The Three Stages Of Language Learning
When you start learning a language for the first time you learn in stages. I think the easiest way to think about this is to think about babies.
I took a linguistics course in University and in it we learned that babies have a weird way of learning languages. They start learning individual words then they start using grammar that is overgeneralized before learning the exact rules.
So by ‘overgeneralized’ I mean they try to apply general rules to all circumstances. So a baby might ask, “Why are there so many persons here?” when the correct phrase is “Why are there so many people here?”. Now I know ‘persons’ is technically correct in some scenarios but it’s not what people normally say.
The technical term for these words that babies say, and I really have to dig up my old notes for this (god, I wish I had followed the way of writing notes I originally thought up of in third year) is ‘irregular forms’.
And what’s more it says here that babies know how to use irregular forms properly and then overgeneralize before learning how to use them properly again.
Now I don’t remember what I was thinking when I wrote these notes but this seems to me that this leads to three stages of language development: copying speech verbatim, knowing rules but not the exceptions, and then learning the…
