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23, and an accountant. I am really interested in
23 Answers foreign languages, but I wonder whether ...

What can adults learn from children?

Maja Burazin, lives in Zagreb, Croatia
Answered May 16, 2017 Which language is the most difficult for people to
Originally Answered: Do scientists understand how children learn their native language, and the ability to learn?
speak, so easily?
How do you usually learn a language?
I am not a scientist, but I'll try to answer this question anyway. It is a great and
Shouldn't the language that most of the world
interesting question.
speaks be called "American" instead of "English"?

Learning to speak comes naturally. Throughout the first year of their How do we study English effectively?

lives children learn to respond to the first sounds around them and their How do Americans (especially children) learn the
parents' voices (later, to all voices they hear). They smile, touch their English language?

parents' faces, they laugh or bring a toy when asked for. They are good What are the best ways to learn foreign
listeners and they're getting used to the sounds and words in their mother languages?

tongue from their birth onwards. Around the first birthday, give or take, How do children and adults learn language
they start to say their first words. Both the interaction between parents and differently?

children and speaking the first words are perfectly natural. Speaking is How do I quickly and efficiently learn a new
natural in the same way as crawling, walking, playing or crying. language?

Learning from copying - children follow the models around them. They Ask New Question

like to copy their family members whatever they're doing. It is a part of the More Related Questions

children's nature. They copy their parents when they are washing the
dishes, mowing the lawn, ironing, you name it. Speaking is also a thing that Question Stats

children copy. Adults cannot copy any of the foreign languages if they don't
87 Public Followers
spend a lot of time with the speakers of that language tv. Learning to speak 15,710 Views
takes time. Last Asked Sep 16

11 Merged Questions
Exposure - no language can be learnt if the learner isn't exposed to the
Edits
language. Children are exposed to their mother tongue all the time. It
means that they are constantly surrounded by speakers of their language.
That's why it is far more difficult to learn a foreign language in a language
school than when being in a foreign country. The problem with all language
schools is that there isn't enough exposure to the language. Lessons are too
short and interrupted by periods when the foreign language is not spoken at
all.

Necessity - one of the reasons that children are so successful learners is

that they need to speak. Therefore they are motivated to learn. They want to
express themselves and ask for the things they see. Seeing a chocolate bar
on the table and asking for it is a good motivator.

No inhibition - children are not ashamed or inhibited when speaking,

unlike many adult foreign language learners. They don't care about making
mistakes and they don't even think about making ones. They only focus on
the content and they feel free to talk the way they like. Even if they are
constantly being corrected by their parents. They will certainly not get
offended by that.

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make a difference between playing with toy cars and speaking. Everything's
fun!

No negative feelings about the language - there is no stress or worries

when it comes to learning a mother tongue. There are no difficult rules,
exceptions to the rules, verb tenses or endings that would case headache.

Fast memory - children learn and remember much faster than adults.

There are more factors that influence children's learning (acquiring) of their mother
tongue, but these are the ones that I think are the most important ones.
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Manuel Aicart, Linguist

Answered Mar 18, 2016

Children around 0-6 acquire the language "through perceptual and affective channels
that become integrated with the limbic system" (Lamendella, 1977; Paradis 1994).
This timeframe is called "critical period".

The critical period (CP) is a transitional process where the organic ability to acquire
a L1 gradually ceases and is replaced by a systematic way which draws on conscious
problem-solving capacities to accomplish the same task (DeKeyser, 2000).

Your first language (L1) is acquired is connected to your body through "an intricate
web of personal memories, images, sensory associations and affective reactions"
(Pavlenko, 2005).

When learning a second language (L2), your mind distributes it across different
neural tissue and calls in for help to other parts of the brain (Petitto, 2009).

In other words, whereas children learn the language as they develop emotionally
with the implication of the limbic system (Lieberman, 2000), adults turn to their
intelligence to accomplish the same task, hence the so many marked individual
differences.

The CP does not mean that adults cannot learn a L2, it just points out the difference
between children's organic vs adults' systematic way of learning a language.

Adults achieve different levels of success in a L2 thanks to a combination of

motivation, hard conscious work, the L1-L2 linguistic distance, and a certain aptitude
for language. Children, on the contrary, will all acquire their L1 to fluency regardless
of those factors.

If adults were hard-wired to learn a L2 "like children" why would they find some
languages harder to learn than others?

Questions around language learning end up in a series of I-can-do-it-and-so-can-you

association fallacies that language learners should beware of.

Related answers:

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If I learn a language starting at age 20 will it always be foreign to my ears

even though I understand it?

