How children pick up a language: Pinker's view (Humans)

by dhw, Saturday, December 03, 2016, 13:41 (2911 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: And children can learn any one, two or three languages quickly up until age eight and then lose the ability. Why? Questions raised and not answered.

My suggestion: the more you learn of one language, the more it will interfere with learning another. If a child begins by learning that its toy can be called a “Spielzeug” or a “jouet”, depending on the addressee, he/she has not yet learned that a toy is called a toy and nothing else. The older you get, the more channelled you become, because the restricted information has become embedded. But even with small children, the amount that can be learned depends on the degree of receptive and imitative intelligence. Some children can grow up bilingual, but others can get confused. The ability to learn is just as individual in children as in adults.

You have quoted the last part of my comment, but I should not have made it. It is not relevant to the discussion we are having, as it applies to all subjects and not just language. Your own comment below is much more to the point.

DAVID: I live in a bilingual state, and I see all little Latin kids speaking beautiful English and Spanish without accents if they start young enough, and I've met a few with three languages that way if they have a bilingual parent who uses the third language with them from the beginning, and they differentiate the languages without difficulty as they learn them together, described in articles I've read. This suggests an underlying language structure of some sort.

Thank you. This is a good example of what I mean (and my eight-and-a-half-year-old grandson in New Mexico is another): if the environment is natural, the process I’ve described works perfectly – the languages are accepted and mastered because right from the start there is no interference. The child knows that a toy is a jouet is a Spielzeug, depending on who he/she is talking to. You had asked why children lose the ability from about the age of eight, and I have offered you a reason why. If they have only been brought up with one language, the more they learn of that language, the less quickly they will be able to adopt another. (This is a major problem for the millions of refugees now moving into countries with a different language from their own.) The younger the child, the more chance he/she will have of becoming bilingual, because learning requires less “re-learning” of what has already been fixed, and the older you are, the more fixed information you have. I don’t see any mystery in this. And I certainly don’t see any evidence for a universal grammar or an innate structure beyond the fact that all human languages use words strung together.