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I am surprised this required research. How is this not obvious ? What's next ? Algebra skills and essay writing? You could pretty much do this research for ever
by nyrulez 10y ago
I am surprised this required research. How is this not obvious ? What's next ? Algebra skills and essay writing? You could pretty much do this research for every thing we ever learn from school to college and publish endless amount of papers.
- tn13 10y agoNo this is not obvious. Throughout human history and even today algebra, writing and reading are hard skills for humans which require years of training to master. Ability to speak however comes very naturally without special training. Human societies independently developed isomorphic grammar. For example Navajo Indians helped American soldiers translate their messages into Navajo and back so Germans wont understand it. This sort of evidence lead scholars like Chomsky to believe that human brain might have some in-built ability aided by evolution to parse some basic grammatical rules.
- dpark 10y ago> Ability to speak however comes very naturally without special training. It literally takes years of practice for children to speak well. Maybe it's natural but we tend to dismiss the difficulty because it happens early. I would think if we had dedicated hardware for grammar subsequent languages wouldn't be so difficult to learn either. It's easier to learn algebra than a second language.
- Xophmeister 10y agoIt is believed that second language acquisition is "harder" than first language for a number of reasons, such as the placidity of the brain crystallising as we age and, potentially, that any special hardware we may have has a finite capacity (because physics). People research this (my wife is doing her PhD on it currently) and the evidence is neither obvious nor conclusive.
- dilemma 10y agoChildren learn language without instruction. That is all. Clearly, there is innate linguistic capability in humans.
- ovulator 10y agoWithout instruction? They are watching people speak for years. They even have people "teach" it to them. Can you say, "Daddy"? While slowing down and enunciating. We are unfortunately very aware that when isolated, kids don't learn to speak. So it isn't innate.
- dpark 10y agoChildren learn to build with magnatiles without instruction. That is all. Clearly, there is innate magnatile building capability in humans.
- delinka 10y agoMy granddaughter (1y 8m) uses flossers without instruction. Clearly, there is innate tooth hygiene in humans. No, what's happening is she's mimicking the adults in the house. She's observing and repeating. She's done the same thing with dolls: put them on her shoulder, pat them, make shushing noises ... because we do that with her; because she see's others do that with other babies. "Instruction"? No. But the only "innate" behaviors this child has involve eating and curiosity. Everything else is spurred by that innate curiosity.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nyrulez 10y agoThen why teach grammar at all if we know kids pick it up naturally? There seems to be a threshold beyond grammer needs to be taught? Or was the hypothesis that there is no such thing.
- accountface 10y agoThere's a difference between formal and conversational grammar
- throwaway2048 10y agoyou dont need to learn "grammar" in school/lessons to know how to speak a language.
- schoen 10y agoLanguage planning/standardization - ensuring prevalence of standard varieties of a language, suppressing non-standard varieties or at least letting people understand how and why they're non-standard (David Foster Wallace wrote a long piece about this in 2001 called "Tense Present" http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-04-0070913.pdf http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0... and there's also a long story about nationalist movements trying to design, and teach, a standard prestige version of their national languages, which does require grammar instruction to create and maintain because it's somewhat different from all or most students' home language varieties) Written vs. spoken language - may have different grammatical norms Non-native speakers - want explicit instruction because they lack native-speaker intuition about some aspects of grammar Appreciating language intellectually - curiosity and appreciation about how your language works, independent of your ability to produce sentences other speakers accept as correct
- schoen 10y agoIn a way, it's the deepest and most perennial controversy in linguistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus But it's hard to present the context of the argument when describing an individual research paper, so maybe the research summary ends up sounding at first like "when they're little, children learn how to speak their languages!", which definitely sounds like "wait, why does someone even bother publishing a paper about that?".
- canjobear 10y agoLearning has to start from some prior or inductive bias. The question is how much knowledge of how language works is built into childrens' innate priors. Chomskyans have typically argued that the innate prior ("universal grammar") gets you almost all the way to understanding language, such that you only have to set a few parameters to get to fluent understanding of a real language.
- nyrulez 10y agoThanks, this makes the most sense to me. The problem more generally stated then for more fields is that how much abstraction do we carry innately and how much must be taught. Applies to math as well. It appears to me that ability to count is innate. But beyond that I don't know what else. Would be great to find out.
- Retra 10y agoI'd disagree that "counting" is innate. The mental recognition of scale and quantity may be innate, but "counting" seems to be a more elaborate matter of embedding scale and quantity recognition into an abstract mental or linguistic framework. That is, to count you need to understand number, but to make decisions about scale and quantity, you don't.
- cristianpascu 10y agoJust today I heard a little girl crying to her father (in romanian): "You are giving!" when she actually meant (by the situation and raised hands) "Give me the toy!".
- a3n 10y agoGod save us from most decisions made because something is obvious (to someone).