Language learning

     Children all over the world have a natural urge to learn language built into their genes. Virtually any infant is genetically equipped to develop the motivation and brain circuits needed to learn the one or more languages it hears spoken around it, without any special help or instruction. Parents need never give lessons in how to change a verb into the past tense, or explain the significance of the difference in sound between for and far. A normal child learns such things just by listening.

     By the age of four, a child will have become fluent through a sequence of stages that are pretty much the same for any child, and for any language, the world over. One-word utterances at age one lead to multi-world phrases a year later. A one-and-a-half-year-old’s vocabulary of 50 words expands to 10,000 within five years. A tow-year-old’s baby talk matures by age seven into mastery of the full repertoire of all the sounds in the language. On average, as the language-learning systems within the brain unfold, girls have a tendency to be a little more precocious than boys.