3 ms·

From my recollection of my developmental psych courses, the studies on this subject generally control for "time available" by including cohorts of adults in fu

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."
bsder 3y ago
I'm always skeptical of these poorer language learning results. It took me 3 years of about 2 hours a day in high school to learn approximately 6000 words in English, my native language. This was in addition to my schooling where I was writing essays and book reports pretty much weekly. Probably 10+ hours per week for history and english. Plus all the interactions in my native language. That's a LOT of language practice. That's almost 1800 hours on vocabulary alone. Add on 1500 hours for essays. That's approaching 3200 hours which strongly exceeds the amount of time required to gain general proficiency in a Category V language (2200 hours). That's almost 10+ hours per week on top of school hours themselves. How many people ever put in that amount of effort into a second language? How many people have the time to put in that amount of effort into a second language?
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  I dunno, if you're an adult who moves from India to America, you're not going to be speaking Hindi much (unless you speak it at home, to be fair). You'll be conducting your life entirely in English. And if you move to the States for university then you'll be doing academics in English too. You'll easily achieve thousands of hours of practice in this way. While most people don't have time to put that many hours into studying a second language outside of a country where it's the native tongue, many immigrants have no choice but to immerse themselves in a new language just by the default behavior of living their life in a new country that doesn't speak their first language. Yes, such immigrants will always be a few thousand hours behind people who started in America, but surely there's some plateau where the improvements become marginal. I don't think the critical period advantage is about the early volume of hours so much as the age period when they're spent - i.e. if you compare someone who moves at 20 vs. 40, the results will be the same, but both will be worse than someone who moved at 8.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  I've re-read your comment multiple times and still don't quite get it. If English is your native language, why did you spend 1800 hours learning English vocabulary when you were in high school? Did you feel that your native level was not sufficient, or were you just interested in advanced English as an academic interest? As a native English speaker, I'm not sure how many English words I know, nor how I would even start counting! However, I am currently learning German, and seem to have found a comfortable pace of learning about twenty words each day, studying for half an hour each day. This doesn't include general exposure to the words through other German practice. If it is possible to keep that up long-term, that means that 6000 German words would take just under a year for me to learn in the ideal case (probably a bit longer, as so-called 'strong' words have multiple irregular forms that are effectively different words).
seabass-labrax 3y ago
I'm intrigued as to what you mean by 'incapable of acquiring the phonemes of a new language'. If that is the only limit on adult language acquisition, then it seems like it would follow as a native English speaker, I should be able to learn Japanese to a higher level than a native speaker of Japanese would be able to learn English. That is because Japanese only has a few sounds that English doesn't, whereas English has a lot more sounds than Japanese. Something about that doesn't feel right, so I hope you will be able to explain if I am missing something. However, were it to be true, it sounds like the best way of 'futureproofing' children's early language education so that they can learn languages later in life is to bring them up to speak, at least at a basic level, a set of languages that covers a large proportion if not all of the distinct phonemes of all languages.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  I suspect you're right that an adult will be able to achieve "nearer" phonetic fluency in a language that shares more phonemes with their first language than they would in one that has little phonetic overlap with it. So a Spanish speaker will have an easier time becoming fluent in Italian than would an English speaker, etc. (I'm surprised by your assertion that Japanese has large phoneme overlap with English, but I don't know much about it - it just seems surprising to me.) I'd be curious to see a visualization of the overlapping phonemes between languages, like a large Venn diagram kinda thing (or maybe just a graph). I think this data is probably available and a visualization wouldn't be too difficult to create - maybe it already exists but I couldn't find a comprehensive one with a brief search.
  - kian 3y ago
    I love the idea of a visualization of overlapping language phonetics! something that showed both the hierarchical nesting of languages and the actual phonemes themselves. Besides tsu and dzu, every phoneme in Japanese is accounted for in the Spanish language. I believe that the Spanish phonemes are a nearly perfect subset of English phonemes.

