I came across an interesting hypothesis recently when reading The Loom of Language which appears to have been confirmed by a recent personal observation. I'll paraphrase it and leave you to read the book if this topic is of interest to you.
Essentially we all accept the notion that as infants we had incredible abilities to pick up and master a language, and this idea is reinforced by the fact that we don't remember much about the difficulties we had with acquiring our mother tongue, or that native speakers tend to be a lot more patient and helpful to the youngin's. I'm not supposing that children don't have a superior ability to learn in some respects, but I'm supposing that as adults we exaggerate the abilities of a child in this area. In the book Bodmer adds that the solidarity in focus gives an adult somewhat of an advantage over the child.
Here's my observation: my Arabic teacher was born in Lebanon and is the mother to a 5 year old boy and her husband, the boy's father, is an Australian. The mother speaks regularly to the boy in Lebanese Arabic and she recently took him to Lebanon for a couple of months. The boy understands a good amount of what his mother says in Arabic but I'm not sure it's even 50% of what he understands of English. Before he went to Lebanon I never heard him say a word in Arabic. Since coming back he says a couple of words but his pronunciation is not correct and he can't construct a grammatically correct sentence by any means. His mother used the word gha-lees today. He first repeated that word as ha-lees and then after a few tries changed to kha-lees.
To this day I can recall how I learnt to count in Arabic when I was about his age and my pronunciation was in no way superior to what an adult could have learnt in the same amount of time, and most probably it is worse than what I could learn in the same time today at my age. I'd be really interested to see if someone has attempted to quantify language learning ability versus age in the short, medium and long term.
Essentially we all accept the notion that as infants we had incredible abilities to pick up and master a language, and this idea is reinforced by the fact that we don't remember much about the difficulties we had with acquiring our mother tongue, or that native speakers tend to be a lot more patient and helpful to the youngin's. I'm not supposing that children don't have a superior ability to learn in some respects, but I'm supposing that as adults we exaggerate the abilities of a child in this area. In the book Bodmer adds that the solidarity in focus gives an adult somewhat of an advantage over the child.
Here's my observation: my Arabic teacher was born in Lebanon and is the mother to a 5 year old boy and her husband, the boy's father, is an Australian. The mother speaks regularly to the boy in Lebanese Arabic and she recently took him to Lebanon for a couple of months. The boy understands a good amount of what his mother says in Arabic but I'm not sure it's even 50% of what he understands of English. Before he went to Lebanon I never heard him say a word in Arabic. Since coming back he says a couple of words but his pronunciation is not correct and he can't construct a grammatically correct sentence by any means. His mother used the word gha-lees today. He first repeated that word as ha-lees and then after a few tries changed to kha-lees.
To this day I can recall how I learnt to count in Arabic when I was about his age and my pronunciation was in no way superior to what an adult could have learnt in the same amount of time, and most probably it is worse than what I could learn in the same time today at my age. I'd be really interested to see if someone has attempted to quantify language learning ability versus age in the short, medium and long term.
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