Re:When do people learn languages? (2002)
by icouldbebetter on Friday December 24, 2021 @04:15PM
(#29677796)
> True bilingualism-- learning two languages from birth-- is its own separate category of language acquisition. It's not uncommon for the learner to never quite learn either language as well as a single language learner. However the process, and learned facility for code switching, carries it's own cognitive advantages.
This is an interesting point indeed as it pertains to my experience. I believe I learned both English and Arabic from birth, however, my Arabic skills have atrophied and my English is definitely stronger but it could use some improvement. However, Levantine Arabic phonemes not found in English at all come naturally to me and when immersed in my home country I would be able to pick up vocabulary quickly and to some degree reading skills although I have very little education in that aspect.
Re:When do people learn languages? (2002)
by ineedasername on Friday December 24, 2021 @04:43PM
(#29678025)
Yep, that fits. And it's been a while since this coursework so I may be wrong, but IIRC one advantage of being multi-lingual and specifically bilingual is the ability to more easily shift to different systems of abstractions. I think the wider range of idiomatic metaphors etc. also presented a more multi-perspective mode of viewing the world. Somewhat on that topic, I can highly recommend the book "Metaphors We Live By", by George Lakoff. Truly a fantastic book & revelatory in showing just how extensively we don't* use literal language and instead rely quite heavily on metaphor.
One brief example is to say "up" when the literal is "increase". "Up" is a physical directions, yet we might say "My bank account balance keeps going up". Really, the $ number is increasing though. Metaphor is everywhere.
Children learn language by necessity. They cannot translate needs and desires into meaningful results if they don't. Once they have the basics, they learn a lot more from peers (preschool) than parents: Adult speech patterns differ too much from the simpler language model of young children so it is their interactions with other young children where they learn pieces of each others' models. Pieces that they don't easily receive from their parents' speech patterns. Vocabulary explodes when they hit preschool even though parents and older siblings may speak to them just as much. This is first-language acquisition, and I hope it's obvious that this is an extremely simplified and incomplete explanation. As a side note, COVID is really screwing with this process for young children who are now far behind in this process. Research has shown that language delay can have lifelong impacts.
SLA (second language acquisition) has many interesting aspects beyond what I can explain here, but I will say that the ease of learning-- all else being equal (a very important caveat)-- source language and target language play a large part. Languages that share similar phonemes tend to be a little easier, ditto for syntactic structure. It makes the exercise a bit more about mapping lexical entries in one language to another, along with learning declinations. Going from a non-tonal language to a tonal language is harder, though interestingly musicians may have an easier time. Conversely, tonal to non-tonal may be easier. Also interesting-- speakers of tonal languages tend to have higher rates of perfect pitch.
True bilingualism-- learning two languages from birth-- is its own separate category of language acquisition. It's not uncommon for the learner to never quite learn either language as well as a single language learner. However the process, and learned facility for code switching, carries it's own cognitive advantages.
Once again though, all of this is a highly simplified and incomplete explanation. There are plenty of very important factors that I'm leaving out here-- my comments here are probably biased towards those aspects of language acquisition that I find most interesting.