I am confused at this: the window that people speak about is largely one of having any language. Aissam seems to have a language, albeit an idiomatic one that was developed to communicate with parents. If so, he has developed the speech pathways, even if any given language will be one of second language acquisition.

Now there may be another reason, but the article is either missing context or the question was not expressed in a way where the doctor answered in a way that follows the science around the critical language period, as I understand it (at least)

Language development starts earlier than most people think. Babies babble with all the sounds the human vocal tract can make, but by 6 months they are only babbling with the sounds of the language in their household. Up to age 12 or so you can learn a second language accent-free, but at that age an important developmental milestone cements phonemes in place.

About 45 years ago I heard Chomsky speak on the idea that the human brain is wired to learn a grammar as much as a bird is wired for birdsong. So learning some grammar is innate, but the particulars are up to environment.

Source: 1/2 a century ago I was a bit of a developmental linguistics nerd. Disclaimer: But many memories have faded.

> Up to age 12 or so you can learn a second language accent-free, but at that age an important developmental milestone cements phonemes in place.

This is only true if the second language has sounds that you don't have in your first language.

Can you name a language pair where that works? I can’t think of one.

If your native language is Ukrainian, when you learn Russian you don't get more phonemes, unless you count slightly different mouth positions of vowels.

Oh, right. I forgot all those Dutch speed skaters who used to train in Norway a couple of generations back. Ard Schenk.. Kees Verkerk and many others. The majority of them learned Norwegian completely accent-free (you really had to listen to figure out they weren't native), despite not learning the language as kids. I figured that must have been because Dutch has such a variety of native sounds that it basically covers Norwegian language sounds.

> Up to age 12 or so you can learn a second language accent-free, but at that age an important developmental milestone cements phonemes in place.

Seems... dubious? What about people who immigrate later (like in high school) and actually pick up the sounds and accents flawlessly? I've seen folks like that and I'm pretty sure they weren't in high school at age 12.

To take your point farther, I've met plenty of people who've learned their second language as an adult and can speak nearly accent free. As far as I can tell, the only difference between those with and without an accent is conscious effort.

The whole idea that there's a window that closes when you're a kid has seemed a little weird to me. Adults learn new vocab and grammar all the time. Learning another language is the same, just a little more extreme.

I wonder if there's some actual scientific evidence for the language learning window, and not just some developmental psychology observations.

Perhaps their native languages were phoneme-rich and could map those to their L2?

> people who've learned their second language as an adult and can speak nearly accent free

Perhaps it's just a capacity that some people have, similar to perfect pitch hearing. Possible, but rare.

Funny that you mention perfect-pitch because in a similar vein it seems like one of those things that can be taught but the window closes very early in childhood.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/030573561246394...

I was gonna bring this relation of also being a skill needing to be developed in early age, but you beat me to it.

good thing there's already a drug for that https://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259552442/want-perfect-pitch-...

science is never fixed is it

> To take your point farther, I've met plenty of people who've learned their second language as an adult and can speak nearly accent free.

I've seen some instances of this, for instance Russians learning French.

My guess is that it's possible if the native language phonemes are a superset of the second language.

Russian doesn't have the guttural 'r' of French.

It’s not accent free, you learn the accent when you learn the language.

>As far as I can tell, the only difference between those with and without an accent is conscious effort.

In my completely unscientific sampling, I'm going to agree with you. This holds true too for native speakers who make no effort to improve their grammar and vocabulary. If one wants to be a better speaker, writer, and communicator, they will be by effort.

Yes, this is the real answer. The claims being made are not as articulate as they should be. You could perhaps say “before 12 a person can pick up an accent for ‘free’” but after twelve its certainly possible to pick up correct accent but it requires conscious effort, which many people are not interested in after they get their spoken L2 to the “good enough” point.

Yeah I don’t think this true at all. I spent six years in a foreign country with very different phonemes and, while I didn’t develop a very big vocabulary, I was complimented on my clear pronunciation for what I could say.

It's very very rare. Though it's not a cut-off at age 12, it just gets more and more rare (and takes longer) from around ten and older. Not sure if it's so much about the vocal tract, it's more about the brain's ability to hear sounds (my wife can't hear the difference between a number of sounds despite having lived in my country for many years and speaking the language well).

