4 ms·

Critical periods for language

24 points by feross 3y ago

lsy 3y ago
Regarding the drop in learning speed after school, I have a pet theory that primary and secondary education are less about teaching people specific details of educational topics, but rather giving them a wide range of meaningful vocabulary in their native language to talk about those topics and others. As soon as you enter the workforce or even a college education, your range of meaningful topics to discuss dramatically narrows as you focus on a specialty or profession.
pimlottc 3y ago
I wonder if perhaps one reason that young children might be able to acquire language quicker is that they're less worried about making mistakes and sounding foolish. I know it's definitely a barrier I have to overcome when trying to speak foreign languages in the real world.
- kazinator 3y ago
  Kids are lavished with positive attention when they make mistakes, because it's cute.
gumby 3y ago
With one exception, I've never believe the theory that kids learn better,* and I have data, though on a small n. My mum's side of the family is heavily polyglot of necessessity; her parents moved to a new country (where the languages came from different language families) and my grandparents were completely fluent in at least one local language. I also married someone who was not an English speaker and her english is more complex than that of most people here in the US. The critical factor is use. If you learn a language only in school you don't really use it. Languages I spoke daily as a kid: mostly gone, except English, my daily drive. If you're embedded in another culture you're going to need the language to get by and you'll continue learning. * For me the exception is accent. Kids learn what phonemes matter and that does seem sticky. But in terms of grammar, vocabulary, slang and semantics, I have not observed those who learnt as kids being any better than those who learnt as adults and used it.
- tralarpa 3y ago
  One of my kids learned a foreign language by watching cartoons in that language on youtube. We had NEVER spoken that language at home (but I can speak it). They didn't speak that language in kindergarten (he was 5 years old at that time and we didn't live in a country where that language was spoken). He just watched the videos and after a few months we noticed that he was laughing "at the right places". We asked him why he was laughing. He said "Because the [main character] just said [something specific about a horse]". I thought "okay, maybe he had watched that episode already in our language and he remembered what they said", so I asked him "Can you say [something in our language] in [the foreign language]?". He did. It was correct, pronunciation and grammar. Do you think an adult could do the same?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - gumby 3y ago
    Sure, I don't see why not if they were willing to put in the same amount of time your kid did. That is basically how you acquire language when you move into a culture. The value of classes, IMHO, is marginal, especially before you have some gross concept of the structure of the language.
    - tralarpa 3y ago
      I have never seen an adult being exposed just one hour per day to a foreign language over three month, and then suddenly producing grammatically correct meaningful sentences. And note that we are talking here about passive exposition. No teacher, no corrections, no feedback, no interactions, no carefully crafted pedagogical input, not even slowed down audio. If you know such an adult, please tell them to write a blog about it. I am curious. I have met many adults in multilanguage environments and even some who, as a kind of scientific experiment, specifically tried that approach, without much success though (after some weeks, they could recognize some words and fixed expressions). I don't say that an adult cannot learn a foreign language by immersion. Actually, there are probably hundreds of millions of such people in the world (take any uneducated worker who is forced to work in a foreign country to help his family survive at home). But the conditions are very different (they get feedback and interactions) and the quality of the result, too. The speed and quality with which kids just absorb a new language like sponges is unmatched.
kazinator 3y ago
> If an English-speaking adult was placed in a monolingual Spanish family, in a part of Spain with no English speakers, after a few years they might find they’d learned Spanish “easily” too. That is not so. That person would have an accent, struggle to say as well as understand things and make weird grammar mistakes that a four-year-old native speaker wouldn't. Oh, and how about being immersed in a household speaking a language that is not even remotely related to English? A child which speaks nothing and is learning Spanish natively is not comparable to someone who already knows English, which is in the same Indo-European family and has tons of congnate words with Spanish.
Qem 3y ago
Language learning is correlated with socialization. We learn by communication with other people. As people get older, it seems they have a harder time making new friends and knowing new people. I wonder if this explains part of it. Perhaps the average adult learner, even when fully immersed in a foreign language environment, doesn't socialize with other unfamiliar adults as readily as a child would do if left to play with other children. Less socialization = less language practice = slow learning.
psychoslave 3y ago
Not until the comment section will you find reflection on time you can actually dedicate to language acquisition. Even on unconscious level, adults are generally already far more overloaded with many other topics to deal with.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  From my recollection of my developmental psych courses, the studies on this subject generally control for "time available" by including cohorts of adults in full-time immersion programs, or even adults who move permanently to a new country. The results have always consistently shown that even with dedicated study and full time immersion, adults will never reach the same level of linguistic fluency as would a child within the critical period (generally < 11 years old) because they're incapable of acquiring the phonemes of a new language to the same degree as a child, due to fundamental limits of neuroplasticity in the regions of the brain responsible for language acquisition. So yes, obviously if you don't have time as an adult to learn a language, you won't learn it as well as if you can dedicate the rest of your life to it. But the point of the results of "critical period" studies is that even if you dedicate the rest of your life to it, you'll still be at a disadvantage compared to a child, when it comes to attaining perfect phonetic and linguistic fluency.
  - Smaug123 3y ago
    Does that suggest that you could arrange a kind of course that all children got, which taught the union of all phonemes of all common languages, without teaching much of the languages themselves? And thereby future-proof the child with the bits you can't learn as an adult, in case they wanted to learn any particular language later?
    - TechBro8615 3y ago
      Probably yes, and I think this is what a lot of rich people do with their kids, at least in terms of exposing them to vastly differing languages like Mandarin and English. I do wonder if there's some limit on the number of phonemes you can learn, and how many hours are required to "solidify" a phoneme. But I definitely think the idea of a "unity course" is a good one. Personally I had a French "class" in elementary school, where I barely learned anything - I certainly can't speak French - but I can pronounce French words better than I can pronounce any Spanish words (despite three years of Spanish class in college). Those French classes were basically just learning to count to 100 and singing songs like "alouette."

