I know we talked about a critical period about learning language, and I just found this very interesting abstract about the way a child learns a second language vs. an adult. I can't find the actual article online, but the gist is very interesting. The article says that a child learns the specific words of a new language before picking up on the verb conjugations and whatnot. They also pick up on patterns within the language much picker. For example, most children intuitively say gooses instead of geese in English because they know to make most noun plural, you add on an s. The adult learns the grammar aspects of language and the rules of structure, then filling in the vocabulary. That's basically how I learn Spanish, in fact. First I learned all the ways to conjugate some simple verbs in different tenses, and then I gradually learn the vocab to go along with the grammar. On the other hand, someone who grew up speaking Spanish learned rudimentary vocab words, and then picked up on sentence construction later. Which makes sense, considering that we all grew up saying single words first, and then form coherent sentences.
-Angela
Yes, I know I ramble a lot.
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Hey, Angela! As far as my hyper-unscientific understanding of the critical period hypothesis goes, this does seem to support it (especially if there is such a marked difference between the way the eight-year-old and the fourteen-year-old learn language). “Results suggest a stronger tendency for young learners to incrementally assimilate input patterns without relying on analytic steps guided by principles of information organization to the same extent as older learners.” Other than that, I must admit I couldn't make any sense of the abstract! I’m definitely being thrown off by the concept of “finiteness,” which apparently has a very precise meaning in linguistics. Here’s a link to an explanation of finiteness of English verbs from Penn linguistics. But Angela, I totally know what you’re talking about, since I’m having that problem with Spanish right now. I’m taking some Spanish classes at Berlitz in Ridgewood, and since we’ve gotten all this wonderful instruction in Spanish putting grammar and verb conjugation into organized schema, I can recite every tense perfectly to my instructor perfectly, but I find I have difficulty expressing the most basic concepts… largely for lack of vocabulary (no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t think of the verb “to brush one’s teeth”).
The "finiteness" link didn't work in the first comment, so here it is:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/box-verbs.html
Well, the abstract was an attempt to make my comments sound much more scientific. :) Anyway, with Spanish, I had that problem through out the whole year. I know what I want to say, and I know what tense to say it in, with subjuctive, conditional, the entire fancy stuff. However, I can never really express myself because I can't find the right words. In English, we use all these kinds of connotations and specific words to describe our thoughts, but we can't do that with Spanish.
-Angela
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