In all my life I've only met two 100% accent-free speakers who learned my language as adults, and a third one who was almost there. Everyone else has something I can detect. But children.. a five-year old Japanese girl could repeat everything I said with perfect pronunciation and intonation, first try. Slightly exceptional girl perhaps, she learned the language in a very short time.

> Though it's not a cut-off at age 12, it just gets more and more rare (and takes longer) from around ten and older.

I mean, nobody is disputing "it gets harder as you become older". I totally believe that. Lots of things gradually become harder as you grow older, and language doesn't seem particularly different in that regard. The question is whether that's because your body "cements phonemes in place" around age 12, or whether there's something else at play that's likely gradual and not such a sharp boundary. The fact that it's rare might be just due to the (a) effort required to learn something new being higher in general, or the (b) perceived RoI being lower, or a ton of other factors that don't boil down to "your phonemes are cemented in place"... right? Anecdotally I know in at least one particular case that I observed and inquired about, that person (who's also very smart and hard-working in general) told me they made a very deliberate effort over a handful of years to improve their accent after immigrating, and that's how they sounded like a native now. I totally believe that many people are just unwilling to invest the effort required (which certainly increases with age). I'm just finding it hard to believe there's some biological force preventing you from doing it past age 12, given I've seen otherwise.

> it's more about the brain's ability to hear sounds (my wife can't hear the difference between a number of sounds despite having lived in my country for many years and speaking the language well).

That might be true for some sounds for some people, but I also have a hard time believing it's such a general thing to the extent you're painting it here. It seems more likely to me the explanation is something else, like maybe nobody has managed to give her a good enough explanation as to how they're different sounds. (Maybe not the best example, but I had a hard time distinguishing ch and s in German until someone explained to me how they're each pronounced. Now I can hear them much better, and pronounce them not-too-awfully too.)

The sounds my wife can't separate are sounds which aren't separate in her native language - the mapping is trivial. It's the same with others from her country, it just varies between individuals (but strongly correlated with age, and to what exposure they've had to other languages when younger). And believe me, it's not about putting in the effort. But to distinguish certain sounds my wife has to watch my lips - this is particularly noticeable if I dictate and she writes. As for training - she received two years of training (30 hours a week) with expert teachers who knew a lot of tricks for how to hear and (not the least) pronounce sounds. Tricks that I didn't know about.

But I've also seen this with American and some English adults trying to learn Norwegian - a great many of them can't hear the difference between vowels which, to me, are totally different. Can't hear the difference between the words "har" and "her", for example (NB: Norwegian sounds. Not English vowels). It seems to take a couple of years of daily ear training (or rather, brain training). As always, there are exceptions. But those exceptions are truly standing out.

(Added: As soon as there's context or visibility the problem is much reduced - but it's still there, as soon as there's only audio and their language level isn't good enough to "select" the right words from context).

I've noticed this within accents of the same language. My own English accent has a very mild separation between the i and e vowels in, e.g., bitter and better. To my ear they sound wildly different, but many native speakers from other places and more English-as-a-second-language speakers can really struggle to tell apart what I'm saying, to the point that it's usually easier for me to switch languages to the local one to distinguish the words if the context is ambiguous. Oddly, despite noticing shifts in my accent having lived abroad for some time now, this is something that hasn't budged.

Similarly in my (learnt as an adult) second language, there are a couple of vowel sounds that aren't in English and I usually have to really focus to hear them, and to pronounce them correctly.

The classic American example for me was always "ten/tin", "pen/pin", which in my Southern neck of the woods are typically homophones. My girlfriend is Midwestern, and definitely pronounces the "e" more in those variants.

My favorite example in English is this sentence: "I peered at a pair of pears on the pier."

As a native speaker, the sounds in peer/pair/pear/pier are slightly but detectable different. But non-native speakers can almost never say or hear these differences.

As a native English speaker (American) I think "peer" and "pier" are pronounced the same, and that "pair" and "pear" are pronounced the same, but that the 2 groups are pronounced quite differently.

The ability to distinguish sounds in an L2 that is not in the L1 is absolutely possible. It comes with a combination of massive input and being taught the tongue positions to allow the person to begin producing the two sounds. If someone says they can’t distinguish the sounds mostly it’s because they haven’t had enough comprehensible audio input.

It's bullshit. I can speak Dutch without an English accent and I learned the language in my 20s, having 0 exposure to it in my youth.

