How children pick up a language: latest review (Humans)

by David Turell , Thursday, August 22, 2024, 19:01 (91 days ago) @ David Turell

Different cultures have different ways of exposing language to infants:

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/07/10/humans_are_changing_how_we_learn_langu...

"The societal gulf raises two questions. Is frequent adult-to-child direct speech really the single, optimal pathway to language development? And could it be that children raised in Western settings learn language differently from how our ancestors did?

"Western scientists have previously visited indigenous communities like the Yucatec Maya in southeastern Mexico and the Rossel Islanders in Papua New Guinea. These academic visitors found that, in contrast to Western infants, infants in these societies primarily hear speech directed to others, rather than directed to them. And these youngsters develop their native language skills just as ably.

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"Tseltal infants are rarely spoken to, “yet have the opportunity to overhear a great deal […] by virtue of being carried on their mothers’ backs,” the authors described.

“'They are also almost never put down, or even passed to siblings, ensuring that they are witness to practically the entirety of their mothers’ social interactions,” they added.

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"The results show that human infants are clearly capable of learning language through observation, suggesting that talking directly to young children is not a requirement. Rather, as an international team of scientists wrote in an article published in 2022 to PLoS Biology, WEIRD societies might be the weird ones when it comes to language learning.

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"Could there be further ramifications of altering the way we’ve historically learned language?

“'Children raised in child-centered contexts may come to expect their attention to be managed by their caregivers and learn to ignore interactions around them,” Foushee and Srinivasan wrote in their paper. “Conversely, children raised in contexts in which child-directed language is rare and other-directed language is common may develop a keen ability to attend to and learn from interactions around them.”

“'One of the ramifications of this general idea is that children from different language environments might excel at different forms of learning and assessment,” they added in an interview.

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"Perhaps, above all, the latest results showcase the truly amazing ability of the youngest minds to learn their native tongues, Foushee and Srinivasan said.

“'Language development is often admired for its robustness and resilience… Our findings invite the perspective that children successfully acquire their native languages across variable environments in part because they are flexible in how they learn.'”

Comment: that infants sop up language easily is obvious. The theory that syntax is built in seems correct. I wonder why it is a lost process after about age eight.