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."

bsder 3y ago

I'm always skeptical of these poorer language learning results. It took me 3 years of about 2 hours a day in high school to learn approximately 6000 words in English, my native language. This was in addition to my schooling where I was writing essays and book reports pretty much weekly. Probably 10+ hours per week for history and english. Plus all the interactions in my native language. That's a LOT of language practice. That's almost 1800 hours on vocabulary alone. Add on 1500 hours for essays. That's approaching 3200 hours which strongly exceeds the amount of time required to gain general proficiency in a Category V language (2200 hours). That's almost 10+ hours per week on top of school hours themselves. How many people ever put in that amount of effort into a second language? How many people have the time to put in that amount of effort into a second language?

TechBro8615 3y ago
I dunno, if you're an adult who moves from India to America, you're not going to be speaking Hindi much (unless you speak it at home, to be fair). You'll be conducting your life entirely in English. And if you move to the States for university then you'll be doing academics in English too. You'll easily achieve thousands of hours of practice in this way. While most people don't have time to put that many hours into studying a second language outside of a country where it's the native tongue, many immigrants have no choice but to immerse themselves in a new language just by the default behavior of living their life in a new country that doesn't speak their first language. Yes, such immigrants will always be a few thousand hours behind people who started in America, but surely there's some plateau where the improvements become marginal. I don't think the critical period advantage is about the early volume of hours so much as the age period when they're spent - i.e. if you compare someone who moves at 20 vs. 40, the results will be the same, but both will be worse than someone who moved at 8.
seabass-labrax 3y ago
I've re-read your comment multiple times and still don't quite get it. If English is your native language, why did you spend 1800 hours learning English vocabulary when you were in high school? Did you feel that your native level was not sufficient, or were you just interested in advanced English as an academic interest? As a native English speaker, I'm not sure how many English words I know, nor how I would even start counting! However, I am currently learning German, and seem to have found a comfortable pace of learning about twenty words each day, studying for half an hour each day. This doesn't include general exposure to the words through other German practice. If it is possible to keep that up long-term, that means that 6000 German words would take just under a year for me to learn in the ideal case (probably a bit longer, as so-called 'strong' words have multiple irregular forms that are effectively different words).

seabass-labrax 3y ago

I'm intrigued as to what you mean by 'incapable of acquiring the phonemes of a new language'. If that is the only limit on adult language acquisition, then it seems like it would follow as a native English speaker, I should be able to learn Japanese to a higher level than a native speaker of Japanese would be able to learn English. That is because Japanese only has a few sounds that English doesn't, whereas English has a lot more sounds than Japanese. Something about that doesn't feel right, so I hope you will be able to explain if I am missing something. However, were it to be true, it sounds like the best way of 'futureproofing' children's early language education so that they can learn languages later in life is to bring them up to speak, at least at a basic level, a set of languages that covers a large proportion if not all of the distinct phonemes of all languages.

TechBro8615 3y ago
I suspect you're right that an adult will be able to achieve "nearer" phonetic fluency in a language that shares more phonemes with their first language than they would in one that has little phonetic overlap with it. So a Spanish speaker will have an easier time becoming fluent in Italian than would an English speaker, etc. (I'm surprised by your assertion that Japanese has large phoneme overlap with English, but I don't know much about it - it just seems surprising to me.) I'd be curious to see a visualization of the overlapping phonemes between languages, like a large Venn diagram kinda thing (or maybe just a graph). I think this data is probably available and a visualization wouldn't be too difficult to create - maybe it already exists but I couldn't find a comprehensive one with a brief search.
- kian 3y ago
  I love the idea of a visualization of overlapping language phonetics! something that showed both the hierarchical nesting of languages and the actual phonemes themselves. Besides tsu and dzu, every phoneme in Japanese is accounted for in the Spanish language. I believe that the Spanish phonemes are a nearly perfect subset of English phonemes.