[catshirt]

i'm having a hard time sourcing either side of the argument, but kids learn a ton of shit.

an adult learning a language has the benefit of both abstract and pragmatic knowledge of language, having spoken at least one for some time. they don't need to spend time learning, for example, how to move their tongue to make different noises. an adult learning a language also has the benefit of being able to read, or listen, to facilitate their learning. a child learns a language without any of this groundwork.

i feel like maybe you are underestimating the sheer amount of information a child has to process and how completely foreign everything we take for granted is to them.

[aaren]

On the other hand, children have little else to do but absorb new information and they take a good number of years doing it. Adults have a load of responsibilities that they have to occupy their minds with. Compared to the carefree oblivion of childhood I think it is remarkable that adults can learn anything new at all.

There does seem to be a lack of research that attempts to correct for this, or at least I can't find it. In the absence of data, I prefer to believe that I'm at least as able to learn new things as 6 year old me.

[Dewie]

Do all kids really have such vast amounts of free time in their childhood, or is that heavily dependent on the culture? I can imagine that a lot of kids have had to work and take on responsibilities at a very young age (though I don't know if they had to do that at the so-called sponge brain age).

[barry-cotter]

Unless you've found some telepaths all children learn language by constant massive exposure. Outside of multilingual societies it'll all be in the same language too. Modern hunyer-gatherers spend ~4 hours a day doing what we'd recognise as work and this is after agricultural civilisation took all the good land. Civilisation is evolutionarily very recent. And humans have extremely long childhood period to learn probably.

Don't confuse schooling with education/learning.

[sizzle]

I remember learning about a study in a neuroscience class regarding language and how, before the critical period in a child's mind, they could learn many languages because their brain had not settled on any one particular language. The "shape" of words (word length, voxels, parts of speech etc) effectively became hard coded in their minds after the critical period ended so they could easily recognize that language, but from then on they can't learn languages easily as precritical period.

Anyone familiar with the topic care to further elaborate on this phenomenon? thanks

[catshirt]

this sibling comment seems to be a good start: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491549

[sizzle]

thank you, I'll find the peer reviewed paper in the Wikipedia footnotesm