How babies and young children learn to understand language

Thank you for this. My kids are bilingual in Dutch / English and often make up such words.

I like that they'll use words from different languages in the same sentence. School disagrees though. I've once heard someone say that bilingually raised people have a higher chance of becoming schizophrenic, although I really doubt that has any major influence.

> Words beginning and endings are learned too because people raising young kids are spending a great deal of time decomposing and telling them simple words. Repeating "cat", "cat", "cat" with pauses.

I'm pretty sure that years ago I read in a textbook somewhere that the effect size for this kind of thing is very small relative to other "parent talk" behaviors like exaggerated intonation?

(But I also wouldn't be surprised if that was just the author's take and not at all a settled matter.)

This really is a thing. My son seems to have learnt the grammar, but not so much vocabulary of English, so he'll borrow vocabulary from Spanish, and force English grammar over it to invent entirely new words.

Example: he doesn't know how to say 'to lie' in English ('mentir' in Spanish). So he says: "You are _menting_" to say that somebody is lying.

Sometimes I feel a little bad we're foisting 4 languages on our kids, plus two more within a 20 minute drive so I expect some basics there will be picked up too.

Our eldest likes language battles: she's corrects me in another language but the game is that I must continue in the 'wrong' one.

Its also contextual maps for statistics. Spoon and fridge are always mentioned in kitchen context.

(Actor + wordsequence + location) * repetition_as_filter makes for a significant data point in language. Thus words are first uttered in context and a feedback is expected.

"pot" hits pot with spoon in kitchen.

Same here. One thing that was funny watching my daughter making the same mistakes italian students make when learning english, even though she was born and raised in an English country. Learning a language that's phonetic makes reading so much easier, when dealing with English it really throws you off the lack of the feature

This has always been my struggle with French as well. I have never quite able to crack the aural/listening component of the language.

How did you overcome the “wall”?

They seem to teach it pretty fast to any idiot in the French Foreign Legion from what little I know. I have a feeling people learn fast with the 'right' incentives.

I can speak German, English and Dutch (which are very close Germanic languages) and also understand a bit of French and Italian. I guess I could learn their basics relatively quickly if I tried hard enough.

However, I actually need to learn Croatian, a Slavic language. This is extremely difficult for me and I make hardly any progress. The vocabulary is so different from everything else I know, I just can't remember the words. The grammar is quite challenging as well.

My strategy is to keep listening to the same recording on repeat. 1000 times if needed. It is good if it is a high-quality recording. After a while, my brain starts picking out the word.s

Shameless plug: try Latudio - https://www.latudio.com/ - we have a listening-only approach, but you can pause sentence anytime and tap on words to see the translation. I'd say give it a try and let me know if that works for you, I'd be happy to hear.

Yeah, no kidding that’s rough.

“est-ce qu'il y a”…. Three syllables, representing six words.

We taught both kids French by dropping them unprepared into the local village school at age 6. Whatever part of their brain taught them English as infants kicked back in and did the same thing for a second time.

Amazing to watch. I wish I could do that.

Native English-speaker here, moved to a German-speaking nation 20 years ago and have become a fluent German speaker as a result. Just want to add my 2c about that wall of sound ..

At the beginning I found it very difficult to parse German as I heard it on the street and in general life circumstances. It wasn't until I rigorously started looking up words I 'thought' I heard, with a dictionary, and gained about 100 of these, before I could accurately parse a spoken sentence.

I think its very important to use a dictionary when learning another language. It wasn't until I got a massive English/German dictionary that I felt I stood a chance.

Another thing that really helped was using sub-titles and watching TV, even if it was a show I wasn't interested in - it taught me so many words that I had heard, but not recognized.

I was facing the same issue when I learned English (I'm French), and I found that watching TV Shows with the subtitles helped a lot.

So you get to hear that wall of sounds, but you get the words spelled out under the picture.

The good news is that now that you’ve cracked French, you’ll find Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese easy. They’re all basically the same language with divergent dialects, but practically identical grammars and structure.

This may come off as a little inappropriate but one thing I think about when learning another language is the usual mistakes or quirks that native speakers of that language display when speaking English. It turns out that quite often those are reflective of the correct form in their language.

It's helped me sound more natural in Japanese and Hebrew.

A big problem here is that slowed-down "teacher talk" does French learners an incredible disservice.

The classroom version of the language is at least a little bit different from natural, connected speech in every language I've studied. But classroom French is effectively a completely different dialect from the everyday spoken language.

I think French is notoriously difficult to understand from speaking language because they tie together so many words and sounds. Contrasted with a language such as Finnish, which is hard to learn, but relatively easy to understand and write because both pronunciation and spelling are just what you'd expect.

