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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6736 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 17 of 19 12 January 2007 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
What you are saying may be true as far as the language as a medium of thought. However, if you look at audio processing, there does appear to be a transition, and it may well be biological - adults rarely acquire flawless accents, kids do, and I suspect adults never develop audio comprehension to quite the same level as the natives. On the other hand, most adult learners don't care, or learn not to care :), about acquiring a perfect accent, and in that sense one can rest at ease about having been out of diapers for a few years too many. And well, second languages are known to be processed in a different part of the brain from the native one(s), so there might be other, perhaps less obvious, differences. Edited by frenkeld on 12 January 2007 at 9:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tujiko Senior Member United States Joined 6326 days ago 140 posts - 144 votes Speaks: English* | Message 18 of 19 12 January 2007 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't believe most adults put in the effort to develop near-native accents, to develop near-native aural comprehension, or to develop most other abilities natives take for granted. But that doesn't mean for an instant it isn't possible. There are a great many feats of imitation more challenging than the mimicry of accents (you will find several such challenges in the worlds of music and acting), and I believe virtually every human on Earth is capable of surpassing the two challenges noted above. But it's a *lot* easier to hide behind dogma (as a stunning number of adults tend to do) in order to justify laziness. I've lost track of the number of "professors" who giddily declare "the critical period is past; none of us will ever learn a language" whenever the topic of FL is broached. It's their loss. The way I see it, there are three kinds of people who face any given task: those who cannot do it, those who refuse to do it, and those who do it. In the task of language acquisition, the majority of adults fall into category 2.
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| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6495 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 19 of 19 12 January 2007 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
It might be related to the same idea, however. The process of building tools isn't just something that works on the level of words, it's across the entire semantic range, including body language. In the case of accents, when we learn a language we approach it with the knowledge of sounds we developed learning our first language. Then we approximate the sounds of the new language with the sounds in our native language, and try to adjust them to sound more like a native. This is very similar to how we deal with words -- working with an approximation to our native language in a gloss, then trying to adjust our concept until it is closer to that of a native -- but in the case of phonetics, most people are not able to think about the mechanisms of language production in a way that lets them change the sounds they are making. Try talking about tongue position to someone who has never taken a linguistics course, and you'll see how much of the mechanism of speech is unconscious. Obviously, there are a lot of people who can't distinguish the sounds of a new language, since they're so busy approximating in the native sounds system, so they wind up with an accent. There may very well be people who can hear the difference between all of the sounds of the new language, but be unable to produce them because they don't know how to change the way they move their mouths. However, I'm sure that if you got someone like Mel Blanc, the late great voice actor, he would be able to duplicate a native accent because he has the knowledge of how to manipulate his own mouth to produce any of a variety of sounds. This is not to say that there is NO biological change affecting language acquisition between childhood and adulthood, but I think the way that it has been presented (at least that I've encountered) doesn't actually make sense. It focuses on one reason for this change, seemingly to try and establish a 'universal concept' accounting for humanity's general trait of speaking foreign languages with an accent, and misses how individual motivation plays a role in language learning. Edited by Raincrowlee on 12 January 2007 at 11:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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