Why Diplomats Envy Babies

Why Diplomats Envy Babies:

The Psychology of Language Learning

Ever wonder why babies and young children can learn languages so easily, yet as adults we struggle? This basic question strikes a PsyDip cord, because of the fact that language is a large part of what separates us transnationally as "foreign" to one another. A review of the world's nations arguably demonstrates the larger the language gap between two nations, the greater the chances of mistrust and cross-cultural miscalculations. Certainly this conclusion is confounded by geography, as different peoples will be more likely to share language roots if they share geography, but it is principally through language that we transmit culture. So let's take a quick look at what psychologists know about language and the baby brain.

Within 18 months babies have a solid vocabulary of around 50 words. By their sixth birthday, that vocabulary has expanded to over 6,000! That means during early childhood we learn at least three words a day. This keeps us on pace to learn the 50,000 words required (for English speakers) for normal conversation. So how do we do it and why do we suddenly get so bad at it as we leave childhood?

It turns out language development is hard-wired into the brain, as an enduring legacy of millennia of evolution. That hard-wiring provides large neuronal trees which are shaped linguistically by a process of "pruning". All babies are born to babble the full range of human sounds possible, across all languages (over 6,800!). All human brains have about the same number of neurons -- about 100 million, but babies brains are wired differently. Babies' neurons are each individually connected to as many as 15,000 other neurons. In contrast, adult neurons have about a third fewer links. With so many links at birth between neurons, babies are equipped with a broad capacity to receive linguistic imprinting, by exposure to local sounds. Sounds not heard locally will not be babbled for long and therefore neuron links to support those unheard sounds will be pruned and absorbed by the brain, as the baby begins to focus on the native language.

In addition to having the extra wiring "built-in" from birth, babies have a processing speed for neuronal firing that far exceeds that of adults. When they hear different sounds in succession as in the case of a language, they are able to register the differences between those sounds in a relatively fast process, because the neurons that fire electrical impulses to record learning are able to re-load quickly and move on to the next audio distinction. Adult neurons cannot fire and reload as quickly, so the sounds of new languages quickly get backed up in our attention span and we cannot register them as distinct sounds beyond a certain point. The "circuit board" in a baby’s brain can handle many more bits of linguistic information in a short span of time - enough to retain key distinctions in pronunciation, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary.

So why do we lose this great power as we age? In short, when it comes to language, nature is only as efficient as it needs to be. Those neurons associated with language begin to crystallize around the preferred local language. A brain that retains a large and redundant system of additional neurons for alternative but unused language sounds is not an efficient one. It takes many extra calories to run the quadrillion cellular links of the large carbon-based neural network a baby has for picking up languages it encounters. Those neurons are "use or lose", meaning once the organism is no longer exposed to certain sounds beyond a certain point (basically 7 years of age) it loses its biological capacity to easily register those sounds. The neuron links there at birth to support such receptivity have been consumed by other demands or absorbed into the system for energy needs. This seems absurd today in calorie-saturated developed countries, but the brain evolved during times of nutritional challenge, long before modern agriculture and processed food.

What does this all mean for international understanding? Firstly, it means we ought to be exposing our children to other languages at an early age. The sooner the better. Researchers say even infants less than 18 months of age show receptivity to language that cannot necessarily be retained over time. Certainly, children should be exposed to other languages prior to age seven if the goal is to speak "native". After age seven our ability to learn other languages shuts markedly. It is true that we can and do refine our language skills within our primary and well-learned languages well into old age. However, we never again have access to a system of 1 quadrillion synapses to absorb the full gamut of language sounds producible by the human voice box and mouth. Lastly, current research indicates that because language evolved in social settings for the purposes of communication, we learn it best in actual, live social situations - not from audio and video recordings. The brains of babies and young children are most likely hard-wired to respond best to real human eye contact and pointing. That is the best way to learn language. Now if we could just agree on the "right" language!

Let's end with a list of the world's most spoken languages (native, by population):

1. Mandarin (885 Million)


2. Spanish (332 Million)


3. English (322 Million)


4. Bengali (189 Million)


5. Hindi (182 Million)


6. Portuguese (170 Million)


7. Russian (170 Million)


8. Japanese (125 Million)


9. German (98 Million)


10. Wu (77 Million)

Referenced above and provided for further reading:

"Your Brain: A User's Guide", Language and the Baby Brain, by Jeffrey Kluger

"The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language", by Steven Pinker