Submitted by electroctopus t3_y7zzjt in todayilearned
Is this why it's so hard to learn a new language as an adult?
Possibly. There are stronger critical periods, like learning how to process vision with two eyes. A second language is a lot more debatable. It's easier to become fluent when you learn at a young age, but some adult learners become fluent so there's not necessarily a critical period where you can no longer learn a second language.
There's a whole section about second language in the article that is worth reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period#Second_language_acquisition
I was in 8th grade when I learned I was mainly using 1 eye my whole life and even after the correction surgery in university, trying to use both eyes at once is difficult, often results in headaches. I guess I missed out on the learning period.
Um. What condition did you have where you only used one eye but nobody noticed?
For a friend of mine, it was that one eye was nearsighted and the other wasn't. Her brain just started ignoring input from the nearsighted eye.
I forgot the actual name but it was misdiagnosed as a lazy eye (or the like) for years until a specialist figured out what was actually wrong. The surgery was for muscle correction. And that eye was also extremely near sighted while the good eye had perfect vision. Not anymore, though.
How exactly was the muscle corrected?
It was cut and reattached. I don't remember many of the details except that the stitches would dissolve on their own after the surgery and I was blinking out pieces for a short while after.
Did it actually correct your vision, though?
It’s called amblyopia
so lazy eye?
woogy woogy
I know when I went to military language school in my late 20s, the cadre said I might be too old. A few older people just breezed through, barely studying. I flunked out. I think it was more of a memorization issue, I got the grammar adequately, just couldn't remember enough words fast enough.
Nope language learning as an adult is way easier than as a kid, takes them a good 5-7 years to be semi fluent and they are practicing every day. This is more like if you are blind at birth from certain conditions that can be corrected if they are corrected too late you still won’t be able to see in your mind even if the eyes are sending the input forward.
There's some evidence that this is what makes learning a language with a very different set of phonemes more difficult as an adult. Babies have a developmental stage where they babble all sorts of sounds--pretty much anything our mouths/voices can make--then those sounds quickly get whittled down to the phonemes and tones we hear being spoken around us. The distinctions between certain sounds get washed out, and the barriers between others are established, and you continue the practice and muscle memory of making the sounds in your native language. If you're a baby in an English speaking country, a front-of-the-mouth "oo" sound is the same as a back-of-the-mouth "oo" sound (e.g. "duuuuude" vs "cooooool"). If you're a baby in a French speaking country, those are two distinct sounds that matter to your ability to understand words. That sound difference is as ingrained to someone raised speaking French as the difference between the "i" sound in "ship" and the "ee" sound in "sheep" is to an English-speaker--a sound difference that doesn't exist in the French language because it only has one close front vowel. Obviously it's not impossible to learn new phonemes as an adult, but babies who are raised bilingual are almost always going to have an ingrained level of phonetic fluency in the other language that's difficult for an adult to achieve.
If the topic is something you're interested in, there's a podcast episode by linguists Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch that covers this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l-73oOgbmo
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