Are language learning skills genetic or innate?

Question

I grew up learning both Chinese and English. Chinese is my first language, but I started learning English in nursery school by age 2, so now, I excel in English more than Chinese, even though I still only speak Chinese with my parents. Why is it that my English surpassed Chinese? Also, does bilingualism have anything to do with learning other languages? I started learning Spanish in school in 6th grade, and I'm a junior now, but people are always surprised to learn I'm the top of my advanced class when there are French/German speakers who struggle a bit. I go to an int'l school and alot of my classmates are bilingual, so I don't get why it seems so hard for them to learn Spanish, or even French. My Chinese teachers have always said I learned Chinese really fast as a kid. I love learning languages and want to learn French in college, but I'm just wondering, are language learning skills genetic or innate?

Sorry I asked more than 1 q. but just answer as fully as possible. Thanks!

Answer 1

Cognitive ability is fairly well understood today, so we are able to describe to some extent how the brain "learns"and what memory really is. We know, for example, that the left side of the brain is functionally representative of reasoning ability, while the right side of the brain is poised more for creativity. A math problem, for example, is processed by the left side of the brain while the right side of the brain shows more activity when someone is painting a picture or creating a statue. Physicists work the left side of the brain, while musicians work the right side.

We think that language may be coupled to both sides of the brain. Part of learning a language is learning it's grammatical structures - where adjectives are used, the conjugation of verbs, the "format" of it's sentence structure. This part of learning is mostly reason based learning, so it involves most activity in the left brain. Another part of learning a language is creative - the speed of speaking the language you feel comfortable with is essentially chosen by you, thus created, as is your accent and how you sound out the different words of the langauge - not to mention how you choose to put them together. This is all creativity based learning, and therefore involves the right brain.

My inclination is to say that people who have no trouble learning traditional modern languages have a good balance between the left and right brain - there is a connection between the 2 lobes of the brain that may be absent or diminished or simply not as developed in those people who have trouble with language. Typically, if you have trouble with language, you have trouble with learning other things in general. This supports the dual lobe theory. Also, language per se isn't limited to French, Spanish, or Chinese - consider Fortran, Pascal, or Java as languages. The latter may be easier for the left brained people to learn because the learning is mostly learning structured logic and reasoning - using almost pure logic - how parts of these "languages" are symanticized, or "spoken".

Being in an environment that's saturated by a given langauge naturally makes learning it easier because of simple exposure to the language. Even when you aren't really "studying" it, you are hearing it from other conversations and you're seeing it in written form everywhere, and you do subconciously pick up on the subtlties offered by the langauge that you would otherwise miss or have to explicitly study in order to learn.

Answer 2

You didn't give us the complete history on your language learning experience. I suspect that perhaps you have sensed that English is the language of social power in the United States, and you have also had a lot of exposure to English at school that gave you the ability to learn that. In my opinion, though, you shouldn't stop speaking Chinese with your parents at home. Also, you didn't say in what way your English has surpassed your Chinese. Perhaps, for example, you are literate in English and not in Chinese. That seems natural, since you went to an English-speaking school.

Bilingualism doesn't necessarily predict your ability to learn other languages when you're older, as far as I know, but there are some things about language that bilinguals are aware of that might help. For one thing, bilinguals are more aware than monolingual children that language is symbolic and it's possible to have more than one symbol for one word. So you may have benefitted from knowledge like that. Many studies in linguistics are performed on monolinguals, so I just think there hasn't been enough research to answer that quetsion.

Everyone is apparently hard-wired to learn language when we are children. After people get older than about age 7 or 13, the process of language learning is quite different from how they learned languages as a child, and the quality of their language is very different from that of a native speaker as well. So your classmates are only struggling with things in their language classes that all non-native speakers of any language deal with.

As far as why you are doing so well in your Spanish classes in comparison to your classmates, it is difficult to say from the small amount of information here. Some people seem to have a "talent" for learning new languages that just makes it easier; you might be one of those people. It also occurs to me that you have just been speaking Spanish much longer than your classmates, since you started in the 6th grade and they maybe have started more recently. So perhaps when they've reached the point where they've had as much exposure to Spanish as you have, they'll be doing well too.

In answer to your question about innateness, in general I can say that it is possible for just about anyone to learn a new language, so yes, all people basically have that ability. I think you are really wondering if your possibly exceptionally good ability to learn new languages is innate. As I implied above, it is possible, although without knowing more about the situation I can't say for sure.

Answer 3

Maybe it's because you said that you love learning languages. That alone will provide motivation and make you excel. A person who learns languages just to pass tests and meet school requirements probably won't reach fluency easily... As for your English surpassing Chinese, maybe you use English more than you use Chinese...?

Answer 4

It depends on whom you ask. Psychologist B.F. Skinner for example believed that language was a learned skill while linguist Noam Chomsky believed that our brains were hard wired for language.

Answer 5

Language skills could just possibly run in your family, or it could be (and I believe this is a major reason) you're exceptionally bright when it comes to foreign languages since you enjoy learning them. And it been proven that you tend to accelerate at subjects in school that you enjoy.

Answer 6

The short answer to that would be yes. Genetic and innate mean the same thing, however.

Answer 7

I completely UNDERSTAND this feeling of yours.
Same here, as a matter of fact.
Maybe genetic?
But environmental factor is also important!

Answer 8

i'm not quiet sure if it's genetic,but not everyone can learn many languages.i know:english,romanian,spanish,portuguesse,greek,a little german,a little french and a litlle rusian:)