Is the ability to use language innate, or is it learned? Do
children and adults differ in how they learn language? Why do certain patterns consistently
occur in many languages across the world? For example, number words (‘two’)
usually come before the noun they’re counting as in “two cars”, in English, and
“deux voitures”, in French. To answer these questions, we can look to the ways
in which humans learn. Our system of language is essentially a series of
patterns; from what makes a word, to how sentences are formed. Humans are quite
good at learning these patterns, and the ability to learn these patterns in
language is known as statistical language
learning. In this paper, Newport described research over the past 20 years showing
that statistical language learning can explain many of the patterns we observe
when humans start to learn language, even across different languages of the
world.
Language learners show an extraordinary ability to learn language
through statistical language learning. However, when the input is variable or
inconsistent, language learning across children and adults look quite different.
Researchers have examined this phenomenon in the lab by comparing how children
and adults learn artificial languages. These artificial languages contain a
consistent grammatical rule that applies to most cases, but this rule is
violated some of the time. Adults learn the language exactly as they heard it,
learning both the rules and the violations. Young children, on the other hand,
learn the rule but not the exceptions, and generalize that rule across the
language. This difference in how adults and children learn a novel language is
important for understanding language acquisition.
The finding of children learning and generalizing the
consistent patterns in a language has been shown in a number of experimental
studies and real-world settings. But why does children’s language learning look
different from adults? One explanation is
that children are biased towards learning the consistent patterns because of how
they learn. Children are able to process less information than adults; because
of this, it is easier for children to learn and use a consistent pattern that
they can apply to many cases than it is to learn inconsistent patterns, or many
exceptions to a rule. This tendency to adopt the easy-to-learn patterns may
explain why certain patterns exist in many languages across the world. Examining
how young children learn language tells us a lot about language acquisition,
and why certain patterns exist across many languages of the world.
Blogger: Nicolette Noonan;
Nicolette is a Psychology Ph.D. student, supervised by Drs. Lisa Archibald and
Marc Joanisse