This study was interesting. For many reasons. On the one hand it was interesting to see an extensive study of exactly how children acquire language and to get a better idea of the time scale on which it all happens. But at the same time, why do we care to study language in humans who have hardly started to use the language and certainly lack the mastery of it to be able to describe their thoughts on the matter?
Yes, it's valuable to know how children learn language such that we can aid the process in formal learning environments. Beyond this, having some sort of time scale to track progress could lead to advancements in predicting learning disabilities (though this time scale must be very loose as not all children will adhere strictly to the same progress). As a scientist (mathematician if that counts) i agree that it's important to conduct studies in new areas to ensure that our understanding is as comprehensive as possible, but why on such young agents?
In order to know how people reason through math problems one is given a problem, asked to solve it and then asked what their procedure was. We cannot carry out this same process with such young children. Which presents us with an unavoidable, unsolvable predicament. If children can't explain how they're actually doing language acquisition is it worth conducting studies with them? But then are we never allowed to study language as it pertains to children younger than a certain age? It just feels like the motivation of these studies is to see how the process takes form and how to get more children to do it at a younger age. Which feels like we're just looking for the fastest way to precocious children when in reality the fact that children learn a language at all is a wondrous thing and learning should be far more natural than a procedure, test subjects, and results.
I read an essay once that hypothesized that young children in early societies were the first to develop formal language in contrast to the pidgin languages their parents probably spoke. This stems from them being around each other long enough for the word usage to catch on, and from their being creative enough to come up with new sounds for new things. If this is true, it's incredible. I think by hyper-examining how learning takes place and how our children pick things up, we're taking away from the creative and miraculous process by which a new sentient being learns this world. I think in a society too motivated by results, we loose track of how nice not knowing really is. If a child lives a full life and never learns any language, study that -- that's something interesting. But for the most part, give enough exposure to most organisms and they'll learn the necessary language to survive in their society. Maybe we let the children be children again instead of test subjects.
Hey Alec! I think it's great that you are asking these "why" questions. Often time in heavily science based classes, I find myself, as someone who's highly interested in the social implications of science, asking "why does this matter?" I think with developmental psychology and linguistics, there is actually a lot of beautiful insights to come out of the way children flexibly innovate to communicate. Maybe it's a bit too detailed, or concerned with the wrong exactitudes, but the way children acquire language is crucial in understanding how humans acquire language and represent thought at our earliest stages; what is knowledge and how is it represented in our minds by language; how do we communicate these representations with one another? These are large questions of which studies like this give us a small puzzle piece.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the interpretation that this paper seemed to you to want to speed up the results of kid's learning. But for me, this research study seemed to be more of an act of trying to understand and appreciate the amazing process that kids do go through to master the languages in which we communicate as people. If this paper is "results driven" in the way you suppose (trying to get kids to change in some way or be better) I agree with you, we should slow down and just express gratitude for this amazing thing that is language! But I kind of want to give this paper the benefit of the doubt, in that it seemed more interested in understanding and explaining these phenomena, than trying to propose some way children need to change.