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From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
Message-ID: <D30zxx.DAI@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <3fosrd$2if@mp.cs.niu.edu> <D2xozo.CKH@spss.com> <3g4br6$dga@mp.cs.niu.edu> <D2z22I.7FK@spss.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 1995 18:41:56 GMT
Lines: 47

In article <D2z22I.7FK@spss.com>, Mark Rosenfelder <markrose@spss.com> wrote:
:
>Perhaps a better way of saying this would have been: If there is such a
>thing as a general learning facility, why does it become almost impossible
>to learn new languages fluently after puberty, when it's no harder (and
>often easier) to learn other things?
>
Marvin Minsky has a whole section in 'The Society of Mind" about it and it is
one of very few things in his book with which I strongly disagree.

My disagreement come from observing my children and myself. It is true that
I speak English with a thick accent, but this definitely does not come from
the fact (as claimed by MM), that (at puberty) I have lost some structures
in my brain which made it possible for me to distingush various accents and
produce them. I can very well distinguish different English accents and can 
even mimic them quite well for short periods of time, if I concentrate on it.

Number of years ago during one year my children went to three different 
English schools on two continents (they were at this time 10 and 8 years old).
In all three of these schools English was spoken with very different accents. 
At first my kids were ridiculed for their accent by their peers, but after 
a month or two you could not be able  to tell them apart from locals.

My conclusion from these observation is that the kids were picking the new
accents very quickly because children concentrate much more on the form of
the speech and not on the content. It is a common observation that kids can
often produce expressions and sentences, with prefect intonation which might be 
required, without possibly being able to understand what they mean. Children
concentrate much more on _how_ things are said than on _what_ is being said.
Myself, on the other hand, when I am speaking, I am too much concentrated on
_what_ I want to say, on meanings and implications of the content, on possible
alternatives, to be able to devote much of my attention to the form.
In general, perhaps an adult mind has so much stuff in it that the words
heard and spoken create so many associations in the brain that the attention
process has no spare cycles (:-)) to devote to the form. On the other hand,
kids' minds do not have enough in them to create an excess of associations
and they devote a lot of attention to the form. Like in the example of my
kids, they desperately need to fit with their peers and this can be achieved
first of all by _how_ they say things and not but _what_ they say, so this is
where their attention goes.

Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