There are to main sounds which are in Dutch but not English ([ui] and the hard [G]) and one which isn't in some English dialects (the rolling [R]). However you can absolutely learn them as an adult. It just requires serious training (years of hard practice, same as with sports). You literally have to build up the facial muscles.

One thing I will admit: I choose not to pronounce the [ui] sound properly due to a combination of being lazy, identifying as an Dutch-as-second-language speaker and because for some absolutely irrational it sounds really childish to my years. That latter point played a surprising role in my lack of ability with the French language. It feels theatrical in the way that certain queer people choose to project their speak and I do not want to project as being something I am not (or be confused as someone making crude n-phobic caricatures which would be 1000x worse because it could make someone else feel insulted). Honestly it's probably a tick I have from being raised to be a polite British gentleman :)

I've noticed that some people speak foreign languages with what I consider to be quite poor accents, but they enunciate strongly. If they are smiling, it almost comes off to me like they are making fun of the language or just pretending they can speak it well. To the point I've laughed along with them before realizing my mistake and cringing.

And then I wonder which of us is more fluent? The one who with the better accent or the one who can more confidently project their thoughts in that language regardless of "skill"? (Probably the latter)

Yea but you are talking about two languages that as you correctly pointed out only a few phonemes are different, with very similar phonology, stress, etc. They are very closely related.

I feel like we're so deep in the thread - where after people have time and time again disproven the original comments message about how being 12 years old is some magic cut-off point to language learning - there are now people who just keep adding different requirements, leading this conversation nowhere and making the new point unfalsifiable and - by extension - unscientific; whereas the original comment had an allure of having a modicum of scientific rigor behind it (which, in the end, was disproven)

I think that the original comment has some anecdotal truth - because the vast majority of people do not spend the effort required to speak their second/third languages without an accent. You have to do silly exercises and stuff for very little gain in the end. You're better off learning a 3rd language.

Professional Actors do it all the time, they spend a lot of time practicing (and I assume money) being trained by Speech Therapists to different perfectly.

Anecdotally, I know a Serbian who went to study to the US for a year in high school and has a perfect Californian accent.

There you go!

> perfect Californian accent

Oh man, I hope they sound like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCer2e0t8r8

Nah, he totally, like, sounds like a Valley girl

To be fair, they did qualify the statement with "or so".

This isn't 12 vs. 12.5 I'm disputing, it's like 12 vs. >= 16.

My anecdotal example: Italian living in Catalonia (for a few years now, but moved as an adult), I speak both Catalan and Spanish with no Italian accent and what's even "worse", I speak Italian with Spanish accent ^^;

I know these languages are all very similar, so that helped a lot for sure, but the 12 years rule is definitely not absolute.

Indeed. Sounds like another 'replication crisis' paper in action.

Oh, rad, I didn't know accents worked like that! So if I speak to my kids in English, and my wife speaks to them in Finnish, they'll get to grow up with a disconcerting mix of newscaster English and northern Finnish drawl.

I wonder if getting exposed to a bunch of languages as a kid is why I have a (relatively) mild accent in Finnish now, despite only starting to learn at 26 or so.

For the two-language trick to work, both languages need to be equally useful for the kids. My sister and her Canadian husband tried having her speak to them in Norwegian, and him in English, but as soon as they understood that she could speak and understand English, but he could not speak or understand Norwegian, the kids switched to English. They still understand Norwegian, but they speak little of it and with a heavy English accent.

that's not much of a defense

"Another problem with the claim that Chomsky’s theory of language “is being overturned” (as if it had ever been accepted, which is not true), is that it’s not clear what “Chomsky’s theory of language” refers to. He has proposed a succession of technical theories in syntax, and at the same time has made decades of informal remarks about language being innate, which have changed over the decades, and have never been precise enough to confirm or disconfirm."

There are a bunch of ideas that are more core and strongly supported (language is innate) which you use to explore more tenuous ideas about what the implications are and how they specifically manifest. Linguistics is an extremely nascent field compared to other sciences, Chomsky calls our stage of understanding "pre-Galilean", no one has claimed to have solved the basic questions yet so it isn't surprising that anything other than the core ideas are in constant flux. I haven't seen a good counter argument to the core ideas of universal grammar (or the minimalist program) and to refute an idea you need to actually present a counter-argument not simply say some sub-hypothesis has been refuted in the past so every fundamental idea has been refuted.

