Knew It!

At last, some support for my pet theory that children have no special gift for learning language which adults lack; they simply don't have the benefit of command of a previous language to fall back on.

Adults find it harder to learn new languages than children but age is not to blame, says a study.

Instead of language skills deteriorating with age, as was once thought, the brain becomes better at filtering out sounds which are not needed in the native tongue.

As a result, adults do not recognise sounds which are vital to other languages because they have lost their childhood ability to hear small sound differences.

"Learning becomes hard because we see things through the lens of our native language," says Paul Iverson, who wrote the report, to be presented today at a London conference, with his University College London colleague Valerie Hazan.

Comments

[kwasi]

That explains something. I have a fairly easy time picking up the way words are pronounced in different languages. I'm guessing its because urban Ghana is a multilingual society and so you are forced to know a few words in several different languages to survive and your filtering mechanism can't kick in as hard

[Jim]

A lot of language teachers subscribe to your pet theory, Abiola, especially if they teach adults. The only advantage children have in langugae learning is motivation. Children are very motivated to please and manipulate adults, including adults who want them to learn a language. Children are even more motivated to imitate each other exaclty, in everything including speech, because thier peers are typically vicious towards anyone who differes in any way.
Adults just don't give a shit to the same extent, and they give less of a shit as time goes on, thus the "Maurice Chevalier effect", whereby people's native accent gets thicker the longer they speak the second language.

Where adults have the advantage over children is that adults tend to try to bring their second langauge skills up to the same level as their native language skills. Educated adults try to get to an educated level in the second language. The adult learner may miss out on some of the really colloquial forms of the langauge, and that may or may not be much of a loss. Bottom line -a second language learner will get to college level in that language about as fast whether he starts at age six or at age eighteen.

There may be rigorous studies on this somehwere; I am sure in fact that there are, but this comes out of my experience both as a teacher and as commander and thus training manager for military linguists.

Kwasi,

I think you are right about the effect of exposure to lots of langauges. Perhaps the languages you are referring to have similar phonologies, but maybe not. French and Dutch are geographically close, but even Belgian Frnench is not all that similar phonologically to Flemish. The same is probably true in Ghana.

[kwasi]

Well, a lot of them are phoenetically similar to each other. Some aren't though.
Plus the list also includes english and french, which are phoenetically dissimilar in a lot of ways at least from the Akan languages

[Abiola Lapite]

Here's a helpful page with all sorts of linguistic information about Akan, including consonantal sounds:

http://kasa.ghanathink.org/akan/lg/languageGuide.htm

One saving grace for English speakers is that it doesn't seem to possess certain problematic sounds typical of Benue-Congo languages in Nigeria though, e.g, "gb" and "kp."

As an aside, it is interesting to note that Yoruba is often frequently mistaken as a "Kwa" language along with Akan.

[Mrs Tilton]

Well yes, maybe. But isn't saying 'old brain better than young brain at filtering out sounds not used in the primary language' the functional equivalent of saying 'older brain less good at acquiring new language than young brain', even if the change is, on its own terms, not a 'loss' but an 'improvement'?

If the hypothesis is correct, of course, it may offer one more reason why those who become bi- or multilingual in childhood have an easier time of acquiring additional languages later. (Even after the 'filter' kicks in, the 'library' of sounds is bigger.) My own take on this has always been that the biggest hurdle in acquiring a new language is not picking up a new grammar or vocabulary (that's just scut work) but learning a new way to structure thoughts. Many people are set in their ways and have trouble thinking outside the box of their primary language. In any language course, I have always been able to spot early on the people who are going to have a rough time of it. They are the ones who ask, bewildered, (e.g.) 'But *why* is the noun following some numbers in the genitive singular, but genitive plural after other numbers? It just *doesn't make sense*!' Doubtless there are sound linguisticohistorical reasons why these things are the way they are, but this not the time to ask those questions (or let oneself be derailed by them).

Some people remain good at acquiring languages even later in life, and I suspect these people are those who whose thoughts are not hopelessly fettered to a particular set of structures (barring, of course, Chomsky's universal grammar, if indeed there is such a thing). The auditory phenomenon you describe, though, would help explain why some people (myself among them) have relatively little difficulty leaning new words and rules, but a lot more difficulty aping a proper accent. I will never speak flawless Hanoverian Hochdeutsch, I fear (though I do wish fewer Germans would ask me if I am Swiss). Those who grow up bilingually have an advantage both conceptually and in terms of the 'filter'.

[Abiola Lapite]

"The auditory phenomenon you describe, though, would help explain why some people (myself among them) have relatively little difficulty leaning new words and rules, but a lot more difficulty aping a proper accent. I will never speak flawless Hanoverian Hochdeutsch, I fear"

I do think that one feature which offers an advantage in getting accents down is knowing a tonal language beforehand; if one is used to encoding words in almost musical terms, it's easier to imitate the locals closely, as every dialect group will have its own favorite pitch patterns even if they aren't used much for actual understanding. It certainly helped me in acquiring a Japanese that others used to remark on the time for its almost native-sounding quality - which in turn encouraged people to think I knew the language a lot better than I did! Still, I suppose if I too heard someone sounding like Hugh Grant while asking me the time, I'd also take him for a life-long speaker rather than someone who'd just memorized a taped conversation.

[Jim]

"I do think that one feature which offers an advantage in getting accents down is knowing a tonal language beforehand;"

This is true if the feature you are trying to learn is tonal in nature, as the Japanese pitch-stress system is. It may not be so helpful for other features. Mandarin and Cantonese speakers are always making fun of the way they mangle each others' vowels, and the Cantonese tone system isn't much help in learning to distinguish (initial) l from n.

What Mrs. Tilton is talking about, I think used to be called discourse analysis. It's not just a matter of how a language prefers to arrange information - Chinese and English put the bottom line up front, German prefers to futx around and futz aroundf unitl you lose all interest in whatever they meant to say, and then there are other parameters - understatement versus hyperbole, and so on. Job security for the translators, and hours of fun for those of us watching Fundamentalists wrangling over the "literal" Word.