24 points by feross 3y ago

lsy 3y ago

Regarding the drop in learning speed after school, I have a pet theory that primary and secondary education are less about teaching people specific details of educational topics, but rather giving them a wide range of meaningful vocabulary in their native language to talk about those topics and others. As soon as you enter the workforce or even a college education, your range of meaningful topics to discuss dramatically narrows as you focus on a specialty or profession.

pimlottc 3y ago

I wonder if perhaps one reason that young children might be able to acquire language quicker is that they're less worried about making mistakes and sounding foolish. I know it's definitely a barrier I have to overcome when trying to speak foreign languages in the real world.

kazinator 3y ago
Kids are lavished with positive attention when they make mistakes, because it's cute.

gumby 3y ago

With one exception, I've never believe the theory that kids learn better,* and I have data, though on a small n. My mum's side of the family is heavily polyglot of necessessity; her parents moved to a new country (where the languages came from different language families) and my grandparents were completely fluent in at least one local language. I also married someone who was not an English speaker and her english is more complex than that of most people here in the US. The critical factor is use. If you learn a language only in school you don't really use it. Languages I spoke daily as a kid: mostly gone, except English, my daily drive. If you're embedded in another culture you're going to need the language to get by and you'll continue learning. * For me the exception is accent. Kids learn what phonemes matter and that does seem sticky. But in terms of grammar, vocabulary, slang and semantics, I have not observed those who learnt as kids being any better than those who learnt as adults and used it.

