Also, we don't need more focus on Autism. Autism is pretty bad, but it's nowhere near as important to address, treat, and educate people about than dozens of other mental disorders. It just happens to be in that sweet spot where it hits kids young enough that they're still cute instead of scary.
Um, no.
Autism can be managed and the quality of life for these children can be vastly improved if caught early. Autism is staggeringly misdiagnosed. Doctors need to be trained on the very early warning signs of autism. What better way to do that than to improve the handbook for diagnosing psychological disorders?
I'd say it's at the front because it's pretty obvious later in life (closest thing to a broken leg there is), making it a fairly easy disease. Add in the importance of early detection, and you have the makings of the biggest portion of any psych handbook. Actually, reading my description, it matches pretty well with our fear of cancer.
The thing with autism compared to other disorders affecting children like depression or ADHD is that there is a window in early childhood that, if preventative measures are taken, can change how high functioning that person will be in later life. If you miss that window the best you can do is maintain the state these children are at and hope for a breakthrough.
While there are other time sensitive disorders (sociopathy, dyslexia), I can't think of any other with such severe consequences if missed.
Psychiatry could probably benefit from a more holistic approach, once we get a whole bunch of additional research done. Don't just identify disorders, build up lists of what constitutes 'normality', and the various ways in which people who don't have disorders can be 'normal'. Don't think of disorders as conditions applied over a normal base, think of everything as a condition, and identify which conditions should and should not be treated.
Psychiatry could probably benefit from a more holistic approach, once we get a whole bunch of additional research done. Don't just identify disorders, build up lists of what constitutes 'normality', and the various ways in which people who don't have disorders can be 'normal'. Don't think of disorders as conditions applied over a normal base, think of everything as a condition, and identify which conditions should and should not be treated.
I disagree. What psychiatry does is look at people who self-identify with distress/impairments in functioning or who can be confidently said to have above (some people can't self-identify) and see what about their mental functioning and behaviour (mostly the latter, because it's much easier to test) differs from statistical normality (obviously there's a range they have to consider). That's the diagnosis part. The treatment part is entirely trial and error, with recommended effective treatments built up over thousands of failures.
We don't want to start dictating "normality", though. We just want to identify areas of impairment. Transgendered people are impaired because of their self-image problems. The only reason gender is mentioned is because that is the underlying cause, but it's not the gender they're treating, it's the self-image and depression, yet people still criticize its inclusion. If you start defining "normal", those problems will only worsen.
Psychiatry could probably benefit from a more holistic approach, once we get a whole bunch of additional research done. Don't just identify disorders, build up lists of what constitutes 'normality', and the various ways in which people who don't have disorders can be 'normal'. Don't think of disorders as conditions applied over a normal base, think of everything as a condition, and identify which conditions should and should not be treated.
I disagree. What psychiatry does is look at people who self-identify with distress/impairments in functioning or who can be confidently said to have above (some people can't self-identify) and see what about their mental functioning and behaviour (mostly the latter, because it's much easier to test) differs from statistical normality (obviously there's a range they have to consider). That's the diagnosis part. The treatment part is entirely trial and error, with recommended effective treatments built up over thousands of failures.
We don't want to start dictating "normality", though. We just want to identify areas of impairment. Transgendered people are impaired because of their self-image problems. The only reason gender is mentioned is because that is the underlying cause, but it's not the gender they're treating, it's the self-image and depression, yet people still criticize its inclusion. If you start defining "normal", those problems will only worsen.
We already implicitly define 'normal' as the absence of impairment. It seems pretty obvious that it's actually far more complex than that.
Are you talking about mustard allergen genes again? Oh boy.
And yes I'm highly critical of the DSM, especially how the DSM is used by GPs that really have as much business giving out psychiatric medicine as they do chemo bags. The history of the DSM itself is also a fascinating study in discrimination - it's been shown time and again in countless ways that having that much control over "normal" is dangerous.
And yet it is exponentially more relevant than online journal publications and meta-studies, no matter how much you believe it shouldn't be.
