How children may pick up a language (Humans)

by dhw, Monday, May 09, 2016, 13:05 (3119 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: A new study suggests they easily recognize patterns, but not as a built in grammar as has been proposed:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160505222938.htm
the study found children who were better at identifying patterns in non-verbal tasks also had better knowledge of grammar.-QUOTES: "Even when other important factors such as intelligence and memory were taken into consideration, the findings still suggest the skill of pattern learning is strongly associated with language development."
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"Psycholinguist Associate Professor Joanne Arciuli from the University of Sydney said the research shows children have a remarkable capacity to learn without conscious awareness."
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"'Unbeknownst to children themselves their brains are constantly computing these patterns or statistics -- for example which words co-occur regularly, which words follow others, and different contexts in which words are used."-David's comment: Aging has slowed my learning capacity. When quite young everything I studied stuck like glue. This may refute Chomsky, but the study is an assumption by association, not proof.-Thank you for this interesting article. It's a subject very close to my heart, since I have spent my whole working life in the field of language - as writer, translator and lecturer. Here are a few thoughts that arise from the article.-I do not believe in a universal grammar, but I think the researchers are right that children observe patterns. A typical example is their gradual understanding of our English irregular verbs. Once they have grasped the concept of past, they almost invariably start by adding the suffix -ed to all verbs: I eated it, I runned…It's only later that they learn the individual exceptions to the “pattern”. The concept of past/present/future is not caused by an in-built grammar: the grammar is a construct that has to be learned in order to express an in-built awareness of time. Even a small child knows perfectly well that there is a difference between an ice cream already eaten and an ice cream on the way.
 
We all know that children aged 6-8 (and pre-puberty generally) do not have the same “conscious awareness” that teenagers, let alone adults have, and that is why they are much more receptive to certain kinds of learning. Consciousness raises questions, and may also pit new knowledge against what has already been acquired. For example, in the context of language-learning a major obstacle at a more conscious age is the interference of the already established native language. My 7-year-old grandson is bilingual (his father is English and his mother Portuguese) because he has been exposed to both right from the start. His father will never ever speak Portuguese like a native! The Germans cottoned onto this long before the British, and brought in foreign language learning at primary school long before we even thought of it.-However, a child can only learn from what it hears. A feral child will have no grasp of human language, but if brought up by wild animals will “speak” their language. There are known cases in which such children later had great difficulty coping with human language, which for me constitutes evidence against Chomsky's theory.