Language Acquisition: Crash Course Linguistics #12
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- Опубліковано 8 чер 2024
- Babies have to learn a lot of language stuff before they can even say their first word. Exposure to language as infants doesn’t just help us say those first words but gives us the tools we need to acquire advanced language skills and learn more languages later on in life. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about language acquisition and how the process differs for babies and adults.
Want even more linguistics? Check out the Lingthusiasm podcast, hosted by the writers of Crash Course Linguistics: lingthusiasm.com/
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One thing that helped me while I was struggling with Japanese was when someone pointed out that children, unlike adults, are usually very willing to make errors in languages they're learning. It's tempting for an adult learning a foreign language to try and get things perfect by learning the correct pronunciations or memorising conjugation tables. This can really slow down how quickly you pick up the fundamentals. But small kids are perfectly happy to garble words, invent their own linguistic shortcuts to explain ideas they haven't learned the "correct" grammar for, or ignore irregularities.
Also children, when they move to a new country, get to interact with a lot of native speakers in school. Meanwhile a lot of adults seek work where the coworkers can already speak an common language.
My first word was "agua" (water); thirsty from a young age...
I have found my first-word twin! Hydration is important, kids!
wow me too. but i never thought of it that way...
THANK YOU for validating that exposure to multiple languages in childhood does not lead to language delays
High-amplitude sucking is a good term to describe my attempts at getting good at smash bros lmao
me: "you can bi- or multi-lingual"
also me: bi AND multilingual
lmao
My native language is Spanish, and one of the sounds that children acquire last in Spanish is the trilled "rrrr" sound. I don't remember what my first word was, but I do know that before I even learned to speak, I was making that sound and trying to communicate with birds at the zoo with it. Just going "rrrrrrrrrrrrrr".
I'm special (in a very unremarkable way).
I started learning at 19 and I can only trill my rrr's for like 2 sec, not a sustained one that a lol streamer LLsylish does
Ah yes, the R :D
We've got the same problems in Slovene (usually R is pronounced as L by kids) and even have some standard learning tools for the many kids who have some trouble grasping that. My (older) brother had to use some of those tools, but I...... replaced all of the Ls with Rs in my speech, which is VERY unusual xD
Could be that I was over-extending what I saw my brother learning, but I do also have the trilled R in my first name, which probably influenced matters :D
I am Spanish too and I teach my kid Spanish as well. The Rrrr sounds was never difficult for him. In fact he learned it so fast that I could heard him all around the house pretending the sound of a motorcycle with his mouth at the age of 6 to 8 mounts all.
English speaking kids sometimes replace R with a W sound, like "Wogewr" for Roger. "TH" is another tough one , probably why the ceceo was lost in Latin America. For a good example of a large number of English speech impediments, listen to the priest marriage scene in Princess Bride.
6:27 as a master's student in Applied Linguistics it makes me so happy that you used the term "additional language".
It looks like the team in CC is very professional.
@@troychavez that's true!
What term would she use instead? Why is that term important? Just curious.
Why is that significant?
Out of curiosity, additional as opposed to what?
4:24 there are 2 _____. I deadass said “of them” !!?!? ig I’m worst than a baby
As an adult language learner, I identify well with the "receptive" bilingualism. I can read and write Spanish fluently but speaking and listening are more difficult for me.
Learning so much from this course! I speak Shona, a language not as well documented as other mainstream languages, and this course has been helpful in helping me think about the pieces that go into speech - and therefore, how to teach friends how to say words in my language.
Damn. You did a good job holding yourself together when talking about deaf children not being taught signs.
I actually thought she would talk about children that had been locked away their whole childhood. There are a few known cases of that, but probably not enough to draw conclusions from them. I thought what she talked about was mild in comparison to what I had imagined...
@@solar0wind 'mild' maybe for some, and in comparison, but you are minimizing and I don't think you should.
