

How we can learn from a baby's brain - robg
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/04/26/inside_the_baby_mind/?page=full

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tokenadult
"'We sometimes say that adults are better at paying attention than children,'
writes Gopnik. 'But really we mean just the opposite. Adults are better at not
paying attention. They're better at screening out everything else and
restricting their consciousness to a single focus.'"

That's a useful distinction. I remember reading somewhere (and I suppose that
robg, the submitter here, is familiar with the professional research
literature on this subject) that the human brain has HUGE processing and
storage capacity, and the human sensory systems have enormous sensory
capacity, and the role of attention is to decide which subset of the enormous
amount of sensory information taken in minute-by-minute goes along the
(comparatively) narrow-bandwidth pathway from sensory organs to the brain. A
big part of learning while growing up is learning what to attend to, and
practicing making the most expedient direction of attention habitual.

Thanks for posting the interesting article.

~~~
eru
I agree.

Compare <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exformation>

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wallflower
It's often said that it becomes very difficult for children to become fluent
in another language after a certain age (some say 7, some say 12) -
Regardless, as someone who has tried off/on foreign language study, the
experience is humbling.

I wonder if babies and young children can acquire language quicker simply
because their brain is optimally tuned for maximum language learning (e.g. if
they hear a word they might not just be thinking of the meaning but the
emotional context, what it means to them, improving recall or if they learn a
word, they intuitively understand the concept behind the word because they
learned the world for the first-time in the real context [e.g. 'fork' in
kitchen]).

I dream about a virtual reality add-on that would let you roam outside in the
real-world and it would augment your reality - through pop-ups of the
Spanish/French whatever word for objects that you see. As one of my Spanish
tutors told me, the key to learning vocabulary is to be able to associate the
concept of the word with the word (in whichever language).

~~~
tokenadult
_I wonder if babies and young children can acquire language quicker simply
because their brain is optimally tuned for maximum language learning_

The most readily noticeable part of the adult barrier to language learning,
which I have run into more than a dozen times as an adult learner of a variety
of languages, is acquiring sufficient phonological proficiency to speak
understandably and listen with good comprehension. That's because production
of the phonemes (and perception of the phonemes) of your native language(s) is
based on ARBITRARY grouping of sound distinctions that are grouped
differently, or entirely ignored, in other languages. Each language has its
own sound system, and generally any learner who begins study of a language
after puberty (especially if male) will have a noticeable foreign accent.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=r2HEqsWeQTYC&pg=PA30...](http://books.google.com/books?id=r2HEqsWeQTYC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=%22Joseph+Conrad%22+%22language+acquisition%22&source=bl&ots=70TbzX0t4A&sig=TZJ9ipBViGWz_2dk-
FjZz76q_9M&hl=en)

But there are also more subtle problems with second-language acquisition of
vocabulary and grammar. Each language groups concepts with words in a
different way from any other language, and each language has grammatical rules
that are wholly arbitrary from the point of view of any other language. But
usually second-language speakers and writers can bluff better as to vocabulary
and grammar than they can as to pronunciation.

I've often worked as a Chinese-English interpreter. I didn't speak any Chinese
until age seventeen, definitely after puberty for me, but I have acquired a
decent accent, not such a thick American accent that I can't occasionally pass
a Chinese person over the telephone--but mostly as a southern-Chinese second-
language speaker of Mandarin to other southern-Chinese second-language
speakers of Mandarin. The issue of "lexicalization" (really knowing the
correct word in the acquired language) really never goes away. And there are
whole thick books about Chinese grammar that few Westerners have read cover to
cover.

All the time and effort needed to learn a second language has given me much
incentive to encourage my children to grow up as bilingual persons--but even
at that it's hard to find an adequately bilingual environment to support daily
use of both Mandarin and English.

~~~
pasbesoin
There's research suggesting that phoneme patterns are not arbitrary. Have a
look at Theo Vennemann (Berkeley, Munich) and his work on syllabic structure
-- I recall some very interesting stuff from the latter '80's.

~~~
tokenadult
The intended meaning here is that the phoneme patterns of English will be
reliably mistaken by a speaker habituated to speaking German, or the other way
around. (I have some acquaintance with both languages.) If there is some rule
of universal grammar in the general case about how sounds can combine, the
fact still remains that the particular case of each speaker's native language
is not a reliable guide to the phonological structure of any other particular
language.

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mdd
This research seems to indicate that ADHD is actually a _feature_ of
childhood, rather than a bug to be fixed.

