Kids are pretty amazing.
They absorb languages like talkative sponges while I’m still struggling to nail down
english.
How do that do they do?
Hey you whippersnappers, Julian here for DNews.
I’m just gonna come right out and say it: kids are dumb.
Most of them don’t know the first thing about quantum mechanics or brain surgery.
But my goodness do they pick things up quick.
What’s their secret?
You may be tempted to think it’s because their brains are growing.
I mean, you look at a kid’s head and there’s just not a lot of brain you can fit in there,
so maybe children are generating more brain cells until they become adults?
Well, that might be a small part of it.
You’re already born with oodles of noodles, around 100 billion, about as many brain cells
as you’re going to have for your whole life.
You will add more to your olfactory bulb, prefrontal cortex, cerebellum, and hippocampus.
By age two though you only keep making new neurons in your hippocampus, the part of the
brain associated with memory and learning.
It’s possible this neurogenesis is partly responsible for why kids pick up new things
so fast.
Still the most significant thing about a child’s brain development isn’t the number of neurons,
it’s their organization.
A baby is born with very few synapses connecting neurons, but by age two or three they’ll
have more than twice as many than they will have as an adult.
This period is called Exuberant Synaptogenesis.
Your brain will actually prune back the number of connections because it just doesn’t need
so many once you’re a functioning adult and set in your ways.
Before that though, your brains wires get more tangled up than headphones in your pocket.
Your brain as an adult becomes more efficient, with different parts of the brain being connected
a long way apart.
Children on the other hand use neurons that are more clustered together.
This is why children are so creative: their brains experiment with different configurations
before settling on a structure.
So during these early stages when the brain is so plastic, children absorb everything.
Language is a notable example.
When a baby hears speech, the neurons in the relevant parts of its brain form more synapses.
The more they hear speech, the stronger those connections become.
It’s why their vocabulary quadruples in size between the ages of one and two.
I think it’s also why they pick up foul language so well, too.
Ever swear around a toddler?
It’s the only word they’ll say for the rest of the day.
But don’t pardon their french, because at early ages kids pick up new languages accent-free:
there are multiple neural pathways so their brains don’t get locked into one pronunciation
pattern.
After their first year though, babies lose the ability to distinguish the sounds of foreign
languages.
Don’t get disheartened if you’re an adult trying to learn a new language though.
You’re still perfectly capable of doing it with time and effort, you’re just going
to have to accept that you’re probably going to have an accent.
Speaking multiple languages will help you communicate with much bigger audiences, but
you still need to reach them somehow, like, say, through the internet.
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There are some pitfalls to avoid when learning a new language though.
Trace helps you out here.
Did you learn a second language as a kid, or pick one up as an adult?
What was it like for you?
Let us know in the comments, subscribe for more, and I’ll see you next time on DNews.