No matter what it's still children having been neglected (no matter how unintentionally) and it is horrible that they do not have access to language skills. (And never will in the same way as other people because they're past the point where acquisition happens in that way)
Besides which, while some of those deaf kids will have been 'otherwise-well-cared-for', others won't have. Some will have been abused, and ostracized by their family/communities. So although those who are the most useful as comparisons for science will have endured only the 'mild' kind of neglect (because abuse always makes things difficult due to interfering with skill acquisition to begin with, and the closer to the well cared for control-group that those without language are, the better they are for science) meaning for those poor kids it'd be exactly what you thought. :\
I feel like anyone who has been unable to acquire language deserves our sympathy, not a comparison to how it could have been worse for them.
Love the One Piece reference!
I'm not fortunate enough to be born into a multilingual family, but through acquiring two vastly different languages (Japanese and English), I felt somewhat curious about the way we actually absorbed them. Thanks Crash Course for sheding light on this matter in a very understandable way 😍
Growing up, I spoke English with my sister and mom, Hindi with my dad and friends and Punjabi with my grandparents and some other friends. Plus my city's (and Punjabi's) proximity to Urdu, I easily picked up on that too. I'm so glad to have grown up in a multilingual household like this!
今、日本語を勉強しています！
私も日本語を勉強しています！がんばれ！
がんばってくださいね！
I wish you had talked more about adult language acquisition.
I'm a speech-language pathologist who works with 3 year olds with language development delays so this topic is kind of my thing, but I still always laugh when I hear the phrase "high amplitude sucking".
I took a seminar during my graduate studies that was all about infant language acquisition, and I swear the experimental design of those papers was fascinating. Great video!
"Language Acquisition"
*looks at everything I've changed to Japanese to learn the language this year*
Edit: I feel targetted by the learning through anime example, and I think a lot of others do too lol
Anime doesn't represent Japanese culture especially in linguistic perspective.
If you are male, you have probably heard from Japanese men, "you talk like a woman". Female Japanese speech is way easier to hear and learn from, IMO. I learned from female teachers, not anime.
Great explanation. I have a three month all baby and a five years old boy, and he constantly asks me when her sister will speak. I told him that it will take her time.I think, this videos help him understand better. Thank you
This was so well done and considered many important perspectives. Thank you crash course :)
Stay healthy and stay safe. Have a great holiday season everyone😊
Omg, this video is just amaaaazing! Loving the series
Multilingual person here, I learnt both spanish ans english as a child, also galician but more on a receptive level (I struggle to speak it), as a teen I was taught french and as an adult I learnt spanish sign language. The older I get the more difficult it gets but I keep on learning.
Conversations with my brother are always really comfortable wrt language cause we move between English and Spanish mid-sentence a lot depending on what word is more comfortable to say at the moment
Hi @crashCourse Thank you for making the knowledge of linguistics accessible to everyone. I got my M.A in theoretical linguistics and looking forward to apply for a doctoral program. I have always been trying my best to explain what linguistics is and how it is different from "learning new languages", often with no success. Hopefully people would put more respect on linguistics degree, as it is a very versatile, very impactful and will always be on demand.
PS. It would be great if you can also include popular linguistics subjects such as natural language processing, rhetoric and manipulation, language and thoughts, corpus data analysis and others.
It’s really interesting how people can already be beyond childhood while still acquire a language without intentionally learning it... I love anime and watched tons of them when I was in middle school, and after some years I can automatically understand Japanese tho the only thing I did following a textbook was to remember the alphabet 😂 (my native language is Chinese so I don’t need to struggle learning kanji)
Apparently, I tried to say the word "Baum" meaning tree at six months of age, but my mum said that maybe she just imagined it. After that I said my first definite words at a normal age, but could talk in complex sentences way earlier than others according to my parents. Languages are still something I'm good at, especially comparing their grammar and stuff like that. However, I suck at memorising vocab, which holds my language learning back.
Oh man- my HOH daughter didn't start learning a sign language until age 4, which we regret, because we listened to our oralist-only-prejudiced hospital staff rather than doing our own research. It's something I worry about a lot. I got bored in high school and could not manage to learn Spanish- it was too close to French and I kept getting confused- so I learned Japanese instead. Now I've learned LSQ sign too, because of my youngest daughter. I hope to learn a new language soon just for fun.
meaningful video. Enjoyed it
Amazing episode :)
Beautiful!
why am I exited to see a crash course upload...quarantine has messed with me.
wait I actually like this video...well done.
