Children Learn New Languages More Easily Than Adults
Other, less tragic kinds of evidence also support this idea. Most people have a much more difficult time learning a second language late in life than they do in childhood. Immigrants may try to learn the language of their new country, only to be outdone by their own children. When we visit a foreign country for a while, our kids seem to be happily chatting with the other kids in the playground, while we are still painfully looking through the phrase books. When we learn a second language past puberty, we speak with a foreign accent—in other words, with phonetics, intonation, and stress patterns that are not appropriate for the new language. We also have more difficult)^ understanding spoken speech and more difficulty with the grammar of the language. Puberty seems to be an important time. An immigrant who speaks nothing but English from the age of eighteen on may still have a heavy accent in his old age; another immigrant who arrives at four years of age may have no trace of one.
Notes:
It is best to teach someone a new language when they are young and their brain is more plastic.
Folksonomies: infancy learning language plasticity
Taxonomies:
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/family and parenting/motherhood/pregnancy (0.362834)
/education/english as a second language (0.255150)
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Entities:
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Concepts:
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Language (0.871846): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
English language (0.798723): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago
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International Phonetic Alphabet (0.751973): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Word (0.648009): dbpedia | freebase
Second language (0.639746): dbpedia | freebase
Bee Gees (0.627206): website | dbpedia | freebase | yago | musicBrainz
The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind