The Child's Secret - Chapter 1 of Learning Languages Like Children
Chapter 1 of
LEARNING LANGUAGES LIKE CHILDREN
By Dr. J. Marvin Brown
ONE - THE CHILD'S SECRET
It is common knowledge that when people move to a new country the children will end up speaking the language natively and the adults won't. The widely accepted explanation is that children have a special ‘gift' that they lose as they grow up. Even with the coming of the age of science this ‘gift' theory went unquestioned, and early linguists thought that some special remedy was needed. They proposed that, for adults, languages should be taught and studied instead of picked up . And this idea slowly evolved into present day language teaching.
But are we any better off with present day language teaching? Why, for example, do adults in Central Africa clearly do better when they move to a new language community than our modern students do? Could it be that early linguists (and all the rest of us) were mistaken? Maybe adults can do what children do. Maybe it's just typical adult behavior (not adult inadequacy) that interferes.
THE MISTAKE – Children can do something that adults cannot.
THE UNASKED QUESTION – What would happen if an adult were to just listen for a year without speaking?
OUR ANSWER – Both adults and children can do it right, but only adults can do it wrong.
Imagine a 4-year-old child and an adult reacting to somebody talking to them in a foreign language. The child most often just listens, while the adult usually tries to talk back. Now suppose that ‘not trying to speak' was the child's secret. It could be. After all, doesn't it make sense that listening to things that are always right would tend to build the language right, while saying things that are always wrong would tend to build it wrong? It makes you wonder what would happen if adults were to do the same thing children do, (that is, just listen for a year or two without trying to say anything). It would be worth finding out. But it seems that this experiment was never tried. Not until recently, that is.
In 1984, the AUA language center in Bangkok started doing precisely this in its Thai classes. The students just listened for as much as a year without speaking at all. We found that adults get almost the same results that children do. If adults understand natural talk, in real situations, without trying to say anything, for a whole year, then fluent speaking with clear pronunciation will come by itself. A lesser period of not speaking will produce proportionately less-perfect results.
It seems that the difference between adults and children is not that adults have lost the ability to do it right, (that is, to pick up languages natively by listening) but that children haven't yet gained the ability to do it wrong (that is, to spoil it all with contrived speaking). We're suggesting that it's this contrived speaking (consciously thinking up one's sentences – whether it be with translations, rules, substitutions, expansions, or any other kind of thinking,) that damages adults, even when the sentences come out right). We're also suggesting that natural speaking (speaking that comes by itself) won't cause damage (not even when it's wrong). It seems that the harm doesn't come from being wrong but from thinking things up.
Now it would appear that the brain is incapable of this kind of contriving before the age of 10-12, so that children are automatically protected; whenever natural sentences don't ‘pop into their heads' they have to keep quiet. Of course children do come up with lots of ill-formed sentences, but these sentences aren't contrived; they pop out of incompletely formed language. But with adults, whenever a sentence fails to pop they contrive one. You can spot this contriving from the typical hesitation sounds (uh...er...mmm...) as they struggle. These sounds suggest that they're building the language in the wrong place – the place that thinks. This part of the brain is the adults' pride and joy, but it sure is an awkward place to put a language. Now the question is how can we get the language into the right place? And the ALG answer is to just stop ‘trying to think it in' – to simply switch channels from ‘try' to ‘let'. And it seems that the ‘let' channel is still alive and well in the adult brain. Nothing has been lost.
What we're suggesting is this. The reason that children always end up as native speakers is because they learn to speak by listening. And the reason that adults don't is because they learn to speak by speaking. But how can we explain this? How can an accumulation of listening and understanding alone lead to the ability to speak? The answer was given by William Powers. He said that when we try to make a given sound, hum a given tune, or say a given word (as examples of a more general theory), it's the memory (or mental image) of the sound, tune, or word that controls its production – not our muscles. And the correctness of the product depends only on the correctness of this image. Powers called these images ‘reference signals'. They are, in this case, sound images that have been either stored or neurally computed. So to speak a language perfectly, all we need is a complete set of perfect reference signals. And reference signals are acquired through perception – not production. In other words, we don't learn to speak by speaking; we learn to speak by listening (with understanding). There were two important ideas that led to our understanding of the child's secret. (1) Stephen Krashen's idea that language acquisition comes from understanding rather than speaking, and (2) Powers' idea that speaking is controlled by mental images of sounds, words, sentences, etc. – not by muscles. But Krashen's theory wasn't working nearly as well with adults as with children and the AUA experience suggested the reason. Adults talk too much. And while everything they hear makes their reference signals better, everything they say makes them worse. It was a losing battle – even with Krashen's suggested ‘silent period' of 10 hours or more. A third step was needed. Students' speaking had to be eliminated completely. It's the sounds in your head that form the sounds that come from your mouth.
So it looks like the child's secret doesn't consist of a young brain passing through a magically receptive period at all. The formula seems to be this: ‘Listen', ‘Don't speak', and ‘Be patient'. And now it appears that this is not only the child's secret. It's everybody's secret. And while children do it more faithfully, adults can do it faster. For a ‘difficult' language (like Thai for English speakers), it looks like adults can usually move twice as fast as babies. That is, they can become 2-year-olds in a year.