Which is the classic appeal to authority.
It should be noted that "appeal to authority" is not a fallacy if the authority that is being appealed to is actually an authority.
Don't think of disorders as conditions applied over a normal base, think of everything as a condition, and identify which conditions should and should not be treated.
As Psych0 has said, this is what they already do.
Psychiatry, as a field, is very very careful not to become arbiters of normality. Particular psychiatrists may or may not act this way, but psychiatrists are humans and come with biases. They're really interested in two fundamental questions: why are you distressed, and would this distress be more easily fixed by changing your situation rather than changing your behavior?
That the given distress in question may represent a form of "abnormality" is an attitude that, while it still lingers in some corners, has been fading from the mainstream since the 1960s.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Also, the thing to remember about the DSM is that really nobody gives a shit about it except students and insurance companies.
Okay, I admit that's an exaggeration, but I want to provide an antidote to the idea that changes in the DSM induce changes in the field. Really, it's the other way around; the DSM just reflects changes in the field that have already happened. It's a Reader's Digest of psych.
Honestly, I see it losing relevancy as ICD codes become more prevalent in mental health.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
And I would think that separating normality from the subjective individual experience of whether or not that person feels they are operating fine or are otherwise functioning well to themselves, would result in more people who otherwise wouldn't need psychiatry being compelled (probably indirectly through societal pressure) into seeking it and causing harm rather than helping.
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited February 2010
If normality could be defined, they would have done it already. They've been studying people for well over a hundred years now.
It's a pretty big hint, I think, that a hundred years of research has come up with no definite answer. It might be that the question doesn't have one. That there is no "objective standard of normal".
Okay, I admit that's an exaggeration, but I want to provide an antidote to the idea that changes in the DSM induce changes in the field. Really, it's the other way around; the DSM just reflects changes in the field that have already happened. It's a Reader's Digest of psych.
Best summation ever? I think so!
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
Dyslexia is time sensitive?
Most "learning disorders" (and I'm including autism in that category for what i'm about to say next, although it really isn't) can be really quite seriously ameliorated if caught early enough. Dyslexic children can be quite literally taught to read if you use the right methods. Not quickly, but not terribly either. Within the normal range (obviously not counting the few exceptional cases that have extreme problems).
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited February 2010
There's a lot of critical periods for development that children go through. Different parts of the growing brain become hypersensitive for learning different things as you grow up and then stop being so sensitive after these periods end. After then it becomes much more difficult to learn these things. (It's not just reading) Children with these developmental disorders can be guided through these critical periods in a manner that minimises the impact (as much as possible) of their problems on these development periods.
It's not going to fix it, but it's a chance to seriously reduce the symptoms and increase their quality of life. It's not something that can just be skipped over and expect them to pick it up later: once you've missed a critical period you can never learn that thing as quickly again.
It's why it's so much harder for an adult to learn a language as good as a native. children can pick up languages so fast and easily in comparison to the incredibly effortful study it takes an adult because of those critical periods.
I'm simplifying it a bit because this is all that is really needed to know to understand why it's important. The finicky details aren't really that important.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
It's why it's so much harder for an adult to learn a language as good as a native.
Actually, that's not really true.
It takes an adult about 4 months to become fluent in a language with total immersion and roughly 4 hours of focused study a day. Most of the problems adults have with study language are actually not neurological.
More true of other things, oddly enough.
EDIT: The most serious problems with adult learning for almost everything stem from psychological issues:
the first is loss aversion (when you are a child you are taught to hate failing/losing - as you get older you become a master at nearly everything you do in your daily life. Having to go back to being a learner, somebody who repeatedly fails at something until they get it right, is deeply annoying for most adults).
the second is lack of necessity - when you are a child, if you want to communicate you HAVE to learn your first language. it is a problem that you spend a lot of thought on. As an adult you will have other concerns. That is why total immersion is so important - especially if you only have one person near you who speaks your language (the person tutoring you).