See also https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007363

The SciAM article you linked doesn't understand the arguments Chomsky makes when "refuting" them (e.g. they erroneously say that superficial differences between languages show that there is no universal grammar).

I thought I read an article one that some very untouched tribes (ala amazon?) have fundamental different ways of communicating that undercut Chomsky's notions of universal grammer. Which the SciAm article glances on, but doesn't really go into any depth.

That's Piraha and Daniel Everett's work. Even assuming the results are correct (that Piraha doesn't use recursion) that doesn't demonstrate anything relevant. What you want to show is that Piraha people don't have the ability for recursion (i.e. they are an example of people without this innate language faculty), not that they don't apply it. I don't think anyone believes that if you take a Piraha newborn to New York they wouldn't learn English.

Chomsky explains it himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6Lk79bnUbM&t=1386s or here https://youtu.be/c6MU5zQwtT4?si=A9t8d0oXV4dOLZTe&t=3008

It's because you lose the ability to form new abstractions once your neocortex shuts down. The sensory areas begin shutting down quite early (around five) for most. You can only hear which category the sound belongs to + the error ("accent" in this case) and lack the ability to perceive finer nuances after it happens.

My personal experience actually maps to this exactly and, when I’ve encountered it, it’s been a far more predictable rule than I would have thought. This is anecdotal I know, and I’ve even looked up the science on this and it seems like isn’t as black and white as my experience would indicate.

But by now I’ve actually asked this of prob 20-30 people. All of them who came to the US before 12 (or attended American international schools overseas) had no accent. And all of them except two who had come here at 14 or later had at least a hint of an accent. There are the few like the one Hungarian I met who had no English other than spending 3 months in the US and whose English was so spot on I actually thought he was American.

In my experience it does seem that there’s something about the brain’s plasticity that changes around 13ish. For example, I started programming young and also had took physics early at my local college and seem to internalize those much better than, for example, the follow-on physics course I took later on.

But if anyone knows the science better feel free to correct me! A neuroscientist I am not…

This is well known and well studied. I highly recommend Sapolksy’s lecture on this: https://youtu.be/SIOQgY1tqrU?feature=shared

Start at 12:14 for the relevant topic, but the entire lecture is a good watch.

Relevant This American Life episode:

> Jiayang Fan has this theory that because she's spent so much time thinking about her own accent when she speaks English, she believes that when she hears other Chinese-Americans speak, she can tell how old they were when they immigrated to the U.S. (7 minutes)

> We test Jiayang Fan’s self-proclaimed special skill by having her listen to three Chinese-Americans speak, and then guess when they came to the U.S. (20 minutes)

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/786/its-a-game-show

Yeah, this seems confusing. Obviously his brain has a solid understanding of language, and he even recently learned a new language (Spanish Sign Language) so learning another language should be possible.

It sounds like the researchers are saying there's something special about learning spoken language. But it seems to me that there can't have been many cases similar to his.

I recall that they trained a part of an insect's head like the nasal passage and it was able to be used for language better than the model at that time chatGPT2. So there's something innate in nature that can learn human languages.

Can you find that study?

Took me a few hours but it was fascinating. I couldn't find it again easily.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/fruit-fly-brai...

https://oadoi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1007430

Cool, and thanks for search!

I think you may have slightly over-sold the study, though -- or at least what you remembered from it.

My reading of the first study was that they took a simulated version of a relatively large (2000 node) neutral network that makes up part of a fruitfly brain, and were able to do standard neutral network training on it to do some language prediction.

I'm not sure that this says anything about fruitfly noses being wired for language though. I expect that they could have taken that same simulated architecture and trained it to do anything that regular neutral networks could do -- detect faces, make stock market predictions, play a (poor) game of Go, or learn a homeowner's thermostat patterns.

I think it's just more a statement about the power of neutral networks in general.

I did misremember, it seems they used a network of algorithms based on how flies use 2000 neurons and the original article I read it from a while ago may have oversold it. The fact it was able to predict well is them looking for inspiration in insects, and that they'll be using more insect inspired behavior.

> It sounds like the researchers are saying there's something special about learning spoken language. But it seems to me that there can't have been many cases similar to his.

