Given the success of foreign exchange students, I’m willing to bet the age factor is much less important than people claim.
People bring up the abused or abandoned children that had trouble learning to speak when introduced to society later in life, but usually fail to mention the reason they were neglected/abandoned as children was due to mental disabilities, so they aren’t really a viable data point.
Genie was locked up at 20 months old. I don’t think they locked her up because of her mental illness. They locked her up because of their mental illness. I reference Genie because she’s the most documented “wild child,” which is a completely disgusting term.
Language is universal to all humans, even though it is multifaceted. Humans also have massive brains that require extra care to bring to fruition in comparison to other animals. Language is one of those things. You can learn other languages at any age, but you first need learn a language.
Genie was locked up at 20 months old. I don’t think they locked her up because of her mental illness. They locked her up because of their mental illness. I reference Genie because she’s the most documented “wild child,” which is a completely disgusting term.
I was going off old college memories - after looking it up, it sounds like her father thought she was mentally disabled and began/increased his neglect because of it, despite her only outward health issue being delayed walking due to a hip problem.
Also re: “wild child”. I agree, and thanks for pointing it out. That’s what they were called in my books, but catchy rhyme aside it’s a horrible way to refer to a victim of such abuse. I’ll edit my original comment.
Language is universal to all humans, even though it is multifaceted. Humans also have massive brains that require extra care to bring to fruition in comparison to other animals. Language is one of those things. You can learn other languages at any age, but you first need learn a language.
It would be fascinating to know what inner thoughts look like without the construct of language to frame them in. Unfortunately there’s no ethical way to find out, short of uplifting a non-sapient species and asking them.
To your last point: I don’t think it’s hard to figure out.
Unlike many people I don’t always have an inner monologue. Like, right now I’m writing so I “hear” the words I’m putting on my screen. But if I’m programming or doing some other complex abstract thought? No sentence there, only a flow of abstract thoughts (words, images, nameless concepts, feelings, intuition, all meshing together in a way that is unique to my brain and would take several paragraphs to adequately explain). This occasionally makes it… challenging to communicate an idea I just had, because my thinking runs parallel to my formulating and going from one to the other is a significant mental overhead.
For sure language does play some structuring role in how I see the world. But there are lots of thoughts I have which aren’t ever framed by language, and I imagine if I didn’t speak any language that’s how all my thoughts would be. Although that would obviously be very limiting, it certainly doesn’t sound alien to me.
And that’s how my infantilization fetish made me a polyglot.
I’m no expert on this topic but I do recall having seen brain scans showing different patterns of neural activation while speaking for language learned in infancy vs adulthood. That suggests that there is more than one route to language learning and one of them closes off after a certain age
Linguists are still divided on this topic, called the “Critical Period” hypothesis - the question of whether there is a “Critical Period” during childhood when children naturally acquire language better than adults.
The data in favor cited in pop articles often comes from “feral children” like Genie, but as Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world mentioned, how much of this inability is due to natural brain development and how much is due to years of unimaginable trauma is hard to know.
Other research has cited brain plasticity differences and brain matter changes that occur during puberty that seems like it may be linked to language acquisition.
Again, however, the counterpoint of “It takes ten-ish years of pure immersion for children to learn a language, and how many adults actually do that” is pretty frequent.
I’m still undecided about what I think - maybe something in the middle, like “humans do lose some neuroplasticity during puberty that may inhibit language acquisition a bit, but adults acquiring native-like fluency is still possible with enough immersion”.
There was an old study showing that London taxi drivers develop enlarged hippocampi, the part of the brain used for navigation, to deal with the labyrinthian London streets. The growth continued over several years even in mature adults as they used those navigation and memorization abilities. I’d like to see a study of the brain of an adult prospective language learner over a long period to see if any similar plasticity exists for the brain’s language centers.
(I’ll admit I’m horribly biased. I was exceptional at picking up new languages as a teen, but let that knowledge decay into nothingness as an adult. I’d hate to have wasted such a useful talent.)
Language acquisition happens different in young children than in adults or older children. Linguists are not divided on this topic.
I think most immigrants I know have an accent when they speak my language, even if they have good grammar and vocabulary, and have been living here a long time.
My dad has been in the US far longer than his birth country of Japan, having moved in his 20s. His English is excellent in terms of vocabulary and grammar, but his accent is very strong. I, on the other hand, having been exposed to the language when young and living in Japan for just one year, have a much better Japanese accent than he does English but am far worse in all other aspects.
There is a pretty famous research paper called “Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life” by Werker and Tees that shows that infants are better at picking up subtleties of phonemes and they start focusing on the most heard language at around 9 to 12 months of age.
The paper is pretty old, published in 1984, but it was very influential at that time. Janet Werker has several other studies about language acquisition, so she might be a good name to start checking when you’re interested in that topic.
I have fairly severe social anxiety; when I went to France, the negative response to the French I was able to stutter out ensured I’d never try to speak French again. (I read it fairly well, because Candide was good enough to read ten times)
In high school, I had an assignment to go to a local Chinese restaurant and order in Chinese. The response to my “我要broccoli 牛肉” was so enthusiastic that I still do a set of Chinese flash cards everyday.
There has to be a motivating force for you to learn something. Whether that is social approval/encouragement, needing to be able to ask for certain things… Some people can be motivated by an intrinsic love of learning things, but for most I think this is confined to specific topics.
For language, I think you need a show that you want to watch, a space you can navigate by only using that language, something that gives you meaningful feedback and places to go that a grade simply doesn’t.
Same story here with Spanish. I was in South America for all of two weeks. But the smiles and help when I tried to use Spanish for anything more than beer and bathrooms keeps me going back to Duolingo.
I speak Spanish, I have a fairly basic level of fluency but don’t live there. People understand me and I can hold conversations but they call me gringo and they are not “nice” or welcoming about it.
I have very little attachments to where I’m from so that was the last straw for me. I don’t identify culturally with where I’m from anymore.
I had a similar positive experience in Spain and Morocco. Tangier is very close to Spain so most of the locals know Spanish.
I would always start conversations in Spanish. Most of the time the person I was talking to would appreciate my attempt and switch to English. In Tangier I talked to a street peddler for over 15 minutes while friends were in a store. I attempted to speak in Spanish but he preferred English. He just wanted to chat.