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ArchonexNo hard feelings, right?Registered Userregular
edited February 2010
As someone who was diagnosed as having Aspergers, I find the news that i'm officially being listed as autistic somewhat amusing.
On one hand, it provides me with ammunition to use if I ever need to get treatment supported by an insurance company. On the other hand, there's no real treatment for it as a condition out there, and i've already graduated from the public school system a long time ago, so it's a bit useless from my perspective. In fact, given the biases of some people, if it comes up as an issue it could end up being a hampering factor in some cases, depending on what i'm trying to do.
Given my own personal experiences, i'm not entirely certain that I need treatment either.
Maybe this will shut up some of the "hurr, Aspies!" and self-diagnosed wankers up however. I can't imagine that people who self-diagnose want to be listed as being autistic, since it's usually a self-esteem issue that brings that about.
But really I'm mostly against GP's handing out scripts for psychiatric drugs like they're goddamn breath mints. That shit needs a crackdown, pronto.
This took away several years of my life.
Every fucking thing gets an initial diagnosis of "anxiety" or "stress" and it takes several years for some doctors to actually run the tests that they should've run in the first place.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
I for one would welcome increased stratification of disease spectrums, if for no other reason than to stop Hollywood from making movies where the profoundly mentally handicapped seem to be able to impart life lessons to everyone around them.
Knowing how endlessly hopeful parents of handicapped children can be first-hand, I really hate to see people wait for miracles that will never come.
People need to be taught how to equip themselves for understanding and providing for the handicapped, not being led into false hope.
I for one would welcome increased stratification of disease spectrums, if for no other reason than to stop Hollywood from making movies where the profoundly mentally handicapped seem to be able to impart life lessons to everyone around them.
Knowing how endlessly hopeful parents of handicapped children can be first-hand, I really hate to see people wait for miracles that will never come.
People need to be taught how to equip themselves for understanding and providing for the handicapped, not being led into false hope.
This is the problem with political correctness and the idea of someone being "developmentally delayed". It gives parents false hope that their children will someday catch-up to their peers and be regular members of society. With some of these disorders that's never going to happen, and parents need to prepare themselves to deal with that.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
But at the same time though, you don't want to medicalise children who simply learn to read late, for example. There is no correlation between when a child learns to read and their eventual proficiency, which is something that not many parents know.
It's why it's so much harder for an adult to learn a language as good as a native.
Actually, that's not really true.
It takes an adult about 4 months to become fluent in a language with total immersion and roughly 4 hours of focused study a day. Most of the problems adults have with study language are actually not neurological.
More true of other things, oddly enough.
EDIT: The most serious problems with adult learning for almost everything stem from psychological issues:
the first is loss aversion (when you are a child you are taught to hate failing/losing - as you get older you become a master at nearly everything you do in your daily life. Having to go back to being a learner, somebody who repeatedly fails at something until they get it right, is deeply annoying for most adults).
the second is lack of necessity - when you are a child, if you want to communicate you HAVE to learn your first language. it is a problem that you spend a lot of thought on. As an adult you will have other concerns. That is why total immersion is so important - especially if you only have one person near you who speaks your language (the person tutoring you).
I want to see that paper.
It certainly is not true that adults get a proper accent with full immersion. It's a fact that you lose your ability to discriminate between phonemes not used in your language starting at around age 12 (obviously not completely lost, but it's much harder).
The thing with autism compared to other disorders affecting children like depression or ADHD is that there is a window in early childhood that, if preventative measures are taken, can change how high functioning that person will be in later life. If you miss that window the best you can do is maintain the state these children are at and hope for a breakthrough.
While there are other time sensitive disorders (sociopathy, dyslexia), I can't think of any other with such severe consequences if missed.
o_O I would think sociopathy would be a bit more important, as they can turn into murderers and such.
When it comes to Aspebergers being folded into autism spectrum disorder, I say good. It is a form of Autism already, only with a different name then the rest of the autistic sufferers. It creates the illusion of Aspies as different from Regular autistics. They are not, they merely have a milder form of the disease.
