Over at Peter Rozovsky's Detectives Beyond Borders recently, the discussion turned to the curious fact that one of the members of the Swedish group ABBA, once fluent in English, has completely forgotten it. As several of us were trying to figure out how this could possibly be, it occurred to me that it would make a good post on this lapsed but not forgotten blog.
According to this informal but anecdotally interesting blog post, the facility with which children learn languages is exactly the reason why they forget them more easily when distanced from them too. In contrast,
Adult learners normally learn languages through grammar which gives them a skeleton onto which they hang the meat of vocabulary. Grammar based learning never delivers as good as result as immersion based learning but it does have the advantage of giving you hard wired rules that you don’t forget.
And another tangentially related article tells us that when people are trying to learn a new language, forgetting the correlate word in their own tongue may actually be an adaptive strategy. College students who had one year of Spanish under their belts were asked to name objects in Spanish, and the more they did so, the harder it was for them to come up with the word in English. Apparently, it gets easier to keep both in mind as you become more fluent in the second language.
Finally, I happened upon this rather poignant NPR piece about a Thai-American woman who was relearning Thai as an adult after her parents had made the decision that they would all speak only English in their new home in the Midwest--an adaptive strategy in its own right, but one that may have brought as many losses as it did gains.
I was about to correct you and point out that the ABBA singer had forgotten her native language of Swedish, and not English, but of course you were right. That's not a lapse of memory on my part, but a lapse of perception.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the rules by which adults learn languages are as "hard-wired" as that post suggests.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
I think hard-wired isn't exactly right, but that the poster meant that an adult learner is usually referring again and again to some sort of structure instead of just assimilating language whole as kids do.
ReplyDeleteAlmost apropos, I was with my two year old twin friends last night and they are just beginning to talk. I was charmed by the way one of them says not "No!", but "No way!" as her preferred mode of refusal.
"No!" = laconic.
ReplyDelete"No way!" = garrulous.
My lesson in language acquisition came the day I saw a toddler reach up to its parent, wanting to be picked up. "Me carry you," he said.
I concluded from this that humans acquire the elements of a sentence -- subject, object, verb -- before they master the ability to put the elements together.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
I'd say more emphatic than garrulous, based on the experience. She's a smartie.
ReplyDeleteIt's not surprising that words precede sentence structure, especially since some languages aren't organized by sequence, like English.
I wonder if children acquiire language the same way irrespective of the language they are acquiring.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
They must, don't you think? That's the real hardwiring.
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm leery of the metaphor like hard-wiring for human learning, but yes, you're probably right. But that just shifts the question to a different level. If children everywhere acquire language the same way, what is the common element to that acquisition? What lingsuistic concepts and grammatical categories are children able to master first?
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
I used to know several linguists who probably could have answered this question. Unfortunately, none of them are to hand right now.
ReplyDeleteThough actually, from my brief reading on this today, I think it might be safe to guess that concrete nouns come first.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure the issue has neen studied out the wazoo, just not by me. Yes, concrete nouns sort of make sense. Gestures and actions probbly serve as fine early stand-ins for verbs, and the suggestion that conrete nouns come first tallies well with the experience we all have of seeing toddlers pointing at objects and naming them.
ReplyDeleteWhat were you reading on this subject today?
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Starting point
ReplyDeleteMy v-word, Prodi, used to be a better Prime Minister.
Thanks, Marco. I will take a look at this later when I have a bit more time.
ReplyDeletePeter, sorry, I didn't catch your last sentence till just now.
I didn't do a lot of digging, it was just in the second part of that article I linked to.
Researchers explain that infants initially say one word at a time, mostly using nouns (especially names for things that can be presented visually) or social words. As they grow older sentences become longer and more complex, with the introduction of verbs and other forms of grammar.
Nouns, verbs and more: The Grammarian's Five Daughters
ReplyDeleteNoam Chomsky is the one to read on this; he argues that language is hard-wired in the human brain and that there is a "deep structure" of language innate in every normal human.
ReplyDeleteChildren and adults have very different ways of aquiring new languages. Both have strengths and weaknesses, however until puberty lateralization of the brain has not yet taken place, which gives children an advantage as they are able to use the whole brain to learn languages.
I think it's interesting to note that the first step in a child's language aquisition isn't a noun vs verb issue, rather the very brilliant observation that something such as language even exists as a form of communication. This is, I think, a good argument for the hard-wired theory.
Anon, though I really can't reply to your post intelligently at all, I thank you for it, and will refer you to Nathanael Green's excellent blog--his most recent post is apposite.
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