One very important factor is how eager your interlocutors are to teach you their language. Obviously parents are extremely motivated here -- you're their child, and they want to communicate with you! But as an adult learner, I found it easier (and more fun) to learn Hungarian, where they were delighted to see me struggling with their language, than German, where they just switched to English at the first sign of difficulty.
Tangentially, it appears that for learning "perfect pitch" (as commonly known), there IS a critical period, and more tantalizingly, that period can be re-opened with certain drugs!
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.00102/full
Warning, anecdata incoming: I am a fully proficient (C2) English speaker. I have learned English in primary and high school and I am using it at work daily. My son spent three years (5yo to 8yo) in the USA and he is fully bilingual. I definitely see a qualitative difference between us. For me, speaking English is more effort even when I am doing it fluently. For him there is no difference. For example, I have to explicitly listen to understand lyrics in a song in English, while it just happens in the background for a song in my primary language. For my son, both languages are processed in the background.
This was a great post, but I looked at this guy’s list and I annoyed by #4. “The world around us is explained entirely by physics”. This might be trivially true in the sense that fundamental physics describes the basic stuff of which the world is made up of, but by that logic so does Democritus’s theory of atoms. Tell me how the standard model explains the specific behavior biological organisms (let alone human society) in a way that doesn’t render the word “explain” pretty much meaningless?
Adults are extremely unlikely to get a native accent, and they may plateau around 99.9% on grammar. But they can otherwise get good enough to do university-level work or hold down a white collar job. Adults can also massively outperform children who are raised from birth in bilingual households, but who are otherwise living in a monolingual community.
Most people, child or adult, learn exactly as much as they need to function.
Source: I learned French in my 30s, and I have a certificate from the French government which says I'm tolerably good at it—good enough to go to a French speaking university, at least. I personally know other adults who worked even harder and who are officially qualified to go to law school. After that level or proficiency, the French government stops testing.
One thing that children have a big advantage on is a fully native accent. That window starts closing around 6, and is gone for virtually everyone by 10 or 12. The other thing that children have an advantage on is the last, say, 0.1% of grammatical accuracy. Even extremely good non-native French speakers make a higher level of gender errors than natives. (There's a super neat paper on this but it's in French.)
But if you'd be happy merely being able to take university classes or work a white collar job, then that's a totally achieveable goal. For fun, I've done long pair-programming sessions in French and it's totally doable.
Schooling from age 12-21 is one critical factor. You're required to read, to interact with your peers, and to write. All of those term papers and dorm-room bull sessions make a huge difference. And of course, that many years of schooling will build you a peer group of native speakers.
Where most adults fail is that they build themselves a "native-language bubble" and only leave it when forced to do so. Learning a language to a high level is hard work. Never underestimate the ability of a resourceful adult to avoid doing that work.
My main challenge in my 40s is keeping my academic French alive. I simply don't use it enough. My "household" French is entirely automatic and doesn't really feel much different than my English at this point.
Interestingly, the "bubble" technique works in reverse. You can build a bubble of your target language. And most rapid learning techniques do some variation of this. Once all other possibilities are exhausted, adult brains will finally give in and learn the damn language.
The key question is one of goals: Do you want to be statistically indistinguishable from an educated native adult? Or would you be happy being able to do professional work, socialize easily, and maybe even give an entertaining presentation? All of the latter are achievable, at a price.
Have I invented this, or did I read the headline findings of a study which said that kids who grow up bilingual turn out practically immune to Alzheimer's? Or it may have been Parkinson's.
I knew a family with two kids who were quad lingual. English, Urdu, Farsi and French.
This was a good post, but it should be pointed out that you clipped the quote in a somewhat misleading manner. The full belief in the original post is "Children don’t learn languages faster than adults, but they do reach higher levels of mastery." This neatly sums up the issue and the last part is just as relevant when making educational choices. Far more dubious is point 5, The reason that calorie-based dieting doesn't work isn't because 'your brain has specific neural circuitry designed to avoid starvation and, by extension, any rapid weight-loss'. It's relatively easy for fat people to lose weight fast. What they struggle to do is not to put this weight back on straight away after they stop starving themselves and this is fundamentally a hormone imbalance issue.
I feel like this seriously misinterprets the main claims about the "additional magic language ability" but don't feel the energy to write it up so just register it.
I am related to a man who served in the US army as military intelligence. He got recruited out of college specifically due to his proficiency picking up languages.
He tells me that over his career, he learned 11 different languages, all of which he used to great effect in all his different postings. He also tells me, that he forgot all of them very quickly after he stopped using them.
Meanwhile, I haven’t spoken French except sporadically in 15 years but slip back into it with some very brief rustiness whenever I must speak it. It’s a language I learned in childhood.
Anectodal, but useful