Also it will hopefully get rid of the self diagnosed ASS BURGERS on the internet. Which can not come soon enough.
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The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
It certainly is not true that adults get a proper accent with full immersion. It's a fact that you lose your ability to discriminate between phonemes not used in your language starting at around age 12 (obviously not completely lost, but it's much harder).
The languages you learn as a child will determine how you pronounce things. Learning how to develop an accent is different from learning how to speak a certain language. To develop a proper accent you will probably have to focus on it specifically. You can be fluent in a language without sounding like a native speaker of it.
The thing with autism compared to other disorders affecting children like depression or ADHD is that there is a window in early childhood that, if preventative measures are taken, can change how high functioning that person will be in later life. If you miss that window the best you can do is maintain the state these children are at and hope for a breakthrough.
While there are other time sensitive disorders (sociopathy, dyslexia), I can't think of any other with such severe consequences if missed.
o_O I would think sociopathy would be a bit more important, as they can turn into murderers and such.
Not really. Sociopathy, and its crazier cousin psychopathy, are diagnosed as Conduct Disorder in children, and covers a wide range of delinquent behaviours. It's also something that needs to be watched over time to see if it is just a phase (as all children go through) or something persistent. It's time sensitive because it's diagnosed only after this destructive, anti-social behaviour has continued for longer than a year.
That said, anyone can turn into a murderer in the right circumstances. This is more about emotional states and long-term behaviour.
It's why it's so much harder for an adult to learn a language as good as a native.
It takes an adult about 4 months to become fluent in a language with total immersion and roughly 4 hours of focused study a day. Most of the problems adults have with study language are actually not neurological.
Thank you for proving my point. Young children learn to speak without any focused study, they only need immersion.
I think you misunderstood what I meant by "hard". I did not mean impossible. It's obviously not impossible when comparing to studying another subject or some other skill as an adult. However, in comparison to a child, it is hard. The adult has to engage in effortful study, they cannot just immerse themselves and pick it up without this concentrated effort. This is due to a neurological difference.
So if you have a disorder which interferes with learning these things anyway, going through this period without any guidance is going to make it much harder than a mere 4 hours a day.
Not once did I say it couldn't be mastered. I think you misunderstood what I was attempting to say and thought I was saying something much more extreme.
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Are you kidding? Kids have 12+ hours a day of focused study. Every time someone talks to them, they're studying. They don't get explicitly taught grammar but they get corrected when they make mistakes and pick it up that way, and given how grammar is a crapshoot in every single language that's probably more efficient than explicitly studying anyway.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
Are you kidding? Kids have 12+ hours a day of focused study. Every time someone talks to them, they're studying. They don't get explicitly taught grammar but they get corrected when they make mistakes and pick it up that way, and given how grammar is a crapshoot in every single language that's probably more efficient than explicitly studying anyway.
This is called immersion. If you were staying in a foreign country in a house with foreign language speakers, trying to pick it up, would this not also happen?
And no kids don't sit there studying every word like an adult would. Have you ever spent any time around children? This is a nonsense statement: young children learn to speak before they can be made to pay attention to something for any decent length of time. Children pick up stuff they've never been taught. They can learn grammatical rules without being explicitly taught them, or even being corrected, just from watching how adults talk to each other.
Focused study is effortful sitting down learning the rules and contents of a language in an organised manner. You are not talking about focused study, you are talking about full immersion in a language.
The person I was first responding to even acknowledged that full immersion plus focused study is necessary to master language as an adult. So I'm not alone in considering these terms different from each other in concept and definition.
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When it comes to Aspebergers being folded into autism spectrum disorder, I say good. It is a form of Autism already, only with a different name then the rest of the autistic sufferers. It creates the illusion of Aspies as different from Regular autistics. They are not, they merely have a milder form of the disease.
Also it will hopefully get rid of the self diagnosed ASS BURGERS on the internet. Which can not come soon enough.
The main risk is that it means there's no longer a specific set of criteria designed to detect the unusual traits of the lightest end of the spectrum.
