The magic ingredient for language acquisition

When was the last time you saw a five-year-old studying verb charts?

In last week’s issue, we learned that what native speakers know when they know a language has very little to do with what is taught in language classes. 

We talked about how native speakers of a language have a rich, abstract, and unconscious knowledge of their language, and how our goal in learning a language is to try to get the same knowledge a native speaker has into our own heads!

But how on earth can we do that?

After all, a native speaker’s knowledge is unconscious. How do you obtain unconscious knowledge?!

Fortunately, evolution has equipped the human mind with a superpower that lets us obtain this abstract, unconscious knowledge we need in order to know a language effortlessly and reliably.

In this issue of How Do You Say…, we’re going to continue our foray into the science behind language learning, to get you on the right path before you even try and utter your first words.

Think of how children learn languages. Given the same rough language environment – say, a home where Spanish is spoken – kids will all converge on virtually the same set of abstract mental models of Spanish.

And this happens with barely any formal instruction or correction. Weirder still, this process is more or less complete by the age of 5! When was the last time you saw a five-year-old studying verb charts?

It’s a bit weird, isn’t it? How do these kids accomplish it? 

It seems that there’s something inside the child’s mind that’s really good at taking the language spoken around them and turning it into just the right unconscious knowledge that lets them produce and comprehend that language.

Linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists get into shouting matches over what exactly this “something” is, but for our purposes we can think of it as a kind of instinct.

Like our other instincts, the instinct for language gets activated when we’re put in the right environment: when we encounter instances of language (words and sentences) around us. 

Let’s call these instances of language present in the environment the input.

So when a child’s parents speak to the child, that’s input. When the child overhears the parents talk to each other, that’s input. When the child’s annoying uncle comes over and tells bad jokes, that’s input. When the TV gets left on within earshot, that’s input too. Some types of input may be more helpful at one stage than another, but it’s all input.

What happens next can be described by a very simple equation: instinct + input = language acquisition.

That’s it. The superpower is activated by input.

With enough input, a child’s instinct for language will replicate in their mind all that abstract unconscious knowledge that exists in the minds of the parents, the annoying uncle, and the TV announcer.

The child has become a native speaker of the language of the environment.

This is astounding when you think about just how abstract the child’s knowledge has to be. Remember from last time that the native speaker of English has to be able to tell the difference between seem and try.

Learning this distinction involves a great deal of abstract stuff: stuff nowhere to be found in the words themselves. And yet this distinction emerges reliably in English speakers everywhere (although this one is relatively late, appearing by about age 7).

Recall the equation: instinct + input = language. Note that there’s nothing in there about reward or punishment.

Children, by and large, do not receive feedback about grammar. Parents tend to deliver rewards or correction based on the accuracy of the content of the child’s speech, not the grammar of the sentence used to deliver the message.

So, if a toy is on the table, the factually inaccurate but adult-like utterance “The toy is on the floor” is more likely to be corrected than the non-adult-like, but factually accurate, utterance “toy on table”.

And even when children do receive feedback about some non-adult-like aspect of their grammar, they tend to ignore it completely. Consider this exchange, which is typical:

Child: My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.

Adult: Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits?

Child: Yes.

Adult: What did you say she did?

Child: She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.

Adult: Did you say she held them tightly?

Child: No, she holded them loosely.

(Gleason 1967, as cited in Butler 1974)

Without feedback, how do children acquire knowledge of language?

Simply from processing the input in their environment. As they encounter more and more input, children’s mental model of their language grows and becomes more and more adult-like until, poof, one day it’s indistinguishable from the grammar of their parents.

Well done, children!

But… if we’re not children, what then? Can we replicate their success? Or do we lose this superpower which allows us to build up abstract knowledge of language from input alone once we hit a certain age?

There certainly are differences between learning a language as a child and learning a language as an adult, but there’s debate over whether these differences are fundamental.

There does seem to be a difference between the outcome of learning your first language as a child – to get technical, we can call this first-language acquisition – and the outcome of learning other languages later in life – let’s call this second-language acquisition. 

Even highly advanced second-language speakers of a language always seem to be non-native-like in some way or another, whether this shows up in differences in word choice, pronunciation, or grammar. 

And the process of second-language acquisition can certainly feel effortful, frustrating, and slow – whereas children seem to pick up their first languages relatively quickly without breaking a sweat.

These differences are real, but we don’t yet know where they come from. 

It’s possible that there is some intrinsic factor in the mind that makes us less able to acquire languages past a certain age. But it’s also possible that these differences come from the many extrinsic differences between first- and second-language acquisition.

These extrinsic factors include things like motivation (the first language is a necessity, while the second language is often a choice), quantity of input (children receive many thousands of hours of input, whereas adults have to fit language learning into busy lives), and frustration with being unable to express yourself as well in your second language as in your first.

Any or all of these could cause the differences that do exist between first- and second-language acquisition. And so could the fact that our superpower instinct shuts off after a certain age, and we have to rely on slower, less efficient general learning. We simply don’t know.

What we do know, however, is that people do succeed at reaching extremely high levels in second languages all the time. Even if they aren’t 100% native-like in every way, for most functional purposes they are equivalent to native speakers. This, we think, is still a pretty amazing outcome worth aiming for.

We also know that first- and second-language acquisition have a lot in common. The most important thing they share is the key ingredient that both need: input.

Whether or not the instinct is still active, input is still required. And lots of it. But, as we’ve alluded to a few times above, not all input is created equal. 

So, in the next issue, we’re going to dive into what kind of input you should look for in order to make your path to near-native-like status as smooth as possible.

Until then, how do you say goodbye in Balinese?

Rahajeng memargi!

Colin & Natasha