Feeling called out by the 日本語 example
Did you notice the ONE PIECE reference？
I’ve been waiting for this episode!
Same
me too! and it was posted just before my language acquisition test lol
I was hoping for insights into adult acquisition of a second language.
2:46 This might actually explain why when I started learning English I thought that th sounded like f, v, or d, depending on the context. The voiced and unvoiced non-sibilant alveolar fricatives aren't phonemes in Polish, which is my first language
That's really interesting! I am looking into the neuroscience of it atm for a video on that
Hey pal. I am into cognitive neurolinguistics too. Great to see someone with alike tastes around =)
3:05 babbling in sign language
3:14 child directed speech
My first language is German and I remember clearly that the last native sound I struggled to produce was [ʃ]. I always pronounced it as [s], so I couldn't pronounce "Tasse" [ˈtʰɑsə] (cup) and "Tasche" [ˈtʰɑʃə] (bag) or "Bus" [bʊs] (bus) and "Busch" [bʊʃ] (bush) differently. I could clearly hear the difference, of course, but I couldn't produce it until probably the age of five or six. One day I finally got it right without even noticing it.
Today I'm a polyglot with near native fluency in two additional languages and more or less advanced knowledge of six more. I still struggle with the English "r" though. It too often sounds like a "w" before vowels.
Unfortunately my daughter, who we are trying to raise bilingually since her birth, will probably end up as a receptive bilingual. She understands German, but actively refuses to speak it since the age of two. I'm the only person around her who can speak it, but she sees no need to speak it for me because I can as well understand and speak the other language. So there's no barrier when just resorting to the dominant language of our linguistic environment. I suppose it's just too terribly lopsided to raise her into a true bilingual, unless we move somewhere in the German language area.
I feel like thanking the thought bubble is the same as clapping when the airplane lands.
When will you guys mention Noam Chomsky?
I know it's inevitable, but I hope they don't... As far as I'm concerned, his position in linguistics is equivalent to Freud in psychology, just with a bigger ego. Significant and influential, but oh so wrong about so many things...
"high amplitude sucking" aaaaaand SHIFT+WIN+S
I wonder if dogs raised or trained by signers learn to understand signs instead of spoken language. And, yes, I know many dogs raised or trained by people who speak aloud are also taught signs to go with commands, like a downward moving fist for "sit" - but I'm unsure if they would obey from the gesture alone without the spoken command. But what I'm really curious about is the way dogs learn to understand words you didn't mean to teach them. Like dogs that run to the door if you even mention walking to another person without even facing the dog. Or if they respond to the signed version of "who's a good boy?" with the same enthusiasm.
I know this is off-topic, but I was reminded of it by mentioning sign acquisition in children.
im quadrilingual and when she said you might know the word only in one language like YES. That's why my speech is usually a hybrid of 2 languages put together depending on who I am talking to
...or say the English word in the accent of the target language :-D I hate doing it, but it works more often than not
LANGUAGE IS THE BESSSSSSTTTT!
I was told that they were actually worried a bit because I started talking late, but I went from babbling to full sentences . .. and some would say I haven't shut up since.
I think it's like those kids who skip crawling and go straight to cruising and running! :D
My spouse is like you, his mum said he didn't speak at all until he could say full sentences. And my brother did something close, he said his first 3 words then stopped talking entirely for a full year until he could speak in sentences.
Hi, I wonder if there are any disadvantages to acquiring more than two languages before the critical period?
nice...
Hi from Malaysia. Since there's 'Malaysia' mentioned.
Question for people that are more fluent in multiple languages:
Do you ever try to speak a third language, but default on your second?
I am an English native speaker, with a competency in Japanese. But when I try to speak French or Italian, I notice myself desperately clawing for words from my Japanese lexicon. Or when I hesitate I say things like "questa pasta.....ano.... uma- deliziosa".