How does age correlate with how fast one can learn a language?

How do I develop an emotional connection in a foreign language?

Sources

DeKeyser, R. (2000). The Robustness of Critical Period Effects in Second Language

Acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22, 499–533.

Lamendella, J. (1977). General principles of neurofunctional organization and their

manifestation in primary and secondary language acquisition. Language Learning,
27, 155–196.

Lieberman, P. (2000). Human language and our reptilian brain. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.

Paradis, M. (1994). Neurolinguistic aspects of implicit and explicit memory:

Implications for bilingualism and SLA. In N. Ellis (Ed.), Implicit and Explicit
Learning of Languages (pp. 393–419). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Pavlenko, A. (2005). Emotions and Multilingualism. New York: Cambridge

University Press.

Petitto, L. A. (2009). New discoveries from the bilingual brain and mind across the
life span: Implications for education. Mind, Brain, and Education, 3(4), 185–197.
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Chad Alan, Fashion Photographer | Dorky Dad

Updated May 30, 2017
Originally Answered: Do scientists understand how children learn their native language, and the ability to
speak, so easily?

It’s really crazy, and I don’t have a scientific explanation.

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and powerful. And impressionable.

It takes a huge amount of effort and dedication for adults to become fluent in another
language. It’s a struggle for most.

Kids follow this natural progression with little effort. It just happens. All of a sudden
they can communicate, express emotion, and start learning a second language at the
same time.

Where does this innate ability come from?

And why do we lose it as we grow older?

I’m sure a lot of you with children have experienced some profound wisdom coming
out of your 3 year old’s mouth. Or when a young child with no exposure to religion or
belief structure starts talking about a previous life. It’s kind of creepy actually.

Some kids invent their own language, and are consistent when speaking it. My cousin
had an imaginary playmate that didn’t seem so imaginary.

Having a child of my own has shown me the power of the mind. One moment it’s
fresh and completely empty (or is it?) and the next moment it’s full of knowledge and
wisdom.

Never underestimate a young mind. Whatever they’ve got going for them, I wish it
could be transferred by baby smell. I could smell babies all day.

∞
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Gigi J Wolf
I could smell puppy breath all day. Babies, not so much.

1 more comment from Rebecca Baldwin

Tamara Vardo, PhD in linguistics

Answered May 16, 2017
Originally Answered: Do scientists understand how children learn their native language, and the ability to
speak, so easily?

There is a vast field of research on your primary question; child language acquisition
is a subfield of psycholinguistics that many scientists have made their life’s study. We
know the basics, but there are thousands of nuances and questions that have still not
been resolved, and doubtless plenty more that it hasn’t yet occurred to us to ask until
some bright grad student in search of a project comes along. We have huge databases
of child speech, transcribed and annotated, and ways to crunch the numbers on them
to see patterns.

>When an adult learns a different language, they realize how difficult it is to start
learning a new language. How do children learn their native language with such ease,
and without even realizing they are doing it?

One key factor: kids are doing it every waking minute, and their very survival
depends on them learning. An adult learning a second language, if she is not alone in
a total immersion context, would be doing it for maybe several hours a day at most,
and knows that if she is desperate, she can resort to her first language to talk to
someone or ask for a translation. Adults in immersion contexts have a much harder
time (well, we don’t often appreciate how frustrated and miserable two-year-olds can
be at not being able to express themselves) but learn a lot faster than in the standard
classroom-learning context, and adults who are alone in immersion contexts learn

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There are arguments for a critical period which ends in the teens, before which age
children learn much faster, but there is a lot of debate as to when that critical period
actually ends, and in my opinion, there is too little attention paid to the factors of
time and desperation when discussing second-language vs. first-language learning.
Children who, due usually to horrible child abuse, did not learn their first language
before their teens end up never mastering it —- but these children also have a lot of
other trauma due to the horrible child abuse.
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Ute Clackson
Answered Nov 14, 2017
Originally Answered: How do children acquire a language?

Babies before the age of approx. 6 months do not know much in the way of words but
they are working hard at learning the sounds and melodies of their parents
language(s). My children were growing up bilingually and their babbling was
noticeably different from that of their mono-lingual neighbours.

Then communication with their care giver comes in. The human baby has some
innate skill that will make adults want to talk to them.

Anybody (not just mums) immediately knows how to speak to a baby. All that high-
pitched, repetitive, cute talk. This is just what a baby needs to get hold of the basics.