When it comes to Aspebergers being folded into autism spectrum disorder, I say good. It is a form of Autism already, only with a different name then the rest of the autistic sufferers. It creates the illusion of Aspies as different from Regular autistics. They are not, they merely have a milder form of the disease.
Also it will hopefully get rid of the self diagnosed ASS BURGERS on the internet. Which can not come soon enough.
The main risk is that it means there's no longer a specific set of criteria designed to detect the unusual traits of the lightest end of the spectrum.
Is this true? Depression is also considered a spectrum and that has specific criteria for minor and major depressive episodes.
I'm interested in this draft now.
It's available via a link at this site.
It doesn't seem like they've updated severity criteria for the proposed category meant to fold aspergers into autistic disorder, they probably haven't worked it out yet.
But here is a link to the rationale.
However there is a paragraph in the rationale indicating they acknowledge that there have to be severity indicators to differentiate where people fall on the spectrum. As well as other specifiers.
Guess we'll just have to wait until they update the draft with severity criteria. It's still a work in progress after all.
Morninglord on
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When it comes to Aspebergers being folded into autism spectrum disorder, I say good. It is a form of Autism already, only with a different name then the rest of the autistic sufferers. It creates the illusion of Aspies as different from Regular autistics. They are not, they merely have a milder form of the disease.
Also it will hopefully get rid of the self diagnosed ASS BURGERS on the internet. Which can not come soon enough.
The main risk is that it means there's no longer a specific set of criteria designed to detect the unusual traits of the lightest end of the spectrum.
Is this true? Depression is also considered a spectrum and that has specific criteria for minor and major depressive episodes.
I'm interested in this draft now.
It's available via a link at this site.
It doesn't seem like they've updated severity criteria for the proposed category meant to fold aspergers into autistic disorder, they probably haven't worked it out yet.
But here is a link to the rationale.
However there is a paragraph in the rationale indicating they acknowledge that there have to be severity indicators to differentiate where people fall on the spectrum. As well as other specifiers.
Guess we'll just have to wait until they update the draft with severity criteria. It's still a work in progress after all.
I'm assuming that putting on the spectrum means sharing diagnosis criteria and simply grading for severity. Currently, there's a special set of criteria because Asp is a separate diagnosis.
Are you kidding? Kids have 12+ hours a day of focused study. Every time someone talks to them, they're studying. They don't get explicitly taught grammar but they get corrected when they make mistakes and pick it up that way, and given how grammar is a crapshoot in every single language that's probably more efficient than explicitly studying anyway.
This is called immersion. If you were staying in a foreign country in a house with foreign language speakers, trying to pick it up, would this not also happen?
No, it wouldn't. You speak to kids far differently than you speak to adults. We use baby language for a reason- it's simplified, stripped down of much of what makes it complex so it is far easier for the kid to learn. We overtly correct some of their errors but we also model proper speech for them deliberately and carefully. If a kid says something incorrectly, you repeat it back correctly before replying. I have studied childhood language acquisition to a limited extent (more focused on reading) and they're not picking it up by magic, they're picking it up because we present it to them so clearly and well. I have no doubt that any adult immersed in an environment like a child's, that is to say where they are unable to communicate unless they learn the language and where they are spoken to using simplified, easy-to-understand language and corrected frequently, would pick up the new language faster than a child.
The biggest difference is that adults always have methods of communication already, and so lack the motivation to put into learning the new language because they don't need it to flourish. They also lack the dedicated time spent with them that a child gets.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
The biggest difference is that adults always have methods of communication already, and so lack the motivation to put into learning the new language because they don't need it to flourish. They also lack the dedicated time spent with them that a child gets.
And this is not even saying that children aren't neurologically primed to learning language - they are - but an adult has already solved a lot of the problems that a child has to solve for the first time. The adult already has the generalisation rules for certain grammatical types and so on already worked out. That is precisely why it takes the adult less time.
