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How are babies able to learn more than one language faster than adults?

And how come adults never achieve that fluency (like a native person) when speaking a foreign language? How are babies able to speak it with such a good accent?

Public Comments

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2XBIkHW954
two reasons: 1:their minds are more flexible-they are not as stuck in their ways. 2:adults already know at least one language, so they try to translate constantly, which is is not the best way to learn a language. it is better to translate the words directly into thoughts of occurances

2. because baby use a big part of their brain and memory than adults.

3. Mostly because, to put it simply, a baby's brain is still maturing. Infants' brains are designed to absorb and retain vast amounts of information. Have you ever noticed how a baby constantly opens and closes its hands, kicks, and flails its arms? That's that baby learning and memorizing motor funtions that it will undoubtably need for the rest of its life. Babies hear the language their parents speak and it is absorved and memorized by the baby's brain, and by the time it can speak, that language is drilled into it's mind almost on par with survival instincts. It is possible to being completely fluent in another language, it's just many times harder for those whose brains are done growing.

4. That's a popular misconception. I don't know of any quantitative research that's proven infants learn one or more languages faster than adults. If anything, babies learn slower than adults, they simply have more opportunity to learn.

For example, baby pops out, remains silent for 8-12 months starts saying *words* after that, and becomes a semi-competent talker after what, 3 or 4 years of doing nothing but hanging around native speakers of a language. No job, no nothing.

Now, imagine if a baby were taught language like children in school, or adults are taught a second language, 30 minutes to an hour a day, once a day, five days a week, with *zero* exposure to the language outside of that. How long do you think it would take them to learn it, if they ever did?

If a fairly intelligent adult with some language learning experience were to travel to a foreign country for the sole purpose of learning a language, with no distractions like work, or communication in their mother tongue, they could probably become fairly competent in the language within a few months, and have general command of the language within a year. Not only this, they could repeat that effort as many times as they liked, gaining general command of 4 languages in the time it would take an infant to get a grip on one (infants can learn more than one language at once, but they learn less of each).

Yes, adults will generally continue to make some grammatical errors when *producing* a language they have learned as an adult. This is because (a) they do not internalize the grammar of successive languages, but *that* may be because (b) their mother tongue interferes with the second language in something called "negative language transfer" or (c) they were not exposed to multiple grammars in infancy.

As far as accents, ability for accents varies greatly between individuals and genders. Although it is true infants learn to exactly imitate the sounds of their native language(s) and adults do not, this may also be the result of an infants general ability and unbending drive to assimilate into its surroundings, as well as the fact that they have no existing pattern of pronunciation to interfere (the same transfer as with grammar in adults).

Yes, in the real world adults are consistently less successful at acquiring language than infants, but that is a matter of opportunity, not mental or physical ability. Read a newspaper to an eight-year-old, there's a lot they will miss even though they have been immersed in their relative culture/language for 8 years and attending school--doing nothing but reading and writing for 8 hours or more at a time--for 2-3 years.

If an adult were to be forced to do nothing but read and write in another language for 8 hours every day for just 2-3 years, returning home to communicate with *only* speakers of that language, interact *only* in that language, and have a genuine drive to assimilate into the target culture, they would out-perform an infant/child reading a paper (or textbook, or computer assembly instruction manual) every time.

Furthermore, there are several limitations on infant/child speech that we overlook. Infants brains are still developing, so they are incapable of conceiving of things like: multiple names for one object, the subjunctive case, irrealis, falsehoods, etc. until their brains develop sufficiently to handle the concepts. Just like infants get a kick out of "peek-a-boo" because they are unable to conceptualize of an object being hidden, thinking it has actually disappeared. Adults have no such restrictions on their cognitive abilities.

Two major theories, the "critical acquisition period" and Chomsky's "language acquisition device" as well as "popular wisdom" are generally responsible for the misconceptions that infants/children are superior language learners. So unfortunately, nothing I write is going to overturn this popular misconception, but if you investigate the details, you might be surprised at what you find. Children are genetically predispositioned to do their utmost to acquire language and assimilate. With equal opportunity and drive, a 30 year old will out-perform a 3 year old in becoming functional in one language (or several) every time.