Posted: May 20, 2013 10:06 pm
Mr.Samsa wrote:Looking at how it's used in the article, I think the author might be using "language" in a very specific way to refer to a particular aspect of language but doesn't clarify exactly what they mean. So the claim "Children mainly learn language from their playmates...", they might mean that they mainly learn new words, or grammatical structure, from their playmates rather than teachers or parents. Which would make more sense as if we mostly learnt those things from teachers then our language-use should be more accurate than it generally is (since we'd be following formal rules rather than social conventions) and it explains why youths speak radically differently than their parents.
As such, it wouldn't be referring to language acquisition, or dialect formation, or anything like that which would likely be predominantly a product of your interaction with parents and close family.
Just a guess though, they might be talking entirely out of their ass.
That's a reasonable suggestion, It could be, I'm not honestly sure what the claim is or how we'd measure it.
Thinking about it a bit more since last I posted there are situations which differ than mine - I know children of immigrants and they generally have English type accents as opposed to their parents who have characteristic accents related to their countries of origin. So in their cases I suppose it's substantially more true.
I suppose some accents will generate more social pressure than others, I can imagine that, for example, a black child getting picked on at school for looking and sounding different might have a rather greater motivation to acquire the accent of their peers than someone like me did.