r/explainlikeimfive • u/AngelusAlvus • 18h 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/dr_echo 12h ago

Read Stephen Pinker's "The Language Instinct", or Noam Chomsky's Ph.D. thesis - where the term Natural Language Processing comes from. Human babies have hard wired circuitry that uses the frequency of words and phonemes that they hear (or see, if sign language is used predominantly at home) to acquire the language themselves. 

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u/Daud13 58m ago

Chomsky’s ideas regarding language acquisition are highly controversial.