tralarpa 3y ago
One of my kids learned a foreign language by watching cartoons in that language on youtube. We had NEVER spoken that language at home (but I can speak it). They didn't speak that language in kindergarten (he was 5 years old at that time and we didn't live in a country where that language was spoken). He just watched the videos and after a few months we noticed that he was laughing "at the right places". We asked him why he was laughing. He said "Because the [main character] just said [something specific about a horse]". I thought "okay, maybe he had watched that episode already in our language and he remembered what they said", so I asked him "Can you say [something in our language] in [the foreign language]?". He did. It was correct, pronunciation and grammar. Do you think an adult could do the same?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gumby 3y ago
  Sure, I don't see why not if they were willing to put in the same amount of time your kid did. That is basically how you acquire language when you move into a culture. The value of classes, IMHO, is marginal, especially before you have some gross concept of the structure of the language.
  - tralarpa 3y ago
    I have never seen an adult being exposed just one hour per day to a foreign language over three month, and then suddenly producing grammatically correct meaningful sentences. And note that we are talking here about passive exposition. No teacher, no corrections, no feedback, no interactions, no carefully crafted pedagogical input, not even slowed down audio. If you know such an adult, please tell them to write a blog about it. I am curious. I have met many adults in multilanguage environments and even some who, as a kind of scientific experiment, specifically tried that approach, without much success though (after some weeks, they could recognize some words and fixed expressions). I don't say that an adult cannot learn a foreign language by immersion. Actually, there are probably hundreds of millions of such people in the world (take any uneducated worker who is forced to work in a foreign country to help his family survive at home). But the conditions are very different (they get feedback and interactions) and the quality of the result, too. The speed and quality with which kids just absorb a new language like sponges is unmatched.

kazinator 3y ago

> If an English-speaking adult was placed in a monolingual Spanish family, in a part of Spain with no English speakers, after a few years they might find they’d learned Spanish “easily” too. That is not so. That person would have an accent, struggle to say as well as understand things and make weird grammar mistakes that a four-year-old native speaker wouldn't. Oh, and how about being immersed in a household speaking a language that is not even remotely related to English? A child which speaks nothing and is learning Spanish natively is not comparable to someone who already knows English, which is in the same Indo-European family and has tons of congnate words with Spanish.

Qem 3y ago

Language learning is correlated with socialization. We learn by communication with other people. As people get older, it seems they have a harder time making new friends and knowing new people. I wonder if this explains part of it. Perhaps the average adult learner, even when fully immersed in a foreign language environment, doesn't socialize with other unfamiliar adults as readily as a child would do if left to play with other children. Less socialization = less language practice = slow learning.

psychoslave 3y ago

Not until the comment section will you find reflection on time you can actually dedicate to language acquisition. Even on unconscious level, adults are generally already far more overloaded with many other topics to deal with.

TechBro8615 3y ago
From my recollection of my developmental psych courses, the studies on this subject generally control for "time available" by including cohorts of adults in full-time immersion programs, or even adults who move permanently to a new country. The results have always consistently shown that even with dedicated study and full time immersion, adults will never reach the same level of linguistic fluency as would a child within the critical period (generally < 11 years old) because they're incapable of acquiring the phonemes of a new language to the same degree as a child, due to fundamental limits of neuroplasticity in the regions of the brain responsible for language acquisition. So yes, obviously if you don't have time as an adult to learn a language, you won't learn it as well as if you can dedicate the rest of your life to it. But the point of the results of "critical period" studies is that even if you dedicate the rest of your life to it, you'll still be at a disadvantage compared to a child, when it comes to attaining perfect phonetic and linguistic fluency.
- Smaug123 3y ago
  Does that suggest that you could arrange a kind of course that all children got, which taught the union of all phonemes of all common languages, without teaching much of the languages themselves? And thereby future-proof the child with the bits you can't learn as an adult, in case they wanted to learn any particular language later?
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    Probably yes, and I think this is what a lot of rich people do with their kids, at least in terms of exposing them to vastly differing languages like Mandarin and English. I do wonder if there's some limit on the number of phonemes you can learn, and how many hours are required to "solidify" a phoneme. But I definitely think the idea of a "unity course" is a good one. Personally I had a French "class" in elementary school, where I barely learned anything - I certainly can't speak French - but I can pronounce French words better than I can pronounce any Spanish words (despite three years of Spanish class in college). Those French classes were basically just learning to count to 100 and singing songs like "alouette."