Very cool, if true

You definitely did know that we make three noises for the plural s, because you'll have been doing it since you were five or something. :) You just never thought consciously about this knowledge; that lack of conscious access to our native speaker intuitions about a language is one of the things I'm most enjoying about studying linguistics.

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That's what I meant by "know". To consciously understand something.

There's tons of things I've done by rote but not known what I was doing.

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The whole point of the wug test is that it proves we're not doing it by rote though. We can greet novel situations with known rules. It's pretty cool. :)

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rmc28

I was amused/intrigued by the rules I didn't know I knew about ways to address people in my recent post about that. Like which are older-to-younger only and that kind of thing.

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How does "adding an s on the end" prove we're not doing it by rote?

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Given a made-up word, so one that the kid can't have heard before and learned from copying others, the kid can accurately use the correct form (like the /z/ with "wug"). Hardly anyone can explain that this is because the voiced final consonant requires the voiced alteration of the underlying plural, but everyone is applying that rule when they make the plural of a word they haven't heard before.

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"When you see X do Y" sounds like almost the definition of "rote" to me.

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Hm, okay, I was using "by rote" to mean memorization by repetition of examples. It teaches you the examples, not the underlying rule.

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naath

ah, unknown knowns. Such a large category.

I don't know at what age I could do the wug test, these days I would probably stoat it up questionably deliberatly, I man the plural of box is clearly boxen right? and tass (a creature|) could clearly be tass in the plural (see, sheep, fish, deer)

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fanf

I think my favourite unknown known is adjective order, which is taught in ESL classes but not reified for native speakers https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/english-grammar-reference/adjective-order

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Yup, that is awesome. I must remember to ask my German BF if it is he same in German (I think so)

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apparently not! He feels that you can put the adjectives in any order before a noun

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ninetydegrees

Wug Test: great link! Thank you! We teach this to ELL students and they also tend to forget the /iz/ sound. It's nice to know it's something native speakers do to (although when much younger). They love hearing about this kind of thing.

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Child language acquisition tends to work pretty similarly to learning a second (or tenth! whatever) language later in life. :)

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Yeah, in both cases immersion seems to be the best approach.

(Lots of other things as well. Get in and do lots to get an intuitive feel for things, and then learn rules later (if at all).)

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I would beg to differ. I learnt German at 45. I could not have learned it exactly as a child learend it, becasue I am not child, do not have a child's mind and I naturally do, and require to, express thoughts that are vastly more complex that a child does. I found that hellish frustrating at the basic levels. Plus I could use my many years of learning stategies to attack the (rather tricky) grammar ( which even German children have to be explicitly taught (at least some of it), you simply can't pick it ALL up by hearing + deduction (eg. cases / gender esp. because of the reuse of "den" and "der").

My BF's son was about 1 at the time - my effective learning rate of German was vastly greater than his over the next few years because I was deliberately applying my adult mind, and learning skills (including reading!!!) plus I had better motor control for speech. He is a clever boy of 8 now, I would say my vocabulary still outstrips his, he probably makes fewer habitual grammar mistakes than me.

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Okay I'm sure your singular anecdotal experience overrides all the stuff I've been taught in my linguistics degree.

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It is at least one counterexample :-) However...let's bypass both anecdote as data (bad, I agree) and argument from authority (which I hope you also agree is not so great) ...

Educate me then. Is it possible to explain to me, in summary maybe, where language acquisition as an adult DOES work the same as with children?

Do adults learn the language to a given level faster or slower than children? Is it different for reading, comprehension, speech? Based on what measures? How has this been tested? Do they use the same or different strategies?

I recall, there are also some development windows for accent and pronunciation that make it harder (but not impossible) to sound native when the language is learned as an adult.

If it is all hopelessly too much, point me at a few good books. Ideally with differing viewpoints, so I can get a feel for wher ethe controversies and differences of opinion are in the field.

Because it certainly FEELS different, and if I truly am mistaken in this, then I want to know why, and how it really does work - so I can be more effective at upgrading my German, for one selfish thing!

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ninetydegrees

"express thoughts that are vastly more complex that a child does. I found that hellish frustrating at the basic levels."

Just wanted to note that, children who are able to express their feelings and reasoning actually experience frustration as well for the same reason (at their own levels, of course). It's hard for them to understand that it's part of learning a language and to learn how to use compensation strategies.

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ah, that is fascinating. We think so much in words once we have them that we forget that there can be thoughts without words. Or maybe only some of us do - probably those that are good with words. Come to think of it, I have known a few people who I can tell don't think in words, or don't WANT to think in words. I feel that thinking in words could get in the way of, for example numerical calculations - I can recall feeling that as a child, that my mind could do the calcuations much faster, but I was stuck waiting for my voice in my head to "speak" the calculation serially to me until it got to the end and the answer...

Edited Date: 2019-08-28 07:06 am (UTC)

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ninetydegrees

Yep, I'm noticing this more and more so thanks for confirming it. :)

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dewline

2. Interesting. Typecasting of a sort at work here, maybe?

6. Moscow City Hall had to have been expecting some sort of issues, given their parent nation. Right?

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liv

Since working in education, I've ended up reading a lot of stuff about evidence-based teaching of reading, because it often shows up in related links to articles that are more directly relevant to my own work. As far as I can work out, the reason the US in particular got really into cueing and so-called "balanced" literacy (ie the wrong way of teaching reading) is because somehow phonics (the right way of teaching reading) got translated as, make children read a load of nonsense syllables / deliberately misspelled words. Everybody can easily see that those approaches are counter-productive. Reading nonsense makes children hate reading because it's deathly boring, and it also does the opposite of what phonics is actually trying to achieve, namely get learners used to recognizing real words in context. And nobody in their right mind wants to teach children to spell things incorrectly. (Possibly a confusion between phonics and phonetic spelling? That's speculation.)

The other thing that went wrong between researchers who study how to teach reading, and classroom teachers in practice is that people think "sight words" means guessing by looking at the vague shape of the word. Which encourages the whole cueing / "balanced" approach the article describes as counter-productive. But actually "sight words" is a technical term, it means that there are some words in English that you just can not read by sounding out because they are so totally irregular. One and two are examples and I can't think of the other classics off the top of my head. So you just have to learn those exceptions as special cases. But that's very different from using a general strategy of just guessing the word without properly reading the individual letters.

Anyway, because of all these misunderstandings, you end up with loads of experienced and capable teachers who hate phonics with a passion, but they hate a total straw man version of phonics which isn't what the technique actually is. I really don't know how that can be fixed.

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