[lojban] Re: Fwd: lojban and raising a child bi-lingual

[Ivo Doko <ivo.doko@gmail.com>]

2009/9/15 Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com>:
> If you were immersed in a foreign-language culture for all your waking hours
> with no other possible language to communicate with, and in a culture that
> you saw yourself as a part of, you too would learn the language fluently,
> and in far less than the approximately 6 years that children take to attain
> fluency.


I'm not so sure about that. I'm pretty sure I either saw a documentary
or read an article about an experiment on how children learn languages
quite differently than adolescents and grown-ups.

There is a certain part of the human brain dedicated especially to
languages and in children that part of the brain is, for the lack of a
better word, active, meaning that it learns and changes and all the
languages a child learns are "learned" in that part of the brain. But
it seems that, at the age of 6 or 8 or something like that, that part
of the brain becomes "inactive", not in the sense that it shuts off
but that, although it is still capable of processing what it has
learned, it isn't capable of learning anything new any more. In a
brain of an adolescent or a grown-up, any new languages learned are
"learned" in the part of the brain dedicated to learning rules. As the
adolescent or the grown-up refine their knowledge of the language they
are learning and attain fluency in it, the only thing that happens is
that the number of neural connections between the part of the brain
dedicated to learning rules and the part of the brain dedicated to
languages drastically increases as they get closer to being fully
fluent in the language. So no matter how hard grown-ups try, it's
never going to be as easy to learn a new language to them as it is to
children.

I'm positive that I either read or saw this somewhere, but I'll gladly
try to dig up some links and references if you don't believe me.


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