<story><title>How babies and young children learn to understand language</title><url>https://lithub.com/how-babies-and-young-children-learn-to-understand-language/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>TacticalCoder</author><text>Words beginning and endings are learned too because people raising young kids are spending a great deal of time decomposing and telling them simple words. Repeating &amp;quot;cat&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;cat&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;cat&amp;quot; with pauses.&lt;p&gt;Statistical learning --and there are studies about this-- is also obvious when multi-lingual kids &lt;i&gt;make up words that do not exists&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ll use words from one of the language they know to come up with words (or words beginning &amp;#x2F; ending) in another language. These words, statistically, could make sense. And they&amp;#x27;ll pronounce them &amp;quot;properly&amp;quot;. Yet they don&amp;#x27;t exist.&lt;p&gt;So it&amp;#x27;s not just the words: it&amp;#x27;s the pronunciation too.&lt;p&gt;As the father of a fully bilingual kid (french &amp;#x2F; english) that was fascinating to watch.</text></comment>
<story><title>How babies and young children learn to understand language</title><url>https://lithub.com/how-babies-and-young-children-learn-to-understand-language/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alexey-salmin</author><text>&amp;gt; Think about listening to a language unknown to you, one with different words, grammar and prosody. You will be at an utter loss to identify its words, let alone their meaning.&lt;p&gt;My experience learning French basically. I&amp;#x27;d say understanding where one word ends and another starts was much easier for English and German. On paper I was able to grasp the rough meaning very quickly thanks to vocabulary shared with English and Latin, but listening took a year: I was facing a solid wall of sound, no cracks.</text></comment>