Once again, if people are interested in the topic, I recommend reading some actual books on the topic written by linguists who know what they're talking about.

I don't debate Creatonists, and I'm not going to debate people here who demand proof without even reading any of the literature. It's why I stopped responding to Nestor's posts (actually that was for a different reason), and I'm not going to start up the debate with someone else following in his footsteps.

The original study was done about American and Japanese babies recognizing the difference between /r/ and /l/, and this is the citation:
Iverson, P., & Kuhl, P. K. (1996). Influences of phonetic identification and category goodness on American listeners' perception of /r/ and /l/. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 99, 1130-1140.

Probably can't find it online though. Patricia Kuhl has done a lot more research on it though, and she continues to talk about it and give updated numbers in lectures. Since I'm not at a college I don't really have access to a library or websites that would have the studies.
Here's a list of her publications:
http://ilabs.washington.edu/institute-fa...bset-tab-4

(One place she talks about it online is her TED Talk, but she doesn't give a lot of specifics here:

)

I'm majoring in Letters and during the course I've had plenty of Linguistics subjects. I'm definitely not that knowledgeable, though, but there are tons of research that show precisely how children's brains up until approximately 7/8 years old do have a special neurological configuration that allows them to learn languages in an incredibly fast and efortless way. As yudantaiteki mentioned, there is a lot of literature on the subject, go and read it if you're interested. Tzadeck also referred to many interesting studies.

What it seems to me is people are mixing different things here. Even though the "native" language already shows the edge children have, what really sets them apart from adults is the acquisition of a 2nd or 3rd language. In these situations, even when you don't have the parents or the immersion environment, they still learn at a remarkably brisk pace.

My own personal experience, although obviously not scientifical at all, was that by age 8, I was fluent in French and English (I'm not even considering Portuguese, my native language). In the case of French, it was kinda understandable, because I studied at a French school (still, in little over a year I became native-level fluent), but outside that environment, I hardly ever spoke the language. With English, the case is even more drastic. Nobody I knew spoke it, I didn't go to any classes, I simply learned it by watching cartoons and listening to music.

Afterwards, I was able to learn other languages (Spanish and Japanese - which I'm still in the middle of), but the process was completely different. And as I've been getting older, it has progressively been more difficult and demanding of extra effort.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Once again, if people are interested in the topic, I recommend reading some actual books on the topic written by linguists who know what they're talking about.

Any suggestions for good books on LA/SLA?

franciscobc84 Wrote:My own personal experience, although obviously not scientifical at all, was that by age 8, I was fluent in French and English (I'm not even considering Portuguese, my native language). In the case of French, it was kinda understandable, because I studied at a French school (still, in little over a year I became native-level fluent), but outside that environment, I hardly ever spoke the language. With English, the case is even more drastic. Nobody I knew spoke it, I didn't go to any classes, I simply learned it by watching cartoons and listening to music.

Have there been any studies done to show what the minimum amount of involvement in a language is needed to give kids the leg up to quickly acquire an L2+?

That was interesting. I wish my parents had put me through 12 sessions of Japanese chat and play.

EDIT: What are some things that the human brain is specially good at learning when you are in your twenties?

Further evidence that early language development is different from adult language acquisition is that children who grow up bilingually can differentiate sounds that "monolingual" babies no longer tell apart.

In the current study, babies from monolingual (English or Spanish) and bilingual (English and Spanish) households wore caps fitted with electrodes to measure brain activity with an electroencephalogram, or EEG, a device that records the flow of energy in the brain. Babies heard background speech sounds in one language, and then a contrasting sound in the other language occurred occasionally.

For example, a sound that is used in both Spanish and English served as the background sound and then a Spanish "da" and an English "ta" each randomly occurred 10 percent of the time as contrasting sounds. If the brain can detect the contrasting sound, there is a signature pattern called the mismatch response that can be detected with the EEG.

Monolingual babies at 6-9 months of age showed the mismatch response for both the Spanish and English contrasting sounds, indicating that they noticed the change in both languages. But at 10-12 months of age, monolingual babies only responded to the English contrasting sound.

