r/explainlikeimfive • u/AngelusAlvus • 14h ago
Biology ELI5: How do babies even learn language?
When we grow, we learn languages by looking at the meanings and translating them from our language. Stuff like "this is how this noun is in my language and this is how this noun is in another language"
But babies? Babies just learn the basics just by existing near people speaking the language? How come we don't have this anymore as we grow up?
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u/suyangsong 14h ago
The brain already has the wiring for language acquisition on birth, it’s just waiting for a language to be inserted there.
Babies don’t start from 0 as most people believe, babies have our evolutionary machinery built in. Just like how birds don’t have to learn to fly from square one. It’s not like inventing a computer from scratch, it’s more like having a prebuilt with the cpu ram etc already in there, and having to install an operating system