Summary
Blog post about how learning language is different in different developmental stages.
When you ask someone who the smartest person they know is, no one’s first answer would be a baby; babies have an incredible ability to learn because of their high neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brains’ “ability to change its structure and function in response to experience or damage.” (Wede 73) As a person gets older, their brain becomes less “plastic” and their ability to change the way that they think and learn lessens and lessens. This ability to learn is very important for language- understanding, speaking, concepts- and once the brain’s neuroplasticity decreases, learning a language becomes a lot more difficult.
When a person above the age of 11 begins to learn a new language, they begin by connecting basic words; if someone was learning French and they hear “pomme”, in their brain it is translated to “apple” and then an apple appears in their brain. When babies are learning a language, everything is new; to a baby learning French and English, saying the word “pomme” would create the same mental picture/process as saying the word “apple” (Khan 58).
The reason that age is a limiting factor on learning can be explained by Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development, cognitive development is how the way you think develops as you get older. These stages are a way of understanding how cognitive development is achieved in a specific order and as the stages are achieved, a child will gain a cognitive ability such as object permanence for the sensorimotor stage, understanding themselves in relation to others in preoperational stage, conservation in concrete operational stage, and abstract thinking in the formal operational stage. These can be seen in the table below.
The actual timeline is not year-for-year for every person, once a person enters the formal operational stage, they lose the conceptual way of thinking and begin to think “systematically” rather than “fundamentally”(Wede, 12).
While the difficulty of learning a new language past this critical time is seen in any high school student that took a language in their four years, there are a few cases in history where a few individuals were unable to learn any language before their formal operational stage, one of these individuals is Genie Wiley.
Genie comes from an abusive family and at the age of 20 months her abuse began. Genie was kept in various restrictive positions that prohibited her from learning to walk. Her father and brother rarely interacted with her and when they did, they only spoke to her in barking noises and grunts. When Genie cried or made noise, she was hit. This lasted until Genie was 12 years old when she was rescued and became a focus to psychologists, linguists, and others interested in her case (Britannica).
Even though Genie was surrounded by some of the smartest linguists in the world, she never fully developed the ability to speak in proper grammar, she was able to express ideas and emotions, but not in the way she would have if she would have been exposed to language at a younger age.
While it was understood that these stages of life are important for developing language, Genie’s case is one of the extremes, but an extreme that provides insight for just how crucial it is to be exposed to language in the first stages of life.
Sources
“Genie.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 9 Mar. 2024, www.britannica.com/biography/Genie-feral-child.
“Jean Piagets Theory of Cognitive Development.” RSS, www.structural-learning.com/post/jean-piagets-theory-of-cognitive-development-and-active-classrooms. Accessed 17 Mar. 2024.
Khan, Raniah. “Critical periods in language development.” International Journal of High School Research, vol. 5, no. 6, 30 Nov. 2023, pp. 57–62, https://doi.org/10.36838/v5i6.11.
Wede, Josh. “Lecture 12- Infancy and Childhood.” The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 13, March 2024. Lecture.