We've learned a lot from people who have received cochlear implants at different ages. Earlier implantation is strongly associated with functional spoken language use and fluent speech. There's a big benefit before age 5; a large proportion of those implanted before 24 months basically have normal language skills, while few after age 5 ever fully "catch up."

edit: Here's a study of prelingually deafened adult outcomes with CIs https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5720870/ All of those studied had acquired spoken language before implantation and had some degree of effective hearing earlier in life, so were not fully deafened before the language acquisition window.

The implants provide an improvement of quality of life but do not allow most of even this population to e.g. understand spoken language on TV without subtitles.

Listening to TV conversations is a high bar. In conversations people can ask for clarification or to slow down etc.

Which explains: Before implantation, 7% of the patients were able to have telephone conversations. vs After implantation, 60% of patients are able to have telephone conversations.

Also, the technology dramatically improved over time so we don’t have long term data on high quality implants.

Still, pay attention to context. This was people who were successfully using hearing aids and oral language before implantation. Even in this subpopulation, they did not do nearly as well as children do, even though this subpopulation was less deafened than most deaf children.

> Also, the technology dramatically improved over time so we don’t have long term data on high quality implants.

We do have enough series to know that 5 year olds receiving treatment have (on average) significantly worse outcomes than 18-24mos.

For the timescales we have tested there’s significant differences, and in terms of quality of life it’s clear early intervention is a significant benefit.

However, slower adaptation isn’t zero adaptation. The limits for people implanted at 5 when they are 50 is still an open and IMO interesting question.

> The limits for people implanted at 5 when they are 50 is still an open and IMO interesting question.

Slower development usually means a lower plateau, and I think we pretty much have to assume as such (and can be prepared to be pleasantly surprised).

Else, we get to wishful thinking: older people on older devices developed more slowly and plateaued at a lesser value of hearing. Now, we have implanted older people on newer devices, and they're developing more slowly, but hey, maybe they'll eventually develop fully normal hearing.

Do you have a source for that plateau? I’ve read that early success predicts future success on age adjusted tests. But the children were still improving in absolute terms over a decade post surgery.

I was arguing mostly from the standpoint of delays in development are almost always correlated with lower ultimate attainment, no matter what measure you're looking at.

But if you want cochlear implant specific data, here-- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10760633/

You're right that time narrows the gap between early implantation and later implantation, but the slope of that narrowing is pretty small by the 20 year mark (and barely statistically significant in this moderately-sized study) and the gap is relatively big.

The difference of time of implantation between the two groups was relatively small (mean implantation at 45 months vs. 34 months) and produces a gap that's durable for decades. >130 months is way, way, out from 45 months.

Very interesting paper!

Still, lots of work to do, to quote "However, it was not possible to control other factors, such as the socio-economic environment of the participants.".

In my view this could affect the study quite a lot (or not, but unknown for now). They mention the initial intervention was 3 months on-site, but after "the patient returned to his area of residence, where he/she would have speech therapy and special education".

Thank you, interesting read.

Looks like scores are still improving at 25 vs 20 years. Though excluding tests which maxing out the gaps never closed.

I was surprised at the amount of continuing improvement, too.

Never fully catching up sounds a lot different than "window for learning spoken language is permanently shut". Am I missing something?

"Permanently shut" for everyone is probably an exaggeration.

A better description "very, very few of those [with hearing restored] after age 5, who had never had any hearing before, develop anything close to normal spoken language skills."

Audio processing is a bit light sight processing - once you miss the critical development period, which is not directly related to the "critical period" for language learning, you will never actually develop them. People can develop something, for example people who had oxygen-destroyed corneas causing blindness who later got corneal transplants, but it will never be vision as you know it.

Search "kitten vertical lines experiment" on the Famous Search Engine. Kittens not allowed to see horizontal lines for the first few months would never be able to see horizontal lines, ever.

It's at least somewhat like that with humans too. Ever wondered why some kids are wearing a patch over one eye? If the child needs glasses but (in particular) when they didn't get proper correction early on then they may have double vision, and what the brain does is to block one eye. That eye, despite "seeing", will lose the paths in the brain necessary for seeing well. The patch forces the brain to start using the eye again.

This happened to me - the doctor told my father "no need to check this regularly", and after some years one of my eyes had indeed lost resolution. It's still like that. One eye can see very well, the other at much lower resolution. Though I found that even at middle age it was possible to improve that to some extent - not the actual resolution, but the brain's ability to actively use the eye could be improved a little. I would read books with only one eye. Could only read half a page at the beginning. But it's impossible to recover the vision I lost as a child, which was caused by the brain ignoring the eye.

