This still doesn’t change the fact that most small children learn language (spoken, not written) without really trying, and most adults have trouble even with motivation.
As the article I linked to says,
the apparent effortlessness is largely an illusion caused by psychological distance. We just don’t remember how hard it was to learn language.
I certainly would not disagree with your assertion that learning language is difficult for adults, as well (as a language-learning adult, I have experience of it myself!).
I completely disagree with some of this. Most small children don’t have a “do-or-die” motivation to learn languages. I would hazard a guess that most children don’t even realize that they > are > learning a language.
But this is exactly my point: as adults, we can go about learning languages in a systematic, intelligent, and efficient manner, or a more organic manner if that is what suits our learning style (the opportunity of so choosing is an advantage in itself!). Children, who don’t know what they are doing, behave as if it’s all unexplored territory and go about it quite haphazardly (as evidenced by all the mistakes they make when learning idiomatic phrases and irregular verb forms, for example). It takes them a while to iron things out, but they eventually do because they aren’t afraid of making mistakes. On the other hand, adults, who tend to be petrified of making mistakes, generally don’t speak enough! I would call this a behavioural impediment to effective language learning, not a biological one.
After all, not being neurologists, I don’t think either you or I can say for certain whether the brains of young 'uns really are better at learning things. Now, each of us can only answer for his or her own mature mind, but in my experience, conscious language-learning is definitely, as I mentioned, a kind of skill, and I have noticed that the speed at which I pick up new words and sentence patterns in my languages has become much more efficient than when I first started seriously studying languages, about six or seven years ago. It is a thing that an adult can come to do smoothly, efficiently and enjoyably, while for a child it is inevitably a clumsy, hit-and-miss process.
As regards your latter remarks, I would certainly agree that language-learning is closely tied to a child’s brain development. I as well have read anecdotes of children who grew up apart from all language stimuli, and were never able to regain the ground lost. However, just because there is a connexion between the two does not prove that the process is easy.
The linguist is right. The typical piece of uneducated trailer trash has a perfect command of grammar. It’s just that his perfect command of grammar is limited to the grammar of his dialect of English, which has many differences from the dialect favored by those in, say, upper-class Connecticut. Snobbism aside, there is no scientific basis for saying that the dialect used in rural Oklahoma is in any way inferior to that used in Harvard.
The point is not about prescriptivism/descriptivism, and Mark Rosenfelder (the author of the article) is both well-informed and anything but a snob, I assure you. While you and I and the author of the article know perfectly well that, linguistically speaking, there is no inherent superiority to any lect, in a social context there is a world of stylistic difference between the spoken and, especially, the written Spanish of (the example given) a lower-middle or lower-class Hispanic community in the United States, educated in English not Spanish, and middle- or upper-class South Americans educated in Spanish. Notice Rosenfelder used the words ‘lousy command of the written standard’, not ‘of Spanish’ or such.