> Parents usually teach their children a lot about language. They give them visual cues, speak at varying rates, change their own tone in some situations, and so on.

They do, but this training is not necessary for a child to acquire language. Idioglossia (private languages between two people) is an extreme example, but also the process of a pidgin becoming a creole, where the younger generation of a pidgin speaking population fills in the missing details to create a more complete language, even without ever being exposed to such a language.

Play this, by your stomach, let my words massage it and rub it - Nas

> They also often receive highly-supervised training from a trusted source. Later, they get formal training on top of that.

Languages as they are spoken have many quirks and patterns that are different than how most parents believe the language works, and those quirks are readily adopted by infants even though few parents if any would consciously teach them. A great phonetic example is "choo choo chrain": we often pronounce words very differently from how we think we're pronouncing them. There are also plenty of grammatical facets that are similar—cases where there's a stark difference the real rule and the rule as formally taught or where a rule is picked up that the parent doesn't even know exists (such as the order of adjectives).

As for the formal training, schools don't generally teach any natural dialect of spoken English (at least in the US), they teach a formal written dialect of English that differs in many respects from the language that we pick up as infants. This dialect is the source of many of the misunderstandings mentioned above, and yet children will learn natural language as spoken regardless of the attempts of well-meaning teachers to correct them.

To me this all suggests that supervised learning for the natural spoken language is unnecessary. Children assimilate their native language from the way it is spoken around them. The main purpose of the formal instruction is to teach children to speak a special dialect in formal settings that will mark them as educated precisely because it is distinct from the one that they'd have picked up naturally.

In Indian epic of Mahabharata, there is story of Abhimanyu who learns how to defeat a military strategy in the womb, while his father was telling it to his mother. Which he later uses in epic war.

> One thing I didn't like was the paragraph on how they differentiate words with no formal training.

You don't like it when you're wrong, that's understandable. Of course your reaction, to just deny that you're wrong and learn nothing isn't actually going to help you be less wrong in the future.

It's a book ad.

It seems like this an excerpt from a book? But it also stops after saying “article continues below” (at least on mobile)

So this bit is just plain wrong

> For this the infants were presented with words and non-words and found to have longer listening time for the nonwords. This indicated they had already become familiar with the words by listening to the continuous sequence of syllables within which they had been embedded. The only way that could have happened was by monitoring the TPs between syllables—the infants were capable of statistical learning.

First, "longer listening time" doesn't mean that they identified syllables. Second, it's a group effect, not individual, and the differences are small. It's NHST, and thus their p < 0.04 and p < 0.03 means very little. Third, two minutes of speech shouldn't be able to affect the underlying speech recognition. It's too fast. If someone talks some unknown language to you for two minutes, you still don't have a clue. Fourth, the task was extremely artificial.

This is a common pattern in cognitive psychology. Small effects, artificial tasks, ignoring other explanations, and then making a grand claim. I'm not denying that the babies, as a group, may have reacted differently to strings of phonenemes not in the training data, but I do deny that this is sufficient evidence for anything.

Babies absolutely will still communicate by utterance, gaze, reach, and body language what they want. My son has a particular cry that means either that he wants food, wants to comfort nurse, or wants water. When we hear that my wife and I can just present those three things one by one and he’ll select what he wants. Don’t feel like you have to follow this advice.

As a parent of three kids, total waste of time. For one, ASL isn't the only way to communicate with signs, and it's not the most efficient way to communicate with signs with kids -- they'll develop their own ways of signaling what they want. It's more of a parlor trick than anything else -- "Look what my kid can do!". I've got 3 kids and they were all very good at communicating what they want. We taught a few signs to our oldest kid, but it wasn't any easier to figure out what he wanted, and by the time he was using them effectively, he was basically talking already, we didn't bother with the other two.

(Going to clarify a bit: If the purpose is to communicate better with your kids before they can talk, it's a waste of time. Learning ASL is a valuable thing to do for many other reasons.)

I think this should work well though I might try and flip the Home language every few years since you want them to be tri-lingual. I don't have any kids yet, but my plan is to speak the less common language where we live at home and then the other language out in the world. That seems to be the approach many friends have taken as well to good effect.

Assuming these languages are actually English, Spanish and German, I would find a local club in the minority language and make some local friends where you can speak that language and your kid can come along for the ride.

My SO and I were raised respectively in the UK and France. We both speak fluent French and English.

Our plan has been: we each speak our mother-tongue (French for me, English for her), and see what happens.

My first child understands english perfectly, but replies in French, and my second is too young yet to say any word, but she understands both languages.

