It's good that they mentioned babies hearing in the womb. I've known many mothers that read to or play music for their babies. They say they feel them respond to some things, too, where they seem to sense their surroundings. I'm just reporting what they told me since I haven't studied the literature on this stuff.
One thing I didn't like was the paragraph on how they differentiate words with no formal training. I feel that gives a false impression. Parents usually teach their children a lot about language. They give them visual cues, speak at varying rates, change their own tone in some situations, and so on.
The babies are soaking up the world on their own using one set of mechanisms. They also often receive highly-supervised training from a trusted source. Later, they get formal training on top of that. Even when not training, much of the content they see and hear is presented in a structured way that helps connect ideas. For instance, listening to the radio or TV with their parents would let them hear a lot of structured speech.
Babies are highly trained. They might also do the statistical learning. They're a mix of the two.
> They also often receive highly-supervised training from a trusted source. Later, they get formal training on top of that.
Languages as they are spoken have many quirks and patterns that are different than how most parents believe the language works, and those quirks are readily adopted by infants even though few parents if any would consciously teach them. A great phonetic example is "choo choo chrain": we often pronounce words very differently from how we think we're pronouncing them. There are also plenty of grammatical facets that are similar—cases where there's a stark difference the real rule and the rule as formally taught or where a rule is picked up that the parent doesn't even know exists (such as the order of adjectives).
As for the formal training, schools don't generally teach any natural dialect of spoken English (at least in the US), they teach a formal written dialect of English that differs in many respects from the language that we pick up as infants. This dialect is the source of many of the misunderstandings mentioned above, and yet children will learn natural language as spoken regardless of the attempts of well-meaning teachers to correct them.
To me this all suggests that supervised learning for the natural spoken language is unnecessary. Children assimilate their native language from the way it is spoken around them. The main purpose of the formal instruction is to teach children to speak a special dialect in formal settings that will mark them as educated precisely because it is distinct from the one that they'd have picked up naturally.
I'd say it's more a matter of setting standards so that drift is reduced and ESL learners don't go bonkers with a dialect that doesn't generalize well, than as a mark of education. For example the differences are already bad enough between American and British English.
ESL here, difference between American and British is nonexistent to me. Sure, some of the word choices differ slightly, like torch vs. flashlight, or rucksack vs. backpack, and even then most of the time, both languages have these words in dictionary, it's just the default that's different. And ESL people are usually in the exact situation you describe, because they're being taught British English during lessons, while learning American English from everywhere else - TV, videogames, Internet. We manage just fine.
Still, given that everyone gets taught grammar for their native language at some point, too, I agree this is in part to reduce language drift. Makes sense - a modern nation with millions or tens of millions of citizens need institutional means to maintain social coherence. Formal education here (at primary/secondary school level) is less about marking someone as educated, and more about ensuring that people from opposite ends of the country can communicate just fine, because without it, their dialects would drift apart within few generations.
> Parents usually teach their children a lot about language. They give them visual cues, speak at varying rates, change their own tone in some situations, and so on.
They do, but this training is not necessary for a child to acquire language. Idioglossia (private languages between two people) is an extreme example, but also the process of a pidgin becoming a creole, where the younger generation of a pidgin speaking population fills in the missing details to create a more complete language, even without ever being exposed to such a language.
> One thing I didn't like was the paragraph on how they differentiate words with no formal training.
You don't like it when you're wrong, that's understandable. Of course your reaction, to just deny that you're wrong and learn nothing isn't actually going to help you be less wrong in the future.
In Indian epic of Mahabharata, there is story of Abhimanyu who learns how to defeat a military strategy in the womb, while his father was telling it to his mother. Which he later uses in epic war.
> In Indian epic of Mahabharata, there is story of Abhimanyu who learns how to defeat a military strategy in the womb, while his father was telling it to his mother. Which he later uses in epic war.
One thing I didn't like was the paragraph on how they differentiate words with no formal training. I feel that gives a false impression. Parents usually teach their children a lot about language. They give them visual cues, speak at varying rates, change their own tone in some situations, and so on.
The babies are soaking up the world on their own using one set of mechanisms. They also often receive highly-supervised training from a trusted source. Later, they get formal training on top of that. Even when not training, much of the content they see and hear is presented in a structured way that helps connect ideas. For instance, listening to the radio or TV with their parents would let them hear a lot of structured speech.
Babies are highly trained. They might also do the statistical learning. They're a mix of the two.