Bilingual babies showed a different pattern. At 6-9 months, bilinguals did not show the mismatch response, but at 10-12 months they showed the mismatch for both sounds.
This suggests that the bilingual brain remains flexible to languages for a longer period of time, possibly because bilingual infants are exposed to a greater variety of speech sounds at home.

Adrian Garcia-Sierra, Maritza Rivera-Gaxiola, Cherie R. Percaccio, Barbara T. Conboy, Harriett Romo, Lindsay Klarman, Sophia Ortiz, Patricia K. Kuhl. Bilingual language learning: An ERP study relating early brain responses to speech, language input, and later word production. Journal of Phonetics, 2011; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2011.07.002

Obviously adults can be "retrained" somewhat (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...061405.php) but the improvement isn't that big substantively speaking -- in this study Japanese subjects improved their ability to differentiate 'l' and 'r' by 18% on average.

Truly bilingual people can differentiate these sounds nearly 100% of the time.

Thanks Tzadeck for the citation. I had a feeling that experiment sounded a bit familiar. I've seen her TED talk.

Tzadeck Wrote:In the next 2-4 months babies stop being able to do this. They get about 15 percent better at distinguishing between similar sounds in their own language, and 15 percent worse at distinguishing between sounds that are not in their language.

That sounds like the babies are worse at learning if you ask me. As I get better at distinguishing sounds in a new language after several months of listening, I don't rapidly lose my ability to distinguish the sounds in other languages. Honestly why is this even startling? When babies start focusing their learning down one channel, they get better it at that task, but worse at the task they don't focus on. The same study then goes on to say that american babies were just as good at distinguishing sounds in mandarin as Taiwanese babies (who had been learning for 10 months) after just 12 sessions of mandarin exposure. In other words, the babies got better at the task again after spending some time on it. Just like adults!

Tzadeck Wrote:Adults can't mimic this at all. As an adult you don't have some magic period where you can distinguish between all sounds with 65% accuracy [the value from one of the studies], and then gradually get better at the important ones and worse at the others.

I know this is going to seem like like an unreasonable quibble, but honestly 65% doesn't seem all that magical to be honest. Even if I couldn't necessarily produce the sounds accurately at first, if you played me the mandarin 'q' and then 'ch' or played two syllables in different tones, I'm pretty sure I'd at least hear the difference 65% of the time. Heck I've done similar things in class with japanese 12 year olds (beyond critical period). They can hear the difference between the similar english sounds (r/l, b/v etc) pretty accurately when said in random sequences using a similar test. There's actually an exercise which you (Tzadeck) may be aware of where students progress down a branching pyramid structure, turning left or right based on listening to similar sounding english words.

The case of 'feral' children would seem to demonstrate that it is the exposure and time that is the key ingredient for language acquisition, as these children tend to have severely stunted language development due to the isolation. Just being children isn't enough.

re: a previous post

Tzadeck Wrote:The way science generally works is not by creating those kinds of perfect studies. Perfect studies are almost always impossible. So what we have to do is make studies that are indirect but are clever and can nevertheless get to the heart of what we are trying to figure out.

I get that perfect studies are impossibly impractical, so I get what you're saying. But I think many of the language studies I've read about are based on flawed assumptions or odd interpretation of the results. Usually they take one small isolated component of language learning (say memorising a set of vocabulary) over a period of a few weeks or month, sometimes just a few days or hour, and then make sweeping generalisations. There are few studies that track learners all the way to fluency, and truly log things like time on task.
Anecdotally, I think most adult learners who are able to spend just an hour a day for five years getting level appropriate comprehensable input via immersion, course or whatever else will end up able to speak quite well and be literate despite spending well less than half the time on task as the average 5 year old native kid. People who've been at it 10 years or more, or devoted more time to it daily show more progress.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Once again, if people are interested in the topic, I recommend reading some actual books on the topic written by linguists who know what they're talking about.

Well feel free to suggest some titles or outline some major arguments.

So far in this thread there's been that head turn test study, which I have misgivings about for the reasons I stated above, and some anecdotal evidence from franciscobc84, which I'm tempted to treat more seriously.

nadiatims Wrote:There are few studies that track learners all the way to fluency, and truly log things like time on task.

