The whole "age" thing

[sfr@rcn.com]

Going back a couple of posts...

I always thought that one of the reasons it's more difficult for older teenagers to develop a native accent in their second language is that the teen years are probably the most self-conscious times of our lives--As you get m,ore self-conscious, you get more afraid of making a mistake, so you stick to other people like you so that you don't have to risk embarrassment. And so you don't learn as much nor retain it as well. (There is nothing like a little embarrassment to make a correction stick in your mind.)

I'm not going to be able to give a citation for this, but too-long a while ago, there was a language teachers international symposium on this subject. The general conclusion is that normal healthy adults can learn as well as children as long as they devote the time and attention to it that a kid does. Also, comparing kids' language acquisition with adults' is apples and oranges, they said. Adults, in order to express much more complicated concepts, need to acquire a whole lot more vocabulary than little kids do. It is the job of little kids to learn how to pronounce their native language and how to put together a grammatical idea. A child learning a second language has different and less complex priorities.

Sandra

[Shadowdh]

Foodtarget... what about if you learned languages at that age then stopped for some years? would this have an effect on the acquisition of languages?

Sandra... I understand what you say re the feeling self concious thing... its one of my biggest hurdles now... and I am not even a teenager... heck not even close...

[foodtarget]

Shadowdh:

what about if you learned languages at that age then stopped for some years? would this have an effect on the acquisition of languages?

We covered this topic in General Psyc, which was several years ago, so my memory recall might be a bit shaky, but it is my general understanding that a language (or any other skill such as playing an instrument, etc.) learned in early childhood and subsequently abandoned before the onset of puberty is likely to be lost. The biological basis for this is that a child gets its brain plasticity from having an excessive amount of neurons that can be used to encode new information. During the brain-solidifying that takes place during puberty, underutilized neurons die out.

I'm sure many of you can think of anecdotal evidence for this. I personally know several people who were fluent in a language as a child, removed from that language environment before puberty, and subsequently lost all proficiency. One girl I know lived in HK until the age of 5 or 6 and learned Cantonese as her first language. She then moved to the States with her parents (who are Vietnamese, which is what they speak at home now), and now she can only understand a little Cantonese and can't really speak at all. I can think of at least 5 more examples, and in each case the language the child lost was not the native language of their parents, so when they moved out of the area that spoke said language, they no longer had an exposure to the language.

I might have misinterpreted the original question. If the question is "does learning a second language as a child and then forgetting it have a lasting impact on their language-learning aptitude?" then my answer is that I'm not really sure. In thinking of all those examples I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I think that all of them display an above average aptitude for languages, even if it's not the one they learned/lost as a child. This seems to indicate that learning a second language as a child enhances language aptitude later in life even when one of the first two languages is forgotten. However this is inconclusive, because most of the people I can think of as examples grew up bilingual even after they lost a language. So I can't tell if learning/losing a language as a child and going through puberty as a monolingual improves language aptitude.

[Shadowdh]

Thanks for the info mate... I was speaking to the second part of your answer but found the first interesting as well... thanks..

[simonlaing]

I think I read in the Nytimes article that people are making new memories all the time and new neuron pathways are formed untill people are very old.

I started Chinese at 22. I think it's not that bad though it has taken a long time to learn to the level I am now.

I think how you are taught, and what you are taught is important. Meeting High schoolers who have had 8 years of english but no oral classes or chances to speak it out in class reinforces this idea that learning the whole language.

Also I have huaren overseas chinese friends who can speak mandarin in general conversation but can't read or write. They have trouble with studying and going back and learning these just as others do.

Anyway, you do anything you put your mind to. Don't let age be something that holds you back.

have fun,

SimoN:)

[sfr@rcn.com]

I think that even if you lose your firsdt, second or third language as a child, that you aren't as rigidly programmed as if you heard only one set of sounds and one system of grammar. By the time I was in high school, I could no longer speak or understand Russian and I could read, write and understand Yiddish, but could no longer formulate a sentence of more than three words.,

However, in college, I took German, Russian and French and had no trouble with any of them, although a Russian friend criticized my Russian accent as sounding like a Jew's.

Now, in my dotage, I have been studying guo yu for over ten years and my teacher says my pronunciation is better than 90% of all Chinese--including her husband's.I think that's what people mean when they say one has an ear for languages.

Sandra

[jfranco]

There are some popular theories, but no evidence that is clearly certain. The research they have done shows that children can more easily achieve native like pronunciation, but in areas such as syntax there is no such advantage. Also, adults have the benefit of being able to tackle more complicated concepts from the onset and can easily learn vocabulary.

Some of my fellow students debated the issue of age in a phonetics and phonology class. The one really important thing to keep in mind is that it is impossible to create an experiment on this with human beings. We cannot lock people up in a cell and study them as this would be inhumane; however, that would be the only true way to control the variables.

Children have a much different mindset than adults and actively experiment with language. If they enter a school system in their non-native language, they are not only exposed to the new language, but they are constantly evaluated on it. They are also very social and eager to gain acceptance and make friends. Adults often stay closely affiliated with their own culture and language and don't seek out such opportunities.

Adults are also afraid of making mistakes, have limited time to practice, and often do not engage in the same type of language play or experimentation as children. Add to that, that adults often already have a strong connection to their native language, which makes them less likely to seek out goals, such as perfect pronuncation. I believe there is some element of psychological resistance, which can become a stumbling block for adults.

That being said, a person is never too old to take up a new language and as language learners our goal should always be to better ourselves. We can only work with what we have at the present moment and there will always be great differences in ability between individuals. If you want to learn a language just study it and see how far you can go. People always have theories to explain things and often in time those opinions turn out to be at least partially wrong.

[Romeo Tango]

It may have something to do with how your mouth is physiologically accustomed to pronouncing sounds in your early years of development. This is why most people who learn a second language later in life will almost certainly have an accent with respect to that second language. I know I'll never be able to make the same sounds as a born Chinese speaker, but all I aspire to is to be able to be understood when I speak Chinese by the locals. But then, I've heard speakers of Chinese and Thai who were born and bred in the US sound exactly like native speakers. So it can happen with conditioning.

[renzhe]

That's an interesting point.

The production of sounds is basically a fine motor skill, and if you've had 30 years of training to only produce a small set of sounds, it is difficult to break out of these patterns.

Comparisons to sports make sense here, to a certain point.

[roddy]

I definitely think you need to remember that what you are learning is a physiological skill - it's not just a matter of facts or mental skills like most other post-childhood learning we do - there are purely physical things in there, learning to put your tongue in the right place and controlling the vocal chords in a way you aren't used to. It's like learning to play the guitar, without being able to see your fingers.