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taw comments on Don't Think Too Hard. - Less Wrong
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What evidence do we have for it? There seems to be gradual deterioration of language learning facilities, and at very old age mental facilities are generally diminished, but other than that, is it true than children learn significantly faster than non-senile adults?
You know, I'm not even sure about that. It takes at least 6-8 years for most children to gain something approaching adult fluency in language. For most adults putting continuous substantial effort into learning a second language (for instance in an immersive environment), it only takes around 2 years to gain similar fluency. It may be more difficult for many adults to learn to hear and pronounce foreign phonemes thoroughly, but many adults don't have problems with that, and almost all can improve greatly with a bit of speech therapy.
I've certainly seen significant evidence that adults with comparable motivation to learning a language actually learn quicker than a child does. While this motivation is rather rare I've been convinced that the critical period idea is a myth.
I think there's high variation in adults' ability, low in children's ability.
A million or more Jews came to Israel from the USSR in 1990-2 (my family among them). Virtually none of them knew any Hebrew (studying or teaching it had been illegal in the USSR), or any other language spoken in Israel (English, Arabic). The immigrants had to learn Hebrew to be able to get jobs, attend school/university/retraining, and interact with local authorities. Local Russian-speaking communities did not yet exist on the requisite scale to take in more than a few newcomers. There was enormous pressure, and all the motivation you could want.
My family was among these immigrants (I was 6 years old at the time), and I've met hundreds or thousands of others. There is a very strong negative correlation of age and fluency in Hebrew, even today, after 18 years of immersion. People who immigrated at age 10-15 or younger are fluent speakers, have little to no accent, and it is very remarkable to meet an exception. Among people who immigrated as adults, most are fluent but make grammatical, pronunciation or spelling mistakes, or have vocabulary problems. Among people who immigrated at age ~~ 50-60 or older, many (I estimate at least 20-30%) never progressed beyond rudimentary skills necessary for e.g. shopping, cannot read or write fluently.
There is of course strong correlation between environment post immigration (school, work, non-Russian-speaking workplaces) and ability, but I've met enough such people to know that the causation goes both ways.
I suggest that causation operates via the very real change impact on motivation and the willingness to change one's identity. 18 years of dedicated practice is enough time for nearly anyone to become an expert in nearly anything to a far greater degree than mere competence.
Studies find that adults actually learn languages faster than children do and older children faster than younger. Here is a more subtle investigation of how the motivation of adults interacts with circumstance and language in natural circumstances.
Possible confounding factors:
There's motivation and then there's motivation. Children are too young to respond to the requirement incorrectly enough to completely fail at it. If your System-2 must learn a new language, but you can still System-1 speak your native tongue within family or with friends, it is a different situation from where a child has no way of communicating at all, and communication is not just an instrumental requirement, it is a powerful instinct. Of course, some older adults will have damaged learning ability and won't be able to learn a new language, but it's an entirely different issue.
You're saying all adults could learn a new language and become fluent if the motivation was on the level of "not being able to communicate with anyone at all". Is there hard evidence of this? In particular, once such people achieve basic communication, do they reliably move on to fluency?
But have you seen evidence that all such adults succeed in learning the language, just as all children successfully learn their first one?
They don't. The social and personal influences to encourage such efforts are not all that common. Most adults don't master most areas of expertise.
I assert that most people can master almost anything if they spend 4 hours every day in dedicated practice for 10 years (ref). I do doubt that most people will perform such a remarkable feat (papers in the same reference traced much of the heritability of expert talent to inherited motivational factors.)
Still in the end most children will learn their first language faster than most adults will learn a second.
There's fairly decent evidence for it.
Did you refer to a child learning their first language? That's an unfair comparison. With no language to think in, a child is much less intelligent and capable than any adult. It's not surprising that adults can use verbal reasoning/thinking skills, and the similarities with the languages they already know, to learn a new language much faster than a child would.
The comparison should be made between adults and children fluent in one language (so at least 6-8 years old) learning a second one. In this situation I expect high variation among adults, some being much better than the typical child, and some much worse.
Well, it might be unfair in some contexts, but the point was that since children don't learn their first language faster than adults learn their second, we can't really draw any conclusions from language learning about the overall speed of learning of children.
If we knew whether older children learn their second language faster than adults, then we might draw conclusions.
We know that. (They don't. But earlier exposure to a second language does predict that they will continue to higher levels of proficiency.)
That's very enlightening, thanks. Then the case of Russian immigrants in Israel may indeed be due to insufficient pressure to learn and other factors.
Hrmmm, there doesn't seem to be any (though google turns up suprisingly little in either direction). So much for 'common knowledge'.
I've removed the reference, thanks for the catch.
Even for language learning, it doesn't seem that children learn faster. They just have nothing else to do, while adults typically only work on language some portion of the day/week. A full-time effort to learn a language will allow an adult to learn a new language to fluency in a few months, that is much faster than children do. Another matter is anchoring created by previous languages, that results in accent and other linguistic quirks.
I have no doubt this is true for especially talented language learners. I am not one of those people, and most people aren't either. Language learning ability has a very high variance. 1-2 years seems like a reasonable median.
Have you actually tried this?
If I did, it wouldn't be a particularly useful piece of info (anecdote). I didn't, and I read about such programs.
I was conversationally fluent in Spanish after traveling in Spanish-speaking countries for six months, despite studying the grammar for only a week and spending most of my time speaking English. I can only imagine how fluent I'd be if I had actually devoted myself to learning instead of, well, doing what I like to call "stupid things in dangerous places". (In all fairness, Spanish is pretty easy to learn from an English base, especially if you've studied Latin. I imagine Chinese or Swahili would be a lot harder.)
It would be nice to know, eirenicon, whether you had any competency in any other languages besides English before you learn Spanish.
Ah, of course. No, English was my only language at the time. I studied French in grade school but have no more than a few words of it left - that said, the underlying grammar, which is similar to Spanish, probably didn't just disappear. I also took a couple Latin courses in high school, but never became very proficient and again, only retained a few words and a rough understanding of structure. When I began learning Spanish it was all very new and quite difficult at first. I do think my strategy was a good one, though. The week I spent taking private lessons was devoted to grammar and grammar alone, on my insistence, and it paid off. En mis viajes fue muy útil.