A couple of decades ago when I was in grade school, I remember a teacher telling me that if you take a newborn born in the USA to English only speaking parents, and give that newborn to a Japanese only speaking family, then the child will "learn" to speak Japanese instead of English. Is this true? If it is, could you please supply me with a reference. I just asked my professor this question, and "suggested" that I look it up myself. But I can't seem to find the answer anywhere.
Anonymous2012-05-06T10:06:02Z
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It's so self-evident that you're not going to get explicit references.
A newborn inherits no information about the language of its biological parents.
The only input we get for learning language from birth is the language(s) we hear spoken around us.
If you Google "language acquisition" you'll find a lot of material looking at the fine detail of how and when it happens.
It has extra to do with the way in which the mind services and is established than what is in it (I'm now not certain that's an excessively giant component in any respect, which every body else appears to be assuming). Infants and small children honestly have extra adaptable, redundant brains, with extra synapses and a extra metabolic exercise within the mind than adults. To placed it with ease, kids are hardwired to gain knowledge of language (and ordinarily different matters) throughout a designated interval in their lives. They additionally improvement from having an innate experience of grammar which they may be able to practice to some thing language that's being spoken round them. What's relatively cool is if a grammatically powerful language is not spoken round them, and as a substitute they simply listen a grammatically primitive "pidgin" language, the children will honestly expand the pidgin right into a extra grammatically complicated kind of language (a "creole") inside a iteration. Pretty high-quality. You can nonetheless gain knowledge of a language when you get out of the educational degree, however it'll on no account come practically as effortlessly because it did then, and you're going to most probably talk any new language which a visible accessory.