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Babies have to learn a lot of language stuff before they can even say their first word. Exposure to language as infants doesn’t just help us say those first words but gives us the tools we need to acquire advanced language skills and learn more languages later on in life. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about language acquisition and how the process differs for babies and adults.
Want even more linguistics? Check out the Lingthusiasm podcast, hosted by the writers of Crash Course Linguistics: https://lingthusiasm.com/
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This was so well done and considered many important perspectives. Thank you crash course 🙂
I was hoping for insights into adult acquisition of a second language.
I'm a speech-language pathologist who works with 3 year olds with language development delays so this topic is kind of my thing, but I still always laugh when I hear the phrase "high amplitude sucking".
Omg, this video is just amaaaazing! Loving the series <3
My first word was a grunt. Thanks to my older sisters.
Is it true that babies can learn to rudimentarily use sign before they can progress from babble to rudimentary spoken language?
It’s really interesting how people can already be beyond childhood while still acquire a language without intentionally learning it… I love anime and watched tons of them when I was in middle school, and after some years I can automatically understand Japanese tho the only thing I did following a textbook was to remember the alphabet 😂 (my native language is Chinese so I don’t need to struggle learning kanji)
I'm multilingual
I can speak English, Bengali and Hindi
As an adult language learner, I identify well with the "receptive" bilingualism. I can read and write Spanish fluently but speaking and listening are more difficult for me.
I wonder if dogs raised or trained by signers learn to understand signs instead of spoken language. And, yes, I know many dogs raised or trained by people who speak aloud are also taught signs to go with commands, like a downward moving fist for "sit" – but I'm unsure if they would obey from the gesture alone without the spoken command. But what I'm really curious about is the way dogs learn to understand words you didn't mean to teach them. Like dogs that run to the door if you even mention walking to another person without even facing the dog. Or if they respond to the signed version of "who's a good boy?" with the same enthusiasm.
I know this is off-topic, but I was reminded of it by mentioning sign acquisition in children.
If only there were fricking one language that world share.
Hi from Malaysia. Since there's 'Malaysia' mentioned.
im quadrilingual and when she said you might know the word only in one language like YES. That's why my speech is usually a hybrid of 2 languages put together depending on who I am talking to
4:24 there are 2 _____. I deadass said “of them” !!?!? ig I’m worst than a baby
meaningful video. Enjoyed it
Is writing language? Or is it a code for languages?
You should do a crash course series that teaches Japanese
My first language is German and I remember clearly that the last native sound I struggled to produce was [ʃ]. I always pronounced it as [s], so I couldn't pronounce "Tasse" [ˈtʰɑsə] (cup) and "Tasche" [ˈtʰɑʃə] (bag) or "Bus" [bʊs] (bus) and "Busch" [bʊʃ] (bush) differently. I could clearly hear the difference, of course, but I couldn't produce it until probably the age of five or six. One day I finally got it right without even noticing it.
Today I'm a polyglot with near native fluency in two additional languages and more or less advanced knowledge of six more. I still struggle with the English "r" though. It too often sounds like a "w" before vowels.
Unfortunately my daughter, who we are trying to raise bilingually since her birth, will probably end up as a receptive bilingual. She understands German, but actively refuses to speak it since the age of two. I'm the only person around her who can speak it, but she sees no need to speak it for me because I can as well understand and speak the other language. So there's no barrier when just resorting to the dominant language of our linguistic environment. I suppose it's just too terribly lopsided to raise her into a true bilingual, unless we move somewhere in the German language area.
I wish you had talked more about adult language acquisition.
I started to learn english since kindergarten. Sometimes I talk in english with my friends, even though we all have the same mother tongue that is not english. Is this a common thing?
BEHOLD THE MIGHTY HORDE OF WUGS
Seriously tho, wugs are like de facto official mascots of linguistics aren't they.
Edit: as a native speaker of Japanese I highly appreciate what I assume to be you guys' conscious effort not to just throw in some utterly unpleasant (to put it mildly) and vaguely Mincho-looking Japanese font that I have seen way too often used by Western content creators in their failed attempts at feigning their understanding of the language.
Wugs!! At last we come to wugs…
Amazing episode 🙂
Learning so much from this course! I speak Shona, a language not as well documented as other mainstream languages, and this course has been helpful in helping me think about the pieces that go into speech – and therefore, how to teach friends how to say words in my language.
My first word was "kitty." An early sign I would grow up to be a crazy cat lady.
You guys should check out the science of reading in regards to language acquisition.
why am I surprised that the plural wug are in this video
Also it should be wüge
I learned English in order to understand this kind of videos.
I would love to watch Gav One Piece…
my brother's was "more"
2:46 This might actually explain why when I started learning English I thought that th sounded like f, v, or d, depending on the context. The voiced and unvoiced non-sibilant alveolar fricatives aren't phonemes in Polish, which is my first language
Actually the plural of wug is still wug but you pronounce it as woog. The original language puts a line over the u to show the difference
I don't remember (of course) my first word, and my parents also can't help me in this matter. But the first word in enlish that I remeber is a "helicopter". There was a cool toy helicopter in the english classes for small children that I attended.
Although informative and mostly truthful, this video (too) demonstrates a concerning lack of understanding that early language acquisition is centred around (and should be understood through the lens of) speech acts, not syntax and semantics. This video leans on a classical paradigm in linguistics which is by no means flawless.
Children learn to participate in practices and direct others by learning speech acts, and it is when they put these speech acts to use that they acquire the words needed to carry them out. A limiting factor in early speech acquisition lies in the lack of social cognition and the period it takes to observe and learn the social practices around them and the speech acts by which those practices are carried out. Words aren't learned in isolation of practical context, and are actually secondary to the speech acts in which they are deployed.
A child begins by learning simple directives–e.g. ordering and requesting, which you briefly touched on when highlighting how one word sentences may in fact carry multiple signifiers spread out over multiple modalities–before learning more complex ones such as apologies, corrections, bets, promises, explanations, interrogations, affirmations, and so on. Each involve a set of give-and-take from the participants which require the development of social cognition, *without which any account of early language acquisition will remain incomplete*.
Contemporary literature already acknowledges this, and it is the syntax&semantics obsessed linguistics of the 20th century which doesn't.
As a baby I'm offended by what you said at 8:15 . No, babies don't get to lie around all day. We have to scream, break things, hit other babies, learn to crawl, cry exactly when mom is starting to drift into sleep and a lot more. Try consulting sources before you make videos. I am disappointed in you, crash course
Cool video
Proud multilingual Malaysian here 👇
I feel like thanking the thought bubble is the same as clapping when the airplane lands.
Great explanation. I have a three month all baby and a five years old boy, and he constantly asks me when her sister will speak. I told him that it will take her time.I think, this videos help him understand better. Thank you
I love it here
This is a wug. Now, there's another one. There are two…
Me, a native Indonesian speaker: wug
Is this a good moment to ask for a Czech language buddy? I offer English and German 😁
My first word was "mãe"
No mention of Input?!
My first word was Numnum, My mother says I used to say it when I wanted something to eat.
Languages good
Hi @crashCourse Thank you for making the knowledge of linguistics accessible to everyone. I got my M.A in theoretical linguistics and looking forward to apply for a doctoral program. I have always been trying my best to explain what linguistics is and how it is different from "learning new languages", often with no success. Hopefully people would put more respect on linguistics degree, as it is a very versatile, very impactful and will always be on demand.
PS. It would be great if you can also include popular linguistics subjects such as natural language processing, rhetoric and manipulation, language and thoughts, corpus data analysis and others.
This episode was so cute that I had to pause the video time to time because of cuteness overdose…