> children younger than about 7 can pick up new skills, like language and music, much faster than adults can.
I don't think this is true. I think a determined adult learns faster.
I don't think this is true. I think a determined adult learns faster.
But, you are right, nobody seems to take into consideration the very special situation in which kids find themselves: if a determined adult is let free to study and apply himself to a craft, 8 hours a day, without the need to provide or take care of others, without any need to think about money, mortgages and paying the bills... What would happen?
People like that exist and they are the proof that you can actually learn and be proficient even when you're older.
Professional soccer star Marco Van Basten retired when he was 32. He went on to become a golf champion and, incredibly enough, a backgammon champion.
Professional italian musician Franco Battiato never took up a brush in his life. Years ago he decided that he had to become a good painter and he went on to do it.
These are two examples I recall, but I think I made my point sufficiently clear: if you have the time, the resources, the commitment you can probably make a little talent flourish even in you late decades.
an adult learning a language has the benefit of both abstract and pragmatic knowledge of language, having spoken at least one for some time. they don't need to spend time learning, for example, how to move their tongue to make different noises. an adult learning a language also has the benefit of being able to read, or listen, to facilitate their learning. a child learns a language without any of this groundwork.
i feel like maybe you are underestimating the sheer amount of information a child has to process and how completely foreign everything we take for granted is to them.
There does seem to be a lack of research that attempts to correct for this, or at least I can't find it. In the absence of data, I prefer to believe that I'm at least as able to learn new things as 6 year old me.
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What if we distinguish first language acquisition as a special process? If you don't acquire a language in the first place then you have no framework for formal learning. A better comparison might be second language acquisition in children and adults (see my post about FLA/SLA above).
Maybe we could look at acquisition of a physical skill as a fair comparison?
I think there is a distinction between infants and children. Neither have anything to do but learn, eat and sleep, but children have gone through the unimaginable process of connecting their senses to the world.
I don't really have much more to add, these are just my uninformed guesses.
Our brains work by modelling the future, then picking a desirable choice of actions to change that future. What changes when we get older is how far out we model the future. In babies it's tenths of a second up to less than half a minute (in foetuses it's a few milliseconds up to dozens of milliseconds). In adults it's a few minutes to a few months. Everything that gets bypassed by the short time horizon is frozen in place (and is critical for survival, e.g. making your heart beat is one such frozen circuit)
For example, walking (and especially running) requires very short feedback loops in your brain. If you don't learn how to do it as a kid (yes, sadly that does happen) you will never be able to do it well. Language is another example where you need to learn short feedback loops. This means that language learning in kids is fundamentally different from adult language learning.
Kids learn a language. Meaning they learn to express their thoughts in that language. There is no level below that language, and they start thinking like that language thinks. Adults learn how to express one language by using another language and express their thoughts and thinking in the original language, and then translate. This can become really fast, but for example you notice the difference in the number of nuances someone can express if they learnt a language as kids versus if they learnt the language as an adult. For example, what is the difference in certainty of "I think I heard him say that X" versus "I thought I heard him say that X". You will notice that native speakers are sure to have an opinion on the matter.
This has reverse consequences as well. Kids' brains only take a very limited future time frame into account, meaning they will never really understand why you do something that will take weeks or months to produce a reward, or why you avoid doing something because it means bad things will happen in a months time. A kid will have a very tough time getting a feel for why buildings don't collapse, or generally to work on long term efforts.
In short you can switch expertise to longer term things (e.g. music -> painting is probably fine, but the reverse would be VERY hard indeed).
It also means that you will very likely blow up your life if you ever manage to reset this particular ageing process. If you're married, for example, that will mean nothing to you any more if you manage to reset your time horizon back to minutes to hours. I would expect you to have problems maintaining a bank account balance similar to when you were 6 years old.
Don't confuse schooling with education/learning.
Anyone familiar with the topic care to further elaborate on this phenomenon? thanks
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition
Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis
I've also seen many adults acquire second languages and fail to do so. I have also learned to speak a second language fluently as an adult myself.
My hypothesis is that adults' greater difficulty in learning a language is mostly based in fear of failure, social embarrassment, the vulnerability of asking for help, and the necessary process of making a fool of yourself along the way. Children are unafraid to blunder repeatedly until they get it right.
The critical period hypothesis is that SLA is age dependent and can only be done properly as a child. However "The critical period hypothesis is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age."
I am not familiar with the research in this field, but I don't think it is clear cut that SLA is age dependent. FLA does appear to be though.
However the reason I doubt the long term effectiveness of trying to recreate this state of learning - it would likely be highly effective if your boss said "we've got an opening in Japan, want it?" Being able to learn language like a child would be advantageous, body language for instance being from the UK living in North America my first reaction when someone says "peace out" and gives me the V I get an adrenaline surge because to me they just gave me a bigger insult than flipping me the bird. However I remember very little of my childhood or the things I learnt.
I remember a lot >10ya but very little <10. I have no problem with learning as an adult, I can learn a large amount of information on diverse subjects and not really try to retain it. There is no issue with learning, it's an issue with focus because the things I'm learning aren't as easy and it's easier to just not do it and no one but myself is going to punish me for not learning.
That said I'm not sure there are any cases besides languages where adults don't crush children. Their superiority is best illustrated by the incredible rarity of L2 speakers who won't be obvious after 10 minutes by grammar or syntax slips or the unicorns who can do that and have native accents.
My favourite data point on children's superiority over adults at language learning is the list with one member.
Adult Learners of English Who Wrote a Classic Work of Literature in it.[a]
Joseph Conrad
[a] Nabokov grew up with English governesses and could read it before he could read Russian.