I think my head basically just has "English" and "non English" settings.
You should do a crash course series that teaches Japanese
@8:48 Gavagai One Piece. You ever laugh so loud you can hear it echo?
According to my mom I took so long to talk that she was worried. The doctor told her to stop responding to my gestures and anticipating my needs. Voila! I started immediately speaking full sentences.
I'm glad it worked! That's correct that you need to give a child opportunities to communicate which requires refraining from anticipating their needs. Gestures, however, are communication and shouldn't be discouraged. Actually it can help a lot... anyone curious about it should look into "baby sign".
One of my younger brothers was the same. He had 3 older brothers and 2 parents who just kinda knew what he wanted, so speaking wasn't needed until we realized what was going on, and started playing dumb with him so he'd speak.
4:47 this is not surprising at all (as some wish to suggest). We evolved to pick up patterns; otherwise, we'd be defunct by now as a species. Take for instance the case of these videos: nobody has explained to you that the music at 10:21 signals the end of this episode; yet, we have all come to recognize that this "video-phoneme-music" signals the end of this and every episode. Pretty much the same, the baby comes to recognize after many exposures, that the "sss" at the end of words about objects signals "more than one." There is no need to recur to "magic," mysterious algorithms inside a baby's head (as nativists are so enchanted to argue); this type of generalization is just another cognitive routinization out of many others. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some other animals are able too associate one specific kind of sound with a specific sort of meaning (an "animal-meaning" if you wish). Still, nice video; once again, you managed to keep it in firm land, away from Platonic accounts of language.
yessss i came looking for this comment and was not disappointed lol
Is it true that babies can learn to rudimentarily use sign _before_ they can progress from babble to rudimentary spoken language?
Anime, yey! I could understand anime in German without any training when I was around 1st-2nd grade. Which then helped me learn English.
Is writing language? Or is it a code for languages?
"Language Acquisition"
*looks at everything I've changed to Japanese to learn the language this year*
My first word was a grunt. Thanks to my older sisters.
I love it here
You guys should check out the science of reading in regards to language acquisition.
9:28 or, you might have learned latin in high school in which case you can neither speak, understand, or fluently read anything but you can translate texts by the greatest writers of old which is... strange
Ah, but you forget, the ATMs in the Vatican City are localized in Latin.
@@Great_Olaf5 When I was in Rome, knowing Latin was more useful in understanding Italian than actually understanding Latin
@@Great_Olaf5 what a relief. How else are those poor Romans meant to withdraw their coinage?!
Uau , cada dia melhor
As a non native english speaker it should be goed
This makes me wonder, I’ve always struggled to fully learn new languages, synonyms confuse me and I just can’t seem to store away words from the other language properly, but I pick up on the ability to read other languages relatively easily. I wonder if there’s anyone with the opposite struggle?
There is. My dad is fluent in three languages, can carry a conversation in two more and knows some words in about a dozen - but in evry language aside from his native tongue, he struggles to understand native speakers at normal paced conversation. It's always quite difficult for people to wrap their head around a guy who speaks their language perfectly, but doesn't understand diddly squad when they talk back to him :D
Imo you're spending too much time learning learning the grammar and reading in the other language. Spend more time talking in the language to natives, even if you're grammar isnt good or if you're stumbling and talking would become easy. Spend more time listening actively and passively and listening will become easy. Like for me, I dont live in the countries that speak Spanish and French so all the reading, grammar learning, watching shows and listening to songs only really increased my reading and listening proficiency especially since i haven't been actively learning for some time. But my writing and especially my talking skills is far from fluent.
I had the same problem before so i would highly recommend watching a show with subtitles in that language as you can read so you wont get lost, and slowly more and more commonly used phrases become accustomed to your ears so you can pick up the nuances in conversation and understand the overall pattern of how that language sounds.
