How Children Learn Languages
Learning a language - learning a first language or learning a fourth - is an exceptional accomplishment for anybody. Yet everyone completes this process and does so successfully at least once in their life.
Linguists - those researchers who devote their lives and thoughts to studying the intricacies and nuances of language - call the learning process "doubtless the greatest intellectual feat any one of us is ever required to perform." Yet this achievement is often taken completely for granted. For non-linguists (like most of us), the magnitude of this accomplishment only becomes apparent when we step back and think of everything that goes into the first few faltering steps we take toward language.
An excellent guide to this moment in life is linguist Dr. Charles Yang's book The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World. Dr. Yang, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, ably reveals the complexities of the process while also showing us why these complexities are mastered so naturally - and so beautifully - by children all over the world, regardless of the language they're learning. Following his guided tour of language learning, we can even begin to appreciate the astonishing truth that, as he says, "children are infinitely better at learning languages than we are."
In order to appreciate the mechanics and other fine points of language learning, many linguists believe we need to understand one big concept first. The ability to learn a language is, they say, part of the "software" we're born with, running in slightly different ways based on specific data inputs. This "program" is called "universal grammar," and it explains how children can learn so quickly despite being surrounded by unfamiliar sounds, many of which aren't even part of language! "The only way for children to learn something as complex as language," as the theory goes, "is to have known a lot about how language works beforehand, so that a child knows what to expect when immersed in the sea of speech. In other words, the ability to learn a language is innate, hidden somewhere in our genes."
Continue Reading.
Sincerely,
Katie Lagana
Early Advantage |