Learning a languageWhen Do We Learn a Language？Children begin learning languages at birth（

Learning a language

When Do We Learn a Language？

Children begin learning languages at birth(infants pay attention to their parents' voices, as opposed to random noises or even other languages), and haven't really mastered the subtleties before the age of ten years. Indeed, we never really stop learning our language. This isn't exactly the sort of behavior(like foals walking an hour after birth) that we call "instinct" in animals.

Do We Learn When We Don't Have to？

But at least it's effortless, isn't it？ Well, no, as we can see when children have a choice of languages to learn. What's found is that, to be frank, children don't learn a language if they can get away with not learning it.

Many an immigrant family in the U.S. intends to teach their child their native language; and for the first few years it goes swimmingly so much so that the parents worry that the child won't learn English. Then the child goes to school, picks up English, and within a few years the worry is reversed: the child still understands his parents, but responds in English. Eventually the parents may give up, and the home language becomes English.

People's Influence

A child is likely to end up as a fluent speaker of a language only if there are significant people in her life who speak it: a nanny who only speaks Spanish, a relative who doesn't speak English, etc. Once a child discovers that his parents understand English perfectly well, he's likely to give up on the home language, even in the face of strong disapproval from the parents.

It's a myth that children learn to speak mainly from their parents. They don't: they learn mostly from their peers. This is most easily seen among children of immigrants, whether they come from differing language backgrounds or merely different dialect areas: the children invariably come to speak the dialect of their neighborhood and school, not that of their parents.(I found a neat example of this in my college's alumni magazine: A liberal family in Mississippi sent their daughter to the public schools, which except for her were all black. She grew up speaking fluent African-American Vernacular English.)

Do We Need Grammar？

Supporters of the "language instinct" make much of the fact that children learn to speak without formal instruction—indeed, they notoriously ignore explicit corrections.

Very little of what we learn is through formal instruction. Children aren't schooled in video games, either, yet they pick them up with the same seeming ease.

The apparent effortlessness is largely an illusion caused by psychological distance. We just don't remember how hard it was to learn language. (In fact, there's some studies suggesting that memory is tied to language, so that we can't remember the language learning process.) The perception of effortlessness should be balanced, anyway, by the universal amusement(which some cartoonists have been mining for nearly half a century) over children's language mistakes.

Do Children Learn Faster？

One may fall back on the position that languages may be hard for children to learn, but at least they do it better than adults. This, however, turns out to be surprisingly difficult to prove. Singleton examined hundreds of studies, and found them resoundingly ambiguous. Quite a few studies, in fact, find that adult learners progress faster than children. Even in phonetics, sometimes the last stronghold of the kids-learn-free position, there are studies finding that adults are better at recognizing and producing foreign sounds.

Now, I think Singleton misses a key point in understanding this discrepancy: the studies he reviews compare children vs. adults who are learning languages. That's quite reasonable, and indeed it's hard to imagine an alternative approach; but th

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