Children who encounter language after the age of 8 or so have a torrid time learning it and never really grasp grammar, despite intensive education and normal scores on IQ measures. These are generally children who suffered severe neglect or deaf kids who grew up without sign, and there have only been a handful ever, so obviously there is some problem with sample bias, but the fact that they can score normal on IQ tests suggests that there is some truth to the findings.
I'm not sure what I think about that stuff. I know for certain that I don't believe in a universal grammar like Chomsky proposes- it's just not necessary to explain our findings, and so shouldn't be included in the theory.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
I'm not sure what I think about that stuff. I know for certain that I don't believe in a universal grammar like Chomsky proposes- it's just not necessary to explain our findings, and so shouldn't be included in the theory.
How do you explain creolisation?
What is the evidence in favor of a neurological critical period of language development in children?
People who don't hear language until pretty late, as psych0 says.
Children who encounter language after the age of 8 or so have a torrid time learning it and never really grasp grammar, despite intensive education and normal scores on IQ measures.
Right, but as you're saying, the linguistic environment adults encounter is significantly different from the one that children encounter. I'm wondering if there's any evidence that demonstrates that this is a result of "brain plasticity" or mylineation or some other physical or biological difference between child and adult brains.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Well no, but you guys are mixing up learning a first language and learning a second language.
Learning a first language has a critical period where it MUST be learned or it will never be learned (at least not in any relatively normal way). It's funny that Feral asked for evidence because the evidence is feral children. Look up studies about Romanian orphans and feral children to find more on this.
A second language has a more of a sensitive period. The younger you are, the easier it is to pick up a second language, but there is nothing stopping an adult from learning a second language.
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I'd say it's at the front because it's pretty obvious later in life (closest thing to a broken leg there is), making it a fairly easy disease. Add in the importance of early detection, and you have the makings of the biggest portion of any psych handbook. Actually, reading my description, it matches pretty well with our fear of cancer.
While there are other time sensitive disorders (sociopathy, dyslexia), I can't think of any other with such severe consequences if missed.
More in the sense that diagnosed early means the child is less likely to fall behind their classmates.
I disagree. What psychiatry does is look at people who self-identify with distress/impairments in functioning or who can be confidently said to have above (some people can't self-identify) and see what about their mental functioning and behaviour (mostly the latter, because it's much easier to test) differs from statistical normality (obviously there's a range they have to consider). That's the diagnosis part. The treatment part is entirely trial and error, with recommended effective treatments built up over thousands of failures.
We don't want to start dictating "normality", though. We just want to identify areas of impairment. Transgendered people are impaired because of their self-image problems. The only reason gender is mentioned is because that is the underlying cause, but it's not the gender they're treating, it's the self-image and depression, yet people still criticize its inclusion. If you start defining "normal", those problems will only worsen.
We already implicitly define 'normal' as the absence of impairment. It seems pretty obvious that it's actually far more complex than that.
It should be noted that "appeal to authority" is not a fallacy if the authority that is being appealed to is actually an authority.
As Psych0 has said, this is what they already do.
Psychiatry, as a field, is very very careful not to become arbiters of normality. Particular psychiatrists may or may not act this way, but psychiatrists are humans and come with biases. They're really interested in two fundamental questions: why are you distressed, and would this distress be more easily fixed by changing your situation rather than changing your behavior?
That the given distress in question may represent a form of "abnormality" is an attitude that, while it still lingers in some corners, has been fading from the mainstream since the 1960s.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Okay, I admit that's an exaggeration, but I want to provide an antidote to the idea that changes in the DSM induce changes in the field. Really, it's the other way around; the DSM just reflects changes in the field that have already happened. It's a Reader's Digest of psych.
Honestly, I see it losing relevancy as ICD codes become more prevalent in mental health.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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It's a pretty big hint, I think, that a hundred years of research has come up with no definite answer. It might be that the question doesn't have one. That there is no "objective standard of normal".
Best summation ever? I think so!
