this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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chapotraphouse

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i've never seen so many americans excited about china and the chinese language. good stuff, folks

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[–] Sulvor@hexbear.net 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (6 children)

Making a top level comment cause lots of people in this thread just spreading blatant misinformation regarding the ability to learn languages as a child versus an adult. No investigation no right to speak.

https://www.nature.com/articles/1301553

Unique childhood plasticity has been demonstrated particularly in the areas of vision, audition, motor, and language abilities

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10149040

The ability to learn certain aspects of language, however, is limited after early childhood. This sensitive period for language learning makes it an important model system for the study of developmental plasticity in children.

Another clarifying example is when people who immigrate to a new country at different ages attempt to learn a second language. When the amount of experience with the new language is held constant, there is an advantage to being younger than 8 years old for acquiring the second language to proficiency.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2920538/

Test performance was linearly related to age of arrival up to puberty; after puberty, performance was low but highly variable and unrelated to age of arrival. This age effect was shown not to be an inadvertent result of differences in amount of experience with English, motivation, self-consciousness, or American identification. The effect also appeared on every grammatical structure tested, although the structures varied markedly in the degree to which they were well mastered by later learners. The results support the conclusion that a critical period for language acquisition extends its effects to second language acquisition.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/427544/

Synaptic density increased during infancy, reaching a maximum at age 1--2 years which was about 50% above the adult mean.

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