Its always been my perception, with the handful of LA papers that I read, that linguists aren't all that interested in simple "fluency." They are interested in why kids can reach native level and adults can't. Fluency and native level speaking are close but always slightly different. Once again refer back to the former example about Wh-movement in a sentence. Native speakers do it with ease without ever having formal instruction in it (not that anyone could probably explain it easily to them), but L2 learners will struggle with it to no end.

I also remember looking at another study in my LA class but I can't recall how it was related to adults vs children. It dealt with the "Isomorphism effect" and the ambiguity of a sentence.

My own experience definitely suggests that there is a critical period. When I was seven I spent a year in France with very little previous knowledge of the language. I took all of my classes in French, did most of my socializing in French, watched a lot of French TV and read a lot of French books. A year later I was fluent. When I was nineteen I spent a year in Japan. By that time I had already been studying for three years and could read manga and light novels, if a bit laboriously. Again I had all my classes in Japanese, almost never spoke English, watched Japanese Tv and read Japanese books. (Two confounding variables: 15 hours a week of classes instead of 35, and I spent prhaps an embarrassing amount of time on the English language internet.)

My Japanese was very good by the end of the year. But I didn't have as good an accent or as good native speaker grammarical intuitions as I did as a child in France, and still don't.

And despite that I still believe input is the most important factor even for adult learners. It doesn't work as well as it does with kids but ... I don't think anything will get you to learn a language as well, as quickly, as a young child does.

couple of points:

French is closer to English than japanese linguistically and culturally. (obviously you have a better idea than I do how significant that is)

Were you reading books for adults as a kid in France, or novels for children? Same goes for media and interaction with teachers and peers. It all would have been dealing with less complex topics correct me if I"m wrong.

Could there have been less of a level divide between you and the french kids and you and the japanese kids? The french kids likely spoke about less complex things.

If you had to be brutally objective, how much time would you say you really spent on your japanese before arriving in japan? Particularly on native audio and having conversations.

the difference in class time seems pretty significant.

Is it possible you were just much more critical and aware of your weakness as a teenager in Japan than as a kid in France?

Can you still speak french well? (nothing to do with the topic, simply interested)

One more thing:

I actually forgot my first language (dutch), even though I could speak it a little as a kid and heard my parents speak it a lot at home. And now I can barely understand it at all. Just being a kid wasn't enough. The amount of exposure was too low for any magical child learning to occur in my case.

nadiatims Wrote:couple of points:

French is closer to English than japanese linguistically and culturally. (obviously you have a better idea than I do how significant that is)

That's true.

Quote:Were you reading books for adults as a kid in France, or novels for children? Same goes for media and interaction with teachers and peers. It all would have been dealing with less complex topics correct me if I"m wrong.

Could there have been less of a level divide between you and the french kids and you and the japanese kids? The french kids likely spoke about less complex things.

This is true, but in Japan I also read a lot of kids' books and watched a lot of children's television, and in my interactions with teachers and peers they would simplify their language for me. (I very rarely had trouble understanding conversations or class lectures.) Certainly my academic vocabulary is better in Japanese than in English, but that's a point I specifically wasn't addressing; whether the topics were simple or complex shouldn't have any bearing on how my accent and intuitive knowledge of grammar developed.

Quote:If you had to be brutally objective, how much time would you say you really spent on your japanese before arriving in japan? Particularly on native audio and having conversations.

By that time I was doing very well in Japanese III at my college, and I was spending a lot of time outside of class reading in Japanese. I had a good amount of exposure to native audio (mostly J-pop and subtitled anime) but had very little experience having conversations. That was definitely my weakest point. But it was a lot more experience than I ever had with French before going to France.

Quote:the difference in class time seems pretty significant.

Yeah.

Quote:Is it possible you were just much more critical and aware of your weakness as a teenager in Japan than as a kid in France?

Well, in France I was mercilessly bullied for talking funny and in Japan everybody told me I spoke really well. (Not because I was objectively better, hah. But because 7-year-olds are cruel little bullies.)