I have the same however my other eye is fine with regard to resolution - I just need glasses or a contact lens.

But yes, the binocular vision is permanently shot (though I get some improvement at times).

That's what you get for being an insufferably stubborn kid.

I have the same situation.

The annoying part is that my "untrained" eye is not near-sighted, but my "trained" eye is. I suspect it was different in the childhood (untrained: far-sighted, trained: not far-sighted) and then shifted in the direction of near-sightedness over time.

The ad-hoc language (generically called "kitchensign" apparently?) might be too primitive.

Maybe the brain's plasticity. I read somewhere, a long time ago, that brain nerve cells wonder around and do their thing based on incoming stimuli when the child develops. During very early age a lot of things can be corrected by the brain if something goes sideways, thanks to the plasticity of these nerve cells, but after a while, when the nerve cells "settle" and "conquer their role", they cannot change anymore.

Sensory and motor systems have critical or sensitive periods early in life and then the neural network is pruned and the critical period closes. This is why second language acquisition is much easier at younger ages. There are some drugs that may reopen the critical period although not much can be done about the pruning. So basically all the early neural circuits for interpreting sounds are not organized correctly and it's unclear if they can be post critical period.

There was very sad case of an abused girl named "Genie" who was never spoken to by her parents - kept in a locked room as a toddler and she was rescued at age 13 and made a ward of the state but never learned the ability to speak despite best efforts of linguists and therapy.

It is if the basics of language and fine motor control required of the vocal cords/tongue/mouth in her brain was not primed and that ability was forever gone.

I find this incredibly hard to believe with all of the research on neuroplasticity. Not to mention there’s a VERY famous case that proves this is not a hard and fast rule: Helen Keller.

Helen Keller had already learnt a ‘home sign’ system, which was presumably language-like enough to allow her to learn English later.

And this kid knows sign language too.

I just can't imagine we have that much hard data on the topic. Unless there have been massive breakthroughs in hearing aid tech that I'm unaware of.

Cochlear implants are amazing but my understanding is they're not 100% restorative. To make a bad metaphorical comparison with blindness, they're like glasses that restore your vision but if the only shape produced were shutter shades.

(pic for reference: http://lh6.ggpht.com/nML2bdK30Z0OS3cHBINnLcXCv6XVI8dWpLvMu8m...)

Worth keeping in mind that Helen Keller didn't loose her hearing (and sight) until an illness at 19 months old.

At this age, a child's brain has already locked in the sounds for their native language and lost the ability to learn non-native sounds (hell, research suggests that unborn infants can recognise the difference between their mothers native language and foreign languages before they even leave the womb). The typical child will have been using single word sentences for months and just starting to move onto two word sentences.

Keller might have regressed to zero language abilities after her illness, but she didn't need to start completely from scratch when she learned how to speak.

> Worth keeping in mind that Helen Keller didn't loose her hearing (and sight) until an illness at 19 months old.

While this is in fact an important sample, this doesn't imply much about how humans develop after 19 months, much less how they develop before 19 months.

> At this age, a child's brain has already locked in the sounds for their native language and lost the ability to learn non-native sounds (hell, research suggests that unborn infants can recognise the difference between their mothers native language and foreign languages before they even leave the womb).

We have nearly zero clue how the child's brain recognizes their "native language". We know they react differently at different stages of their development to the same stimulus, which is occasionally linguistic. We have nearly zero clue what the mechanism is that corresponds input to measurable output. This is a very disingenuous characterization of the data.

It's also worth mentioning that the root of this question is trivially false—people obviously learn language after the age of five. Such haphazard presentation (at best) should not be taken seriously.

Hellen Keller never developed the skill to listen to spoken language.

I agree with you fwiw, but your argument needs to acknowledge the above statement.

Hellen Keller was deaf. How could she _develop_ the ability to listen to a spoke language?

if only this site could manage something more complicated than the dialectic of "not retarded enough for y-combinator" and "too retarded for y-ycombinator"

one day, y-combinator will give a shit about disability. There is not enough money in the game for the powers to be to care yet.

Is it the capacity to learn to speak a language, or the capacity to learn to understand spoken language that shuts? Or both? It's not quite clear from the way it's phrased here if maybe the inability to speak is only a consequence of the inability to understand, or if it's theoretically separable. Aren't there people who learn to speak, albeit with an accent, even though they have never been able to hear? So they might learn to read lips and speak, even though they wouldn't be able to understand a spoken language if they gained the ability to hear?