@@QemeH I have this problem in French! I took two years in high school and loved it and can actually say a lot of things with good grammar, so whenever I go to France (I'm from northern Spain so actually I go about once a year) I'm really excited to use it. Unfortunately, even though I remember most of what I learned and can use it, I have a terrible ear and just cannot understand what they say to me, it's really frustrating 😟
Probably! :D It's going to depend on what kinds of things a person struggles to process. Some people are much better with reading, others much better with speaking.
Learning disabilities also do not discriminate by language. Personal experience on that one as I'm dyslexic, and when I learned Hangul I quickly discovered that the same 'flipping' will happen when I'm looking at that alphabet as when I look at english letters.
Likewise trying to memorize Hanja characters, even though they're not letters my brain doesn't care and treats them the same, inverts them, flips bits, and wiggles their edges. (I was hoping because they're logographic that it wouldn't happen since my brain doesn't flip full images afaik, but I do also have the same issues with numbers as letters, so maybe for me it just applies to most symbols made of lines)
I love you 💞
This episode was so cute that I had to pause the video time to time because of cuteness overdose...
Cool video
I don't remember (of course) my first word, and my parents also can't help me in this matter. But the first word in enlish that I remeber is a "helicopter". There was a cool toy helicopter in the english classes for small children that I attended.
This question is for multilingual people. What default language is the voice in your head?
I was not raised bilingual, bit today at the age of 24 I find myself thinking more and more in english, even though it is not my native language. I think it has to do with how much I use english / my NL that day, and different topics I think in different languages.
Depends on the situation:right after talking with friends in french or after classes in french, it's french for example. Right now though, it's english, cause i just spent ten minutes listening to something in english.
And then sometimes it's just whichever i feel most at ease with: if i want to express an idea to myself (in my head) and one language has a very convoluted way of saying it, and another one has a way easier one, most of the time, i'll default to the easiest one
It's highly dependent on the situation. I only speak my heritage language at home/with family, so my dominant language is English. My internal monologue is usually very domain specific (English 99% of the time, but if I'm cooking or chatting with my parents, then maybe in Gujarati).
my native language is portuguese
so most of the time, portuguese
but when I lived in Austria for a year, I started to think and dream in german
when I watch series and videos in english for too long I start to think in english
but dreaming in english is very very rare. sometimes short phrases.
was it helpful? hahahaha
Tbh I'm kind of embarrassed that English is the voice on my head and not my native language cause it always makes me fell a bit distant from my roots
interesting...
I started to learn english since kindergarten. Sometimes I talk in english with my friends, even though we all have the same mother tongue that is not english. Is this a common thing?
I'm multilingual
I can speak English, Bengali and Hindi
There are many ways to fail to learn a language, but the best way is to never try.
I forgot how to speak Spanish in preschool 😭
This is a wug. Now, there's another one. There are two...
Me, a native Indonesian speaker: wug
My first word was "kitty." An early sign I would grow up to be a crazy cat lady.
Can babies learn multiple sign languages simultaneously?
I would think so.
Nice question, ill like to know the answer to that. My guess is yes.
Yes! Much like with hearing babies who learn spoken languages they might mix them up and code-switch, but sign languages are real languages in every sense, and that includes that multiple languages can be learned at once. (I heard of a kid who was learning I think it was russian sign language and BSL at the same time :) )
Although informative and mostly truthful, this video (too) demonstrates a concerning lack of understanding that early language acquisition is centred around (and should be understood through the lens of) speech acts, not syntax and semantics. This video leans on a classical paradigm in linguistics which is by no means flawless.
Children learn to participate in practices and direct others by learning speech acts, and it is when they put these speech acts to use that they acquire the words needed to carry them out. A limiting factor in early speech acquisition lies in the lack of social cognition and the period it takes to observe and learn the social practices around them and the speech acts by which those practices are carried out. Words aren't learned in isolation of practical context, and are actually secondary to the speech acts in which they are deployed.
A child begins by learning simple directives--e.g. ordering and requesting, which you briefly touched on when highlighting how one word sentences may in fact carry multiple signifiers spread out over multiple modalities--before learning more complex ones such as apologies, corrections, bets, promises, explanations, interrogations, affirmations, and so on. Each involve a set of give-and-take from the participants which require the development of social cognition, *without which any account of early language acquisition will remain incomplete*.