Certainly the standards that had been set for me were much higher -- writing academic papers, giving class presentations, reading Natsume Soseki and Mori Ogai. But my French was better than my Japanese in the sense that I could converse spontaneously without ever having to puzzle over whether something sounded right grammatically. I know this because I continued studying French in dribs and drabs after moving back to North America, and didn't have any trouble taking college-level classes in French literature.

Quote:Can you still speak french well? (nothing to do with the topic, simply interested)

Because I don't really use it anymore, my active vocabulary has atrophied a lot. My accent is a really weird mix of Quebec French, French French, and the French that I picked up from other American and Anglo-Canadian students learning French as their second language. I can still read very well, but in conversation I would be fumbling for words all the time. (And I missed the linguistic socialization that someone going to school and working in France would have had, so I don't know the polite language of business and getting along in the real world.) In many ways my Japanese is better than my French. But in the specific areas for which linguists believe there is a critical period -- developing a good accent and good grammatical intuitions -- it's really not.

i started learning Japanese around the same time as my cousin started speaking his first words in english, so i've been kind of interested to watch how our respective languages developed. He'll turn 5 as i reach 3 years of Japanese learning around April-May.

I'm not gonna say "kids are better at learning languages". In some ways, my Japanese is far more advanced than his English is... of course!! Since he has to make concepts for all of his new words, and i've only got to acquire slightly different ranges for concepts i have already. I can also use a dictionary, whereas he has to pick stuff up from experience and explanation. So, my passive vocabularly is much, much larger than his is.

However, there are differences, precisely in those areas that the critical period suggests there would be. Firstly, if you watch kids acquire accents, it really is amazing. They seem to be wired to repeat things in exactly the way you've said them. You hear your own intonation of words and sentences echoed right back at you, with the exact same shape of the mouth required to make the correct accent. Adults do seem to have to put in a lot more effort to get the same result, and the results tend to get worse the older you are. For a child, this is just such an incredibly natural thing, no effort required whatsoever. This may have to do with the functioning of the mirror neurons in the brain, and the hardening of the myelin sheaths...?

The second big difference is in grammar. While he does make mistakes with grammar where there are exceptions to rules, they are different mistakes from the kind of mistakes that i make. His mistakes are all logical mistakes, whereas i make a lot of silly mistakes that i shouldn't make. e.g. 「ｘを憧れる」 where it should be 「ｘに憧れる」 「会社を勤める」 rather than 「会社に勤める」, and sometimes with verb endings as well when i just haven't thought enough. As soon as i read it back and see it, it's a doh! moment, because i really do know these!!! He never makes silly mistakes like this, ever. Once he's acquired a pattern, he's acquired it, and that's that.

I am studying grammar, but I don't actually think of it that way.

I am going through a dictionary of basic Japanese grammar and sentence mining the examples for all grammar combinations covered by the book. I read through some (but not all) of the explanations about the grammar points once so that I get the gist of it.

It's been 44 days since I finished RTK and my reading speed is picking up very nicely.

I just find it a lot more fun that instead of going through the grammar as you would in a class, I just open up anki every day and read sentences in Japanese, sentences that just a couple of months ago would have been absolutely impossible for me to even comprehend.

I am the total opposite of Fillanzea - I learnt entirely by text books and got a degree, phd offer and flattering letter without setting foot in Japan or socialising with Japanese people. After spending ten days there I got a trial with a patent translation company.

In retrospect I should have immersed myself but the time wasn't right for me. There are massive holes in my comprehension due to lack of oral/aural input. I would basically recommend both approaches but would stress immersion is good.

Most people in this thread seem to focus on a mental aspect of language acquisition, which is fine; it is a worthy topic to discuss.

But it also looks like some tend to ignore fact that hearing and speaking abilities are different in children and in adults because of physiology of hearing and speech apparatus. Often the reason you can hear or not hear certain sounds is physiological rather than mental one and similarly for speaking. Our ability to learn to perceive and/or produce given sounds changes with age and is at its highest in babies. In a monolingual environment, our senses specialise in differentiating a limited set of sounds and as we grow older, learning the second language becomes more and more difficult because of (literally) lack of muscles. This is less of an issue between phonologically similar languages (so, when nadiatims says that his/hers parents, being Dutch, achieved native level ability in English, it doesn’t really surprise me) but I’m yet to see a Chinese person, who learnt English as an adult, who would be at a native level in English.