Now we've moved to France and found ourselves speaking more and more in French to each other, and -unfortunately- our household is now speaking mostly French rather than keeping English in the mix. But this makes me think maybe we should all speak English at home now that French is acquired by my eldest... not sure!

My wife and her parents live with us and speak primarily Spanish. My wife and I speak primarily English to our son. He is bilingual with some funny quirks:

* He speaks based on his listener. So Spanish to abuelita, English to papa, and dealer's choice to my wife.

* In the early days, he would mix-translate, e.g. saying "another more" since presumably that was how he translated "una mas" in his head.

* He picked up my non-regional accent that I thought I never used anymore.

* His understanding varies based on his vocabulary in a given topic. He understands science in English, but colors generally tend toward Spanish.

* I consciously spoke a lot of Spanish to him when he was young. He didn't fall for it and only speaks English back to me.

So, I wouldn't necessarily overthink it. The goal is to get her exposure to hearing the language and building the vocabulary, and secondly, to compell her to use it to express what she needs.

So, this describes both my and my wife’s situations as kids, and now my kid’s situation.

Let me tell you, three languages is a stretch. In both my wife’s and my cases, the languages which got used stuck - and I don’t mean our parents didn’t speak them all to us - just that in our respective cases the utility value of the third language, which was in both cases an ancestral tongue not related to where we lived or spoken by both parents, was not adequate to make it stick. We each acquired the family language and the local language.

Our kid, we speak English with at home, Portuguese in the public sphere. She’s acquiring both and not muddling them to any great degree.

There’s a notion we share that other languages we each speak fluently would be good for her to learn, but based on our own experiences we intend to take a different approach. Once the two languages which will actually present utility to her day to day are in place pretty firmly, it’s time to ship her off to her grandparents for the summer, where she will be immersed in a tongue that will in that circumstance provide her utility. It was how I ultimately acquired my third language - two months with cousins and their family, aged 7.

So in short, your mileage may vary, but each of us found learning a third language that only one parent and nobody else spoke a chore, and it did not stick via primary language acquisition mechanisms, but had to come later.

You don't want to try things with your kids.

One language per parent works. The other approaches? It's already quite challenging not to mix language in simple bilingual families.

Your second rule sounds super weird. Are you going to change language as you walk through your door? Additionally, at some point the kid will choose a language. To me does not sound solid.

Maybe you can make a teddy bear use a third language. Not that weird (in the first 5 years, I guess, lol). And that would introduce the kid to it.

EDIT: also if you talk only at home you'll get limited to talk about sofas, order your room and stuff like that.

And if you get more than one kid, all this house of cards will fall. The kids will speak between them whatever they want and you can do very little to change that.

I can chime in.

My wife is from Germany, and I'm from Portugal, we both speak English with each other which is easier (DE is very hard for me to learn), but she talks DE with the little one and I talk PT with him.

He can speak perfectly DE, PT, and English depending on which language he listens to, which is quite impressive for me as a parent.

He can even maintain a proper conversation and do translations between languages.

Sometimes he adds a word from another language in a phrase but he seems to know what that word is in the correct language.

I'm Dutch, my girlfriend is Croatian, we speak English to each other, we live in Costa Rica where my daughter goes to school as well.

I speak Dutch to my daughter. My girlfriend speaks Croatian to her. My daughter goes to school in Spanish. Setup with grandparents is the same as with me and my girlfriend.

We're mostly consistent (though occasionally my daughter asks me to read something to her in Spanish or Croatian, and similar for my girlfriend). It generally just works, my daughter speaks Dutch, Croatian and Spanish well - she plays in Spanish, and sometimes answers in Spanish as well even if we speak our own language to her, but mostly she switches language based on context. Surprisingly (to us) she has absorbed a lot of English as well and generally understands what we're talking about, though we've made no particular effort to teach her that (she gets basic English in school, but it's not much, she's 3). Occasionally she uses a word from one language while speaking another, which can be funny because she does adjust the conjugation, so she'll apply Croatian cases to Dutch words and things like that.

I can speak to my experience as the child raised multilingually, though not quite the same situation you are proposing. I was raised in the US to a an American dad and a French mom, and they both speak both languages. My parents decided they would only speak to me and my younger brother in French, assuming (luckily correctly!) that I would learn English by simply being in an English-speaking world. My experience, and I think my parents and their multi-lingual friends would agree, is consistency. My parents even went so far as to pretend not to understand us if we spoke to them in English! Not even to ask for a word translation! If you speak English, you always speak English. If your spouse speaks Spanish, they always speak Spanish. My feeling as a recipient of this education is that its probably better if you both speak the same language to your children, but I know that splitting them up can also work. Again, the key is consistency, and the simpler you can make the rules about who speaks what language the better.