I ask because I'm interested to know which parts of brain research might eventually try to prop that door open. Granted, most people born with this genetic condition would probably just be treated shortly after birth and learn spoken language during the normal time frame, not go through some special other treatment just to prop that mental door open, but I'd still be interested to understand what's actually going on in the brain better.

There's a youtube video of Helen Keller who was both blind and deaf. She learned to speak in her adult life.

I don't have the link handy but it's entitled: "Helen Keller Speaks."

If you look at the video it seems she even appeared to pick up the accent of her teacher.

Was she not profoundly deaf?

Well she was deaf deaf and blind blind. Not partially deaf or blind. The vocalizations and mouth movements could have been learned by touch.

Tongue movements would have been harder to learn which explains why her vocalizations are hard to understand.

> Aren't there people who learn to speak, albeit with an accent, even though they have never been able to hear?

Yes, some people go through "speech therapy" and train to emit the right sounds while not hearing the output (but I think they rely on the inner vibrations ?).

Understandably that requires a ton of training on top of existing skills and not everyone ends up with something workable.

Part of the existing skills is the the ability to vocalize the sounds in the first place, and if a kid never intentionally vocalized for 11 years, I wonder if their vocal cords could ever develop to a point they can make the range of sounds needed.

It does seem like the difficulty, then, must be with the comprehension of spoken language, then, not strictly the speaking of it.

I had wondered about this for awhile, how when you see adults have their cochlear implants turned on for the first time, sometimes they respond as though they do understand what people are saying to them. I had wondered how they could possibly know how to interpret the sounds as specific words, even if they knew the words, but this makes it seem like that's not what's happening. They're probably still reading lips to understand the words themselves.

I suspect this is a reference to the neural mapping around auditory signals, but given that the brain is still capable of changing at any point in life I disagree it's "permanently shut"

Is this one in deaf children or others with receptive language but no ability to speak?

Even still there's plenty of situations where this could save his life.

> the window for learning spoken language is permanently shut

People still learn languages with completely different sounds when they are much older? Japanese, the african click-sound languages... is it some lower-level abstraction that goes missing?

But those are not the only language they know though it's just a different language. The parts of a person's brain where language and speech exist are already developed. It's a mix of several areas for comprehension, speech, flow of speech - it's quite complex and not a single spot in a person's brain.

Then again ruining the point of my own comment what about cochlear implants?

For reference, the language you're thinking of is Xhosa

They said "languages" for a reason. There are quite a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant#Languages_with...

Thank you!

I think the true answer is not impossibility, but significant, near insurmountable difficulty. The sound processing is not hooked up to cognition in the way it would be in a brain that had always had sensory input from the ears. Aissam would first need to learn to differentiate tones, voices, mouth-sounds, consonants vs vowels, etc. That's a lot to ask of a brain that had no understanding of that form of input at all.

But all of this may turn out to be untrue! Our understanding of language acquisition comes from Feral Children[1], who had no language understanding at all, but could hear. Aissam has language skills, though developed late - The article mentions he started learning Spanish Sign Language at 8 years old. That's already a remarkable feat. This might overturn our views of language acquisition, which were mostly formed in the 1800's; Pedagogy has come a long way since then.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition#As_a_typi...

I think it’s the ability to understand any language through sound. Presumably other languages learned lean heavily on what you already know from other languages.

How are born deaf people able to learn to speak if this is the case?

Deaf children can be taught to speak by very explicitly demonstrating tongue/throat position. It's a pretty arduous process and has fallen out of favor, so most deaf people who don't get a cochlear implant will use sign language only.

However, with early implantation language acquisition is relatively easy (thought it varies per child).

The sensory medium is separate from one's capacity to learn and use language. Sign languages have grammar, vocabulary, "accents" etc just like spoken languages.

I think they mean how can a person born deaf learn to make speech if the above quote says this individual will not be able to speak a language. I think the answer to that is it's more "they won't be able to make speech like a person born with hearing would do by listening and naturally learning" rather than "they won't be able to try to make sounds with their voice they are not able to process auditorily".

Moreso comprehend it. It seems impossible to suggest that a person could learn to vocalize language but not to understand those vocalizations. It may be impossible in spite of what it seems.