As anecdotal evidence, I can also give you that:
Once, I was on a train and couldn’t help overhearing a conversation between two friends talking about their common friend, whose name was Aśka (the conversation was in English). One of the two was of a Polish origin so when the other mispronounced “Aśka” as "Aszka" he was corrected. The response was “Aśka, Aśka – what’s the difference?!” The thing is that Polish has three distinct sounds that are represented by “ś”, “sz” and “rz” (the closest match in English would be sh as in "fish") which for an untrained ear may be difficult to discriminate (and pronouncing those must be even harder).

As for myself, I don’t think I’m able to hear the difference (I guess, there is some?) between “man” and “men” - I just need extra context to guess those right.

Inny Jan Wrote:Most people in this thread seem to focus on a mental aspect of language acquisition, which is fine; it is a worthy topic to discuss.

But it also looks like some tend to ignore fact that hearing and speaking abilities are different in children and in adults because of physiology of hearing and speech apparatus. Often the reason you can hear or not hear certain sounds is physiological rather than mental one and similarly for speaking. Our ability to learn to perceive and/or produce given sounds changes with age and is at its highest in babies. In a monolingual environment, our senses specialise in differentiating a limited set of sounds and as we grow older, learning the second language becomes more and more difficult because of (literally) lack of muscles. This is less of an issue between phonologically similar languages (so, when nadiatims says that his/hers parents, being Dutch, achieved native level ability in English, it doesn’t really surprise me) but I’m yet to see a Chinese person, who learnt English as an adult, who would be at a native level in English.

As anecdotal evidence, I can also give you that:
Once, I was on a train and couldn’t help overhearing a conversation between two friends talking about their common friend, whose name was Aśka (the conversation was in English). One of the two was of a Polish origin so when the other mispronounced “Aśka” as "Aszka" he was corrected. The response was “Aśka, Aśka – what’s the difference?!” The thing is that Polish has three distinct sounds that are represented by “ś”, “sz” and “rz” (the closest match in English would be sh as in "fish") which for an untrained ear may be difficult to discriminate (and pronouncing those must be even harder).

As for myself, I don’t think I’m able to hear the difference (I guess, there is some?) between “man” and “men” - I just need extra context to guess those right.

Your point about hearing/speaking and your anecdote don't make match. Saying its probably a "Physiology" issue would mean its a problem with the body some how. Like you are going deaf or having trouble controlling your muscles. Your anecdote however suggest that you do still mean "mental." What you describe is an issue with perception. The polish guy could not PERCEIVE the difference between the two different things. I know this all too well because I tried to pick up a bit of Flemish/Dutch and couldn't tell the difference between what I was saying and what they were saying when they said I was doing it wrong.

Unless of course you are indeed trying to argue that your ears somehow stop hearing particular types of sounds.

vix86 Wrote:The polish guy could not PERCEIVE the difference between the two different things.

No, no, no It was ozie guy who had difficulties.

In a script this would look like:
(O)zie guy: "You know, I met Aszka yesterday." (He mispronounces name "Aśka")
(P)olish guy: "You don't say 'Aszka', you say 'Aśka'." (Polish guy hears the incorrect pronunciation and indicates how the name should really sound)
O: "Aszka, Aszka – what’s the difference?!" (I put 'Aśka' before so that might have been confusing, but the point remains, ozie guy could not hear the difference)

vix86 Wrote:Unless of course you are indeed trying to argue that your ears somehow stop hearing particular types of sounds.

That's exactly what's happening. I just did a quick search and I found this guy and this presentation (Lecture 10 - Language). Take a look at slide 1 on page 2 - there are sounds we, the adults, don't hear.

Or, this article. From there:

Quote:"Sounds in the new language are hard to perceive and produce."

Inny Jan Wrote:No, no, no It was ozie guy who had difficulties.

Ah ok. Still.

