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Typical children are constantly exposed to language in the form of adults and older children speaking and communicating around them. Children acquire language at a very rapid rate, and most children's speech is relatively grammatical by age three. Normal children are able to hear and understand reasonably complex syntax, including rules of inflection and pluralization, and remember irregular verbs and nouns without ever having a direct lesson in grammar or speech. In fact, some cultures such as the !Kung San do not speak directly to children who have not yet learned to speak back. How do children achieve the amazing mental feat of learning something they have never been taught?
that are similar in sound to irregular ones. This leads to items such as hat as a past tense of hit (by analogy to sit-sat).
Linguistic Plasticity
It is commonly believed that children have a certain period of "linguistic plasticity" that extends only to a certain age; beyond that point, language acquisition becomes a difficult and demanding process that is not always completed successfully. Estimates of the linguistic plasticity period vary greatly, but in general it can be assumed that children must learn their first language before age eight at the outside. So-called "wolf children" who had no contact with humans or who were isolated from speaking populations before age eight have met with very limited success in acquiring language, especially grammar. In one famous example, a thirteen-year-old girl called Genie was discovered isolated in a room by her father. Attempts to teach her grammatical English resulted in failure; she was able to learn the words identifying certain objects, but was unable to put them together into comprehensible, grammatically correct English sentences. By contrast, the even more famous Helen Keller was left blind and deaf from an early illness; her teacher was able to communicate language to her and she developed into a highly articulate woman. Similarly, a girl of six and a half once escaped from imprisonment in her
grandfather's house; she quickly began to learn proper English and produced complex sentences a year and a half after she began to learn. (Source: The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.) The same principles apply to the acquisition of foreign languages - learning to write and especially to speak a foreign language can be a difficult experience. The "window of opportunity" for proficiency with a foreign language is larger and more variable; in general, those who attempt to learn a new language after puberty are less likely to master writing and especially speaking a foreign language. Those who acquire multiple languages before puberty often speak both or several with ease, but those who acquire them later do much worse. This phenomenon is especially noticeable in speech - for a normal person who already has a first language, it is not impossibly difficult to memorize the grammatical structure of another (though this depends on the similarity between the two languages). However, people whose speech is already structured for producing the sounds of one language will have a difficult time producing the sounds of another, even if they are intimately familiar with the second language's grammar. Ukrainian-born author Joseph Conrad had a very thick accent, but was an extremely fluent writer in English. Novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand never lost her heavy Russian accent despite living in the United States for decades, writing four novels and a number of philosophical books and essays. She also learned to read and write German, but freely admitted that she could not speak it.