Question: How do we learn language

Sophie Scott answered on 8 Jan 2018:

We starting to learn language even before wear are born, as we are learning about the melody and rhythm of our mother’s voice, and babies are sensitive to these characteristics of their language. There is a lot of evidence that babies ability to understand spoken language processes faster than their ability to produce the words – in other words, babies can understand a lot more than they can say! As babies and young children start to get better at understanding words, they also seem to show learning of how words can go together in sentences. When they start talking, they will often make grammatical mistakes (e.g. “I wented to shop”) which indicate that they’re learning – and sometimes misplaying – the grammar of their language). Children learn words very fast, but we seem to keep learning new words pretty intensely right up to middle age.