Contemporary literature already acknowledges this, and it is the syntax&semantics obsessed linguistics of the 20th century which doesn't.
Languages good
I would love to watch Gav One Piece...
Wugs!! At last we come to wugs...
MY FIRST WORD WAS HAT
My sisters first word was Diet Coke.....
No mention of Input?!
My first word was Numnum, My mother says I used to say it when I wanted something to eat.
my brother's was "more"
First?
I'm sorry unfortunately I was first you arw a close second though, that's also a big deal, congrats
Proud multilingual Malaysian here 👇
Is this a good moment to ask for a Czech language buddy? I offer English and German 😁
Actually the plural of wug is still wug but you pronounce it as woog. The original language puts a line over the u to show the difference
My first word was "mãe"
Cu vi parolas Esperanton?
Ne.
mi parolas ĝin
Which dialect of Esperanto? Aren't there like, a couple dozen of them now?
I'm somewhat disappointed by this video, seems to still follow the frequent misconception that children actually learn language more easily than adults. There's a great article on the subject (with sources (though not exceptionally comprehensibly cited, IIRC he gives the title in the text and thereafter gives an abbreviated title and page number(s)), and I've actually looked through many of them myself to double check), it's not published in a journal to my knowledge, but it's well written.
zompist.com/whylang.html
I was also disappointed in that regard.
Yes!! What a dis-service to people who want to learn a new language: Tell them it's really hard, then give them books in that language. Imagine if we did that to a newborn!
The critical period is only critical for developing the ABILITY to learn language. If you learned language- any language- during the critical period, you can learn any other language after the critical period. The trick is to give yourself the same opportunities you had in your first language-- lots of exposure to that language, spoken. Words, songs, conversations, stories... Avoiding any written material until the language has taken firm root in your mind (meaning, you're at about the same level as you were at three in your native tongue). Only then are you ready to even think about reading, about grammar, about "studying" the language.
How long this takes depends on how much exposure you can get, but hour for hour, you will learn the new language faster than you did your first. (And if you learn yet another language, it will be even faster. Your neuro system simply becomes good at what you practice.)
My first words was ah because i said that because I fell in a puddle
What was yours and tell me why you said that
If you don't know say "ah"
First
Unfortunately you are theid my friend but do not fret 3rd is a honorable spot, grats
BEHOLD THE MIGHTY HORDE OF WUGS
Seriously tho, wugs are like de facto official mascots of linguistics aren't they.
Edit: as a native speaker of Japanese I highly appreciate what I assume to be you guys' conscious effort not to just throw in some utterly unpleasant (to put it mildly) and vaguely Mincho-looking Japanese font that I have seen way too often used by Western content creators in their failed attempts at feigning their understanding of the language.
why am I surprised that the plural wug are in this video
Also it should be wüge
English isn't the simplest language to guess plural "rules".
Spanish is! In words ending in a vowel is always a matter of adding one "s" in those that end in consonant "es" and that's it, no exceptions AT ALL
We have rules, and believe it or not they're largely consistent. There are two major plural paradigms, one minor one, and a handful of patterns unique to loanwords. There is one notable exception to this, in that it used to follow one of the major paradigms, began to follow a minor one that has since been completely dropped from the language, and in response picked up a different minor one in addition to the previous. Child used to be both singular and plural (the major paradigm), picked up the somewhat rare plural suffix -er, then, when it became one of the only words to still use that suffix, picked up another rare (but still pattern holding) plural suffix -en.
Every irregularity in any language has a historical regular reason for it to exist, there are no exceptions to rules, only multiple intersecting rules, some of which have lost all but one condition. No perfectly regular language exists in the world, unless it has been intentionally constructed as such, and none of those survive through frequent use, people by the very act of using language, change it in ways that break its consistency.
Oh, my sweet summer child...
It's a lot simpler than, say, German, though
一番コメント
Based on the quality, nah, this is not the best or top or number one comment. Maybe it's the 第一コメント though.
@@lhfirex Maybe that's what they meant