Most "learning disorders" (and I'm including autism in that category for what i'm about to say next, although it really isn't) can be really quite seriously ameliorated if caught early enough. Dyslexic children can be quite literally taught to read if you use the right methods. Not quickly, but not terribly either. Within the normal range (obviously not counting the few exceptional cases that have extreme problems).
It's not going to fix it, but it's a chance to seriously reduce the symptoms and increase their quality of life. It's not something that can just be skipped over and expect them to pick it up later: once you've missed a critical period you can never learn that thing as quickly again.
It's why it's so much harder for an adult to learn a language as good as a native. children can pick up languages so fast and easily in comparison to the incredibly effortful study it takes an adult because of those critical periods.
I'm simplifying it a bit because this is all that is really needed to know to understand why it's important. The finicky details aren't really that important.
Actually, that's not really true.
It takes an adult about 4 months to become fluent in a language with total immersion and roughly 4 hours of focused study a day. Most of the problems adults have with study language are actually not neurological.
More true of other things, oddly enough.
EDIT: The most serious problems with adult learning for almost everything stem from psychological issues:
the first is loss aversion (when you are a child you are taught to hate failing/losing - as you get older you become a master at nearly everything you do in your daily life. Having to go back to being a learner, somebody who repeatedly fails at something until they get it right, is deeply annoying for most adults).
the second is lack of necessity - when you are a child, if you want to communicate you HAVE to learn your first language. it is a problem that you spend a lot of thought on. As an adult you will have other concerns. That is why total immersion is so important - especially if you only have one person near you who speaks your language (the person tutoring you).
On one hand, it provides me with ammunition to use if I ever need to get treatment supported by an insurance company. On the other hand, there's no real treatment for it as a condition out there, and i've already graduated from the public school system a long time ago, so it's a bit useless from my perspective. In fact, given the biases of some people, if it comes up as an issue it could end up being a hampering factor in some cases, depending on what i'm trying to do.
Given my own personal experiences, i'm not entirely certain that I need treatment either.
Maybe this will shut up some of the "hurr, Aspies!" and self-diagnosed wankers up however. I can't imagine that people who self-diagnose want to be listed as being autistic, since it's usually a self-esteem issue that brings that about.
This took away several years of my life.
Every fucking thing gets an initial diagnosis of "anxiety" or "stress" and it takes several years for some doctors to actually run the tests that they should've run in the first place.
Knowing how endlessly hopeful parents of handicapped children can be first-hand, I really hate to see people wait for miracles that will never come.
People need to be taught how to equip themselves for understanding and providing for the handicapped, not being led into false hope.
This is the problem with political correctness and the idea of someone being "developmentally delayed". It gives parents false hope that their children will someday catch-up to their peers and be regular members of society. With some of these disorders that's never going to happen, and parents need to prepare themselves to deal with that.
I want to see that paper.
It certainly is not true that adults get a proper accent with full immersion. It's a fact that you lose your ability to discriminate between phonemes not used in your language starting at around age 12 (obviously not completely lost, but it's much harder).
o_O I would think sociopathy would be a bit more important, as they can turn into murderers and such.
Also it will hopefully get rid of the self diagnosed ASS BURGERS on the internet. Which can not come soon enough.
The languages you learn as a child will determine how you pronounce things. Learning how to develop an accent is different from learning how to speak a certain language. To develop a proper accent you will probably have to focus on it specifically. You can be fluent in a language without sounding like a native speaker of it.
Not really. Sociopathy, and its crazier cousin psychopathy, are diagnosed as Conduct Disorder in children, and covers a wide range of delinquent behaviours. It's also something that needs to be watched over time to see if it is just a phase (as all children go through) or something persistent. It's time sensitive because it's diagnosed only after this destructive, anti-social behaviour has continued for longer than a year.
That said, anyone can turn into a murderer in the right circumstances. This is more about emotional states and long-term behaviour.
Thank you for proving my point. Young children learn to speak without any focused study, they only need immersion.