I think this is a common misconception. Children also find it difficult, but they have a decade to figure it out while adults usually only give themselves a few years. Even at the end of that decade, many children still have problems reading and writing well into adulthood.

As adults, we can learn so much faster than kids precisely because we already know how to read and write conceptually. If you can read effortlessly in your native language, you will not be satisfied with your progress in another language until you can read at the same level. What often holds adults back is embarrassment and how that affects our ego. If we could let go and just engage without overthinking it, adults absolutely could pick up languages much faster than kids.

Meaning what, at a few kilobaud?

Anyone have a link to the work he cites?

Once you go beyond Markov chains and into vector models (Transformers or even LSTMs), next —-token-- syllable prediction can capture grammar.

Honestly, the first thing I did was ctrl+F and chomsky, and as there was no reference I didn't bother reading the article. Thanks for inserting some credit where credit is due. This is coming from a background of serious interest in computational linguistics in the late 1990s... I'm aware Chomsky's since dethroned, but the contribution was massive. I am greatly disinterested in these days of popular generative ML, where LLMs ~= hall of mirrors(internet-scale abject kerfuffery) and then people guffaw in awe of the remix.

The characters aren't connected so the brush is lifted and a space left behind. Of course this also goes for the space between signs of a compound word, but this also holds for "compound word", which is itself a compound word. Also they had \n = EoL alright.

Negative spaces are so important in *-graphy

Agree with your main sentiment. For accuracy:

> quite a number of languages, such as Chinese and Japanese (and I think Korean too), are written without space between words or characters.

Correct with Japanese and Chinese. Modern Korean (few or no hanzi/chinese characters) does use spaces.

> In fact, until quite recently (last 100 years or so), written Chinese had no punctuations.

Eh… ok, sure, I guess.

Punctuation was formalized in the 20th century, yes.

There are also lexical markers than can be (and often were) used to mark the beginning or end of certain ideas. While not punctuation, these characters serve a similar purpose in delineating linguistic chunks.

The following page gives some simple examples:

https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2021/09/how-china-adopted-...

Don't even have to look that far. Scriptio Continua, writing without spaces, was all the rage in Greek and Latin, and the idea of using all those fancy separators like spaces and full stops only caught on in Europe from 800-1400. [0]

[0] Wiki Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua

> Y'all … thinning …

Kind of gave it away there.

Author is in England.

Canadian (Toronto) English speaker, although I’ve lived in the US (NYC and Seattle) for a while and it probably rubbed off on me.

To me they sound pretty much same if you’re very consciously saying the words as units, in isolation, “trying to pronounce them”.

If I say them a little more casually, though, the sounds that come out of my mouth are a little bit closer to “haam” and “hmster” - the vowel sound definitely gets emphasized in the former case and clipped almost entirely in the latter case.

It’s really easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re saying a word “properly” unless you’re very very conscious of the sounds you’re producing. As a Canadian, I know this - the stereotype Americans have of the Canadian accent is exaggerated, and it’s much stronger in rural areas, to the extent that I didn’t really think I sounded any different to the Americans in TV or movies. But Americans could still pretty quickly tell I was Canadian when I moved down there. The word “about” is one of the canonical tells, and although I don’t say “aboot” or anything, I learned that I do really say it in an accented way. It wouldn’t be apparent if you just asked me to pronounce the word, but in a sentence my mouth would gloss over the vowels, saying something more like “abut”.

Hm, is it saying "hamster" is /æ/ whereas "ham" is /æː/? I can't actually find a source that uses IPA yet bothers with vowel length right now ...

Even in dialects where it is not traditionally transcribed (such as American - partly because long vowels are most common in place of a disappearing /r/), usually there is in fact an audible difference when you aren't thinking about it. This is part of why computer speech always used to sound so terrible. The most blatant example is when comparing vowels before /t/ vs before /d/, which means that "matter" (short) and "madder" (long) are distinguishable even in accents where /t/ is pronounced like /d/ in this context.

Note that this is orthogonal to stress (since both syllables are stressed in this example), and also orthogonal to the badly-named "long vowel, short vowel" taught in school (which is actually for completely different vowel sounds and which omits several other vowel sounds).

Australian English is supposed to have phonemic vowel length, such that "can" (the container) and "can" (the auxiliary verb) are pronounced differently.

I'm an ESL, mind you but

I think the vowel gets pretty cramped with similar short vowels (hem-ham-hum) so the tendency is to make it more different. It drifted away in general in American English, but the vowel in "air" stands in the way in non-rhotic accents, so the change is much more random and word specific.