Children do it better

Steven Pinker

There aren't many things that small children can do better than their parents. Crawl into tight spaces might be one of them. But five-year-olds can't drive a car very well, and not just because their feet don't reach the pedals. You wouldn't ask a toddler to do your taxes or cook a meatloaf. Yet any child with virtually any IQ can learn any language in the world with ease just by hearing it spoken.

In A Far Off Place, a novel I reviewed here on April 4, a European boy raised in Africa can speak the Bushman language, one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn because it uses clicks as well as words, because he heard it spoken as a small child. Children need to go to school to learn to read and write a language, but they can speak it when they are barely a year old just by hearing others speak it, preferably actual people rather than images on television.

So how can small children learn languages — even multiple languages at the same time — with such ease, while adults struggle with any new language and, in most cases, will always speak it with an accent?

Steven Pinker has some interesting things to say about this phenomenon in his book The Stuff of Thought. Here are a couple of them:

— Children don't just memorize language. They analyze it. 

We know this, Pinker says, by the many cute things they say as they learn the language. A child never heard an adult say something like "Don't tickle me; I'm laughable" or "All the animals are wake-upped." But they have heard adults use other words in similar ways, leading them to think that such phrases are proper. And in fact they could be. We just don't happen to say these things in this way. What children say, however, is in most instances perfectly understandable and using excellent grammar.

— Children don't need to hear a great deal of conversation to learn a language.

They are able to make a lot out of very little. Many adults make the mistake of speaking baby talk to children or using only short, simple words in short, simple sentences. Despite this handicap, children learn the language anyway because they hear what adults say to each other. From these snippets of conversation, perhaps overheard while their minds are actually focused on their play, they rapidly learn not just the vocabulary of a language but all the rules by which that language works. They soon know what nouns, verbs and modifiers are even if they have to go to school to learn what they are called.

It remains a mystery, at least to most of us, how virtually every child is able to perform this magic. Perhaps a bigger mystery is why adults can't do it.