We know children learn languages very easily, and do it 'perfectly'. An adult tries to learn a language for years and most of the time, fail miserably or only partially succeed. Why do children learn so well?
Brain plasticity is cited as a reason, in relation to Critical Period Hypothesis of Lenneberg. Research has proved that delayed development of pre-frontal cortex in infants result in a delay in cognitive control. Delay in cognitive control results in facilitation of convention learning. After all, language is a set of conventions!
So, it is like saying that children learn languages easily because they lack cognitive control. Now, that is very interesting. If lack of cognitive control facilitates acquiring conventions, why do we make a lot of rules about languages and try to learn these rules instead of the language as such? Aren't we doing it the unnatural way? Instead of doing away with cognitive control, we use cognitive control excessively in order to learn languages.
To learn a language, what we need to do is very simple- lose our cognitive control. That is all we need to do.
How do we lose our cognitive control and become childlike so that we learn faster and save a few years of our lives? This is the research question in Bilingualism or Multilingualism.
Brain plasticity is cited as a reason, in relation to Critical Period Hypothesis of Lenneberg. Research has proved that delayed development of pre-frontal cortex in infants result in a delay in cognitive control. Delay in cognitive control results in facilitation of convention learning. After all, language is a set of conventions!
So, it is like saying that children learn languages easily because they lack cognitive control. Now, that is very interesting. If lack of cognitive control facilitates acquiring conventions, why do we make a lot of rules about languages and try to learn these rules instead of the language as such? Aren't we doing it the unnatural way? Instead of doing away with cognitive control, we use cognitive control excessively in order to learn languages.
To learn a language, what we need to do is very simple- lose our cognitive control. That is all we need to do.
How do we lose our cognitive control and become childlike so that we learn faster and save a few years of our lives? This is the research question in Bilingualism or Multilingualism.
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