Came here to say I hope this can someday lead to a tinnitus cure :'|

Funnily enough, just listening to high pitched noises reduces my tinnitus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUZOSg3a1rk

it turns out it's a "phantom limb" problem of hearing - when your high pitch hearing ability decreases, you start to have phantom sounds "fill in the blanks" at the frequency it got worse at

you can test it yourself by generating sine waves and seeing when your hearing becomes worse

https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/

mine drops off at 12.5KHz and goes almost completely silent above 16KHz

the tinnitus frequency is about 13Khz!

Trying to listen to quiet noises between 12Khz and 16Khz trained me to be more sensitive to those sounds and to generate less tinnitus

Ah interesting. I had noticed my tinnitus would get worse when I had been sitting in silence for a while, especially with over-ear headphones to further dampen ambient sounds (ie album ran out and I was so preoccupied with coding I didn't put another on).

Fortunately mine is just at a mild annoyance level so far, but will try your trick.

You probably know about all about meniere's. If not, have you tried going off salt?

Have you tried going off pseudoscience?

What part of their comment was "pseudoscience"?

> What part of their comment was "pseudoscience"?

Is hypernatremia a cause of Meniere’s?

Reducing salt might help with symptoms[1].

[1]: https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/special-topic/m-ni...

Exactly. Additionally, a major symptom of Meniere’s is a tinnitus, something the OP had issues with.

It's funny that someone would call pseudoscience without doing a lick of research, which is... well, not very scientific ;)

> After age 5, the window for learning spoken language is permanently shut.

It's fascinating how our brains are wired in such a way to enable read-only mode at an certain age in development.

I think it is more like telling the marketing team that you can't add an HDMI port to the computuer because it has already finished the production run.

That is to say, it is as much of a hardware issue as a software issue.

Get ready to repeat yourself, because the marketing team really wants that port. The CMO just said "We should really add an HDMI port in a code patch because it would help OEM sales a lot." A sales engineer has agreed and is scheduling a brainstorm session.

> It's fascinating how our brains are wired in such a way to enable read-only mode at an certain age in development.

You're responding to a quote that is trivially false with a quick google. Ok.

> Gives me hope that one day my tinnitus may have a cure.

We are all chained to reality. We must all accept reality or kill ourselves trying to.

> But no matter how well the gene therapy works, the researchers recognize that Aissam may never be able to understand or speak a language, Dr. Germiller said. The brain has a narrow window for learning to speak beginning around ages 2 to 3, he explained. After age 5, the window for learning spoken language is permanently shut.

This is trivially false. How are you acting like this person can be taken seriously? At best, they're wildly hyperbolic in their statements. At worst, they're funded to push a polemic.

How is it trivially false? I know nothing about it.

Maybe the quote is about the critical period hypothesis[0], which is not universally accepted.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis

Well, the part that was claimed. "The brain has a narrow window for learning to speak beginning around ages 2 to 3, he explained. After age 5, the window for learning spoken language is permanently shut." The person seems to mistake the term "speech" for the phrase "language comprehension"—the field moved past that decades ago.

I was extremely confused by this statement because well... I exist. I didn't start speaking until around 5 because of various health issues and I wouldn't say I was reasonable at it until I was a preteen, but I definitely acquired language, just extremely slowly.

I too have to ask why this is "trivially false". We hardly have even anecdotal references to people who never heard language until after five (except for stories about children raised by wolves and couldn't learn to speak - not exactly stories we can trust).

Of course that's goes the other way too - which studies are Dr. Germiller referencing? But again - if it was "trivially false" this would mean that it's something generally known because it's observable. And it isn't, as far as I'm aware.

The brain is a surprising organ, it's only been four month since the kid can hear anything and maybe the brain is powerful enough to use this first-time influx of new impulses as the same start when learning language as a baby. After all, the brain needs 25 years to fully form.

The problem with these kinds of statements is they're impossible to test. They depend on 'found' examples, like kids raised by wild animals.

But those kids were different.

It is my understanding that psychedelics can open up that learning window. I wonder if that could be used to benefit in this case. (I imagine a lot of people might be opposed to having a minor take psychedelics; but if it works, does it matter?)

Look up neosensory. They are a company by David Eagleman who has some amazing TED Talks. They have a product that treats tinnitus.

Sounds like clear bs.