There is some default grammar making function in the juvenile human brain. The
result is that babies pick up grammar if spoken to with grammar and if they are
talked to without (as happened occasionally to jumbled up worker or refugee
populations) the toddlers will develop their own grammar. You will get a pidgin
language which a few generations down can develop into a creole. (The fact that this
happens is well establish, what exactly happens is subject of research.)

Just leaving the radio on will not do it.

Interaction, communication is extremely important for all aspects of child

development but in the case of language it is particularly obvious.

BTW, language learning carries on for quite a long time. Considering that you’ll know
some 40000 words (mother tongue only) by the time you leave school, on average,
you have to learn 5 per day. This normally slows down a bit in adulthood but not to
zero. I am in my 50s and still keep learning new words (but admittedly in my second
language).

second BTW. In my home country (Germany) often the worry is expressed that
immigrant children don’t learn enough German before starting school. However, on
second sight, it often shows that those children that are proficient speakers in ANY
language soon catch up while those, whose parents had to work and did not have the
time for baby babble fall behind. It therefore turns out that deprivation hampers
development much more than learning to speak in the “wrong” language.

third BTW. Most children are quite capable of picking up 2 (or more) languages
during this period. For this to happen, the parents have to control the language
environment appropriately. Apparently, the brains of such primary bilinguals (like
my children) store language differently to us more common secondary bilinguals
(like myself who started learning my second language at the age of 10) so much so
that it can be made visible in the MFI scanner.

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Heidi Cool, Interested in the history of language.

Answered May 16, 2017
Originally Answered: Do scientists understand how children learn their native language, and the ability to
speak, so easily?

The others have given several excellent answers, and this is clearly something that
scientists continue to explore. Here are some of my non-expert thoughts on the
matter.

I think infants learn language easily because humans are excellent pattern seekers.
Babies have few responsibilities. They can spend their waking hours observing the
world around them, listening, smelling, looking, touching, tasting, etc.

As they observe and collect data they’ll recognize patterns in language and begin
making the connections between sounds and meaning. Their minds aren’t cluttered
with an array of things the way ours are. They’re also still building pathways through
their brain. A baby’s job is basically to survive and then to observe the world and try
to make sense of it. They have few other concerns, so if they are well cared for they
can focus on this task and learn at their own pace.

No one has told them that this should be difficult so they have no self-doubts to
hinder their progress.

You may be interested in the experiment conducted by MIT professor, Deb Roy . He
video and audio taped his child from the moment he brought him home from the
hospital, then had his team analyze the recordings. He shares his insights into what
he discovered about language learning in the video below.

Why I taped my son's childhood

Patricia K. Kuhl, Ph.D. has also done research into early language learning and
shared her knowledge in another Ted Talk, here:

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Svetlana Stroganova
Answered Jul 8

The Innate Grammar System We Are Born With

How does the brain perceive grammar? The famous modern linguist Noam Chomsky
believes that this ability is inherent while other scientists think that we build phases
and sentences based on our experience. What do experiments show?

In the last century, Noam Chomsky suggested that the ability to speak any language
is innate. According to this hypothesis, grammatically correct sentences have
sequences of words that correspond to some abstract structures that exist in our
minds, helping us to recognize linguistic expressions.

According to Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, fundamental grammatical

principles are innate and unchangeable. All people share a language system inherent
from birth. The interaction between this system and an external stimulus, such as
external communication, permits the child’s brain to discern specific properties of a
particular language and to apply this universal system to the perception of this
language. Due to this innate system, children have the ability to quickly learn a
language. Yet children lose this ability as they grow up. The linguist thinks that
understanding a language depends not so much on experience but on the amount of
available grammatical structures that help children to learn new grammar using
external speech. Why only children have the ability to learn native or foreign
languages applying the mechanism of universal grammar is still unknown.

Neuroscientists from New York University, Peking University and the Max Planck
Society have attempted to understand what happens in the brain when it discerns
linguistic units. The researcher’s aim was to determine how the brain distinguishes
among different levels of language organization: words, phrases and sentences. The
subjects heard some words, phrases and sentences that had meaning or no meaning;
at this time, the researchers measured activities of different neuron patterns linked
with speech recognition. The neuroscientists identified activities of certain patterns
each associated with perceiving specific levels of linguistic unit organization (words,
phrases and sentences). The study revealed that the neuron system analyzes all three
levels of the phrases simultaneously, reflecting a natural hierarchy in our neural
processing of linguistic structures. The scientists believe that these results support
the Chomsky’s hypothesis that we are born with an innate grammar system which is
used in the processing of languages.

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http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-pu...

http://www.nature.com/neuro/jour...

See more :

You and Your Cognitive Abilities

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