Quote:That's exactly what's happening. I just did a quick search and I found this guy and this presentation (Lecture 10 - Language). Take a look at slide 1 on page 2 - there are sounds we, the adults, don't hear.

You do realize these are slides from a Child psychology class. Psychology is the study of the psyche, the mind. In other words, mental.

What you are not understanding is that experiencing the word is a two part process. First you sense the word via your organs, ears in this case. This is sensation. Then the sensation is turned into neurological pulses and sent to the brain to be processed. Eventually it makes it to our consciousness (whatever/where ever that may be) and we "experience" it. When its in the neural pathways headed toward consciousness, this is perception.

Let me give an example to explain:

Optical illusions are perception problems. The kanizsa triangle demonstrates this well. Because of the way our brain processes visual information; most people can "see" a triangle in the picture. But there isn't actually a triangle drawn anywhere.

Color Blindness however is a sensation problem. People with color blindness lack cones for a certain color and there for are not able to sense the full color spectrum.

So the Aussie guy not being able to hear the proper pronunciation is a perception issue. His ears, as a sensing organ, are still functionally fine (I assume), however his brain is not processing the sound and catching the minute differences. Therefore, "it all sounds the same to me." What people are saying is that babies brains are well keyed to be able to pick up on all sounds very well and imprint them onto their brain. This is why babies effortlessly pick up accents.

It's similar with Japanese people with R and L, and frankly I never know how to pronounce them in Japanese...

For example I pronounce:

ありがとう as arigatou but pronounce あります = alimasu (a lot of the time anyway).

But when I hear Japanese people say it, they say it slightly different to me, and I can't make the right sounds however hard I try, it's like it's in between R and L somewhere -.-

vix86 Wrote:So the Aussie guy not being able to hear the proper pronunciation is a perception issue. His ears, as a sensing organ, are still functionally fine (I assume), however his brain is not processing the sound and catching the minute differences. Therefore, "it all sounds the same to me." What people are saying is that babies brains are well keyed to be able to pick up on all sounds very well and imprint them onto their brain. This is why babies effortlessly pick up accents.

I'm not able to find references to prove that but I'm pretty sure sensory perception is part of the problem as well. You see, there are these little parts in your ear that get shaped during your life in a very much the same way as other parts of our bodies. Extreme examples are Padaung women or just body builders. If that was a perception issue then (assuming everybody's ears are the same) it would be just a matter of sufficient exposure to a new sound system to train your brain to perceive those new sensory information. This however doesn't happen. Why?

lardycake Wrote:It's similar with Japanese people with R and L, and frankly I never know how to pronounce them in Japanese...

For example I pronounce:

ありがとう as arigatou but pronounce あります = alimasu (a lot of the time anyway).

But when I hear Japanese people say it, they say it slightly different to me, and I can't make the right sounds however hard I try, it's like it's in between R and L somewhere -.-

It's nothing like an "r". You make an "r" sound using your teeth and lips. The sound you want to make is actually between an "l" and a "d".

Say "li li li", "di di di" and really take notice of what your tongue is doing... when you say "li li li" your tongue is kinda floppier than when you say "di di di" right? Now, put your tongue in the "li li li" position, and try saying "di di di" (i.e. don't let your tongue go floppy). Then you get りりり

Inny Jan Wrote:If that was a perception issue then (assuming everybody's ears are the same) it would be just a matter of sufficient exposure to a new sound system to train your brain to perceive those new sensory information. This however doesn't happen. Why?

Uh, it does happen? People can learn to speak and listen to languages that are remarkably difficult to pick up. English->Chinese for instance. Most people may not detect the differences in tones but over time they can train themselves to hear the differences. I hear this becomes more difficult as we age though. Why does it become more difficult? Neuroplasticity. The argument that I have heard is that when we are younger we can form synaptic connections more easily but as we age these slow down. We still form connections (if we didn't we wouldn't have memory), but maybe not with the ease that a child can and that is why children are remarkable at spoken language.

You will defiantly need some evidence to support the claim you are making though because it seems pretty absurd to me.

vix86 Wrote:Uh, it does happen?

To some degree, I agree. But I can't see any point in continuing this debate.