Kids have an easy time getting a new language. This difference is not only in the ease of acquisition, but also in the higher quality of the result. It seems that a child’s brain is more susceptible and ready to acquire a new language. It’s known that the human brain is being massively hard wired during the first years of a child’s life. It can be hypothesized that certain attributes of the language being learnt at such early stages are hard-wired into the infant’s brain.
It’s not the whole language that is being hard-wired, as the big mass of learning (the vocabulary) is being made gradually over the years until the child reaches adulthood. However, it seems that the connections that form during this period enable better language acquisition and facilitate better learning of a certain language.
This system has two further effects:
1. It will make it relatively harder to acquire new language further on, especially when these differ greatly from the subject’s native language or even contradict it.
2. It will probably make it relatively easy to acquire languages based on similar founding principles. For example, it seems that German speakers have a relatively easy time learning English and French acquire Spanish with relative ease.
The idea that different languages bring to different wiring casts doubt upon the idea of universal grammar as advocated by Chomsky. Of course, it doesn’t mean that such a universal underlying structure doesn’t exist. It just means that if it does exist, it’s at very low level and the brain is actually wired according to a higher level logic. It also hints towards a gradual learning of a language, something many statistical models, which confront the learning machine with tons of data, somehow seem to miss.
It’s hard to say at what level the hardwired logic is. It’s definitely not the vocabulary of the language, probably not even its most basic parts. However, it’s something language specific. Maybe it’s the division into part of speech and the relation between these, or certain very basic grammatical structures and building blocks.
A few further note supporting this thesis:
In the few recorded cases of children who were isolated from society and weren’t given the opportunity to acquire a language, “post-liberation” language acquisition was never complete and their abilities didn’t reach these of normal children.
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