I think you misunderstood what I meant by "hard". I did not mean impossible. It's obviously not impossible when comparing to studying another subject or some other skill as an adult. However, in comparison to a child, it is hard. The adult has to engage in effortful study, they cannot just immerse themselves and pick it up without this concentrated effort. This is due to a neurological difference.
So if you have a disorder which interferes with learning these things anyway, going through this period without any guidance is going to make it much harder than a mere 4 hours a day.
Not once did I say it couldn't be mastered. I think you misunderstood what I was attempting to say and thought I was saying something much more extreme.
This is called immersion. If you were staying in a foreign country in a house with foreign language speakers, trying to pick it up, would this not also happen?
And no kids don't sit there studying every word like an adult would. Have you ever spent any time around children? This is a nonsense statement: young children learn to speak before they can be made to pay attention to something for any decent length of time. Children pick up stuff they've never been taught. They can learn grammatical rules without being explicitly taught them, or even being corrected, just from watching how adults talk to each other.
Focused study is effortful sitting down learning the rules and contents of a language in an organised manner. You are not talking about focused study, you are talking about full immersion in a language.
The person I was first responding to even acknowledged that full immersion plus focused study is necessary to master language as an adult. So I'm not alone in considering these terms different from each other in concept and definition.
The main risk is that it means there's no longer a specific set of criteria designed to detect the unusual traits of the lightest end of the spectrum.
Is this true? Depression is also considered a spectrum and that has specific criteria for minor and major depressive episodes.
I'm interested in this draft now.
It's available via a link at this site.
It doesn't seem like they've updated severity criteria for the proposed category meant to fold aspergers into autistic disorder, they probably haven't worked it out yet.
But here is a link to the rationale.
Rationale
The severity tab is blank.
However there is a paragraph in the rationale indicating they acknowledge that there have to be severity indicators to differentiate where people fall on the spectrum. As well as other specifiers.
Guess we'll just have to wait until they update the draft with severity criteria. It's still a work in progress after all.
I'm assuming that putting on the spectrum means sharing diagnosis criteria and simply grading for severity. Currently, there's a special set of criteria because Asp is a separate diagnosis.
No, it wouldn't. You speak to kids far differently than you speak to adults. We use baby language for a reason- it's simplified, stripped down of much of what makes it complex so it is far easier for the kid to learn. We overtly correct some of their errors but we also model proper speech for them deliberately and carefully. If a kid says something incorrectly, you repeat it back correctly before replying. I have studied childhood language acquisition to a limited extent (more focused on reading) and they're not picking it up by magic, they're picking it up because we present it to them so clearly and well. I have no doubt that any adult immersed in an environment like a child's, that is to say where they are unable to communicate unless they learn the language and where they are spoken to using simplified, easy-to-understand language and corrected frequently, would pick up the new language faster than a child.
The biggest difference is that adults always have methods of communication already, and so lack the motivation to put into learning the new language because they don't need it to flourish. They also lack the dedicated time spent with them that a child gets.
And this is not even saying that children aren't neurologically primed to learning language - they are - but an adult has already solved a lot of the problems that a child has to solve for the first time. The adult already has the generalisation rules for certain grammatical types and so on already worked out. That is precisely why it takes the adult less time.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'm not sure what I think about that stuff. I know for certain that I don't believe in a universal grammar like Chomsky proposes- it's just not necessary to explain our findings, and so shouldn't be included in the theory.
How do you explain creolisation?
People who don't hear language until pretty late, as psych0 says.
Right, but as you're saying, the linguistic environment adults encounter is significantly different from the one that children encounter. I'm wondering if there's any evidence that demonstrates that this is a result of "brain plasticity" or mylineation or some other physical or biological difference between child and adult brains.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Well no, but you guys are mixing up learning a first language and learning a second language.
Learning a first language has a critical period where it MUST be learned or it will never be learned (at least not in any relatively normal way). It's funny that Feral asked for evidence because the evidence is feral children. Look up studies about Romanian orphans and feral children to find more on this.
A second language has a more of a sensitive period. The younger you are, the easier it is to pick up a second language, but there is nothing stopping an adult from learning a second language.