Microblog

8/22/2024

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"

8/22/2024

See this thread on X about peculiarities of Danish. I'm pretty skeptical of claims that "all languages are equally complex", partially because of research like this. Interesting findings:

• "Danish has an unusual speech opacity (consonant reduction)"
• "Danish children do present delays in language acquisition: At 15 months, Danish children possess a median vocabulary of 90 words, compared to 140 for Norwegian kids and 150 for Swedish ones"
• "Up to 8 years of age, Danish children have more difficulties [compared to other Scandinavian children] with inflectional morphology, e.g. declining regular and irregular verbs in simple past"
• "Adult native speakers of Danish do NOT seem to have issues with Danish"
• "Danish native speakers are equally affected by near and distant sentential context in their disambiguation of words and phonemes, while Norwegians just won't wait for distant contexts and will make their decisions earlier."
• "The speech signal does not get clearer as Danish native speakers grow up, so we hypothesized that they learn to put increased focus on additional sources of information (e.g. context)"

They ran a nifty experiment to demonstrate this. Two cool findings:

• "Danish native speakers are equally affected by near and distant sentential context in their disambiguation of words and phonemes, while Norwegians just won't wait for distant contexts and will make their decisions earlier."
• "Forcing them to wait makes them more similar to Danish native speakers"

I love learning about stuff like this. If you do too, try reading about the difference in rates of dyslexia across languages!

One more thing: check out the Duostories for Toki Pona and Toki Pona Glyphs (sitelen pona!)