I may be wrongly picking up on your name, and maybe it's just a handle, but it sounds decidedly non-English speaking.
So at what age did you start learning English? I did after age 8, and yet both you and I are fluent enough. At least in this and other messages to the list, you show evidence of both a rich vocabulary and good command of the complex English tense system. I believe that my English is similarly up to the standards of a native English speaker, though maybe with a somewhat poorer vocabulary than that of an educated English speaker.
Talking face to face, it takes Americans some time to recognize a foreign accent, but I can attribute that to the variety of accents you can find within the US itself.
With people who learn a foreign language by immersion later in life, I've seen them get to a very good command of the new language in a short time, reaching the level of a 6-year-old kid within 1 year. Russians, for example, can learn to use articles if they want to.
With all that, I don't see how you could say that the brain can't learn new patterns.
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 6:36 AM, Ivo Doko
<ivo.doko@gmail.com> wrote:
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.