#cultural diversity

cosmere-cosmeme:

(or people who know about linguistics)

Whats your favourite fun linguistics fact??

That hearing infants come with the potential to distinguish/produce all sorts of language sounds, and then their brains start paring down to the ones they’ll need as they hear more speech around them. For example, babies born to people who don’t have contrastive aspirated vs. unaspirated [p] in their language can differentiate /pʰ/ from /p/, but by the time they’re toddlers they’ll start losing that skill as their brains prioritize relevance of speech sounds.

ALSO, the paradigms of “how you should talk to your kids for their best language development” are based a lot on white Western individualism. Throughout the world, there are various attitudes toward children and language, and all of them produce successful speakers/signers! In some cultures, babies are spoken to in simplified baby talk; in others, they are spoken to as adults; in others, children are not directly addressed until they can speak in return so they pick up ambient language. Some cultures expect children to speak in simple but concrete phrases; some expect children to learn oral traditions first; and some expect children to speak in indirect metaphorical language and gain concreteness as they grow.

All of these methods are successful, and it’s harmful to shame non-USian caregivers for not obeying the school curriculum, or to shame working/busy caregivers for not reading a book to their kid every night and teaching them a Pimsleur course every morning.