No, Children Aren't Naturally Better at Languages

I just finished Mark Rosenfelder's excellent article entitled "When do people learn languages?", in which he spends an entire section debunking a widespread myth: that children learn languages easily. I've long disagreed with that claim, so I was happy to come across his article.

Here's a summary of his arguments:

• "Children begin learning languages at birth... and haven't really mastered it subtleties before the age of ten years"
• Language learning isn't effortless for children: "children don't learn a language if they can get away with not learning it"
• "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"
• "It's a myth that children learn to speak mainly from their parents. They don't: they learn mostly from their peers"

He mentions that many people believe children to learn language better than adults, then refutes this idea.

"One may fall back on the position that language 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."

And he mentions a few reasons that children learn languages so well:

• "They can devote almost their full time to it. Adults consider half an hour's study a day to be onerous."
• "Their motivation is intense .... children can get very little of what they want without learning language(s)."
• "Their peers are nastier. Embarrassment is a prime motivating factor for human beings"