surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
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.
Rates of neurogenesis and synaptic pruning.
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).
Yes, but I was talking about the oft-repeated canard that adults find it harder to learn a second language than a child. Going by time taken, adults have it significantly easier.
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.
I don't think you can generalize "the linguistic environment that children encounter" that way— and although it's not quantifiable evidence, I think it's telling that children everywhere grow up to speak a perfect copy of the dialect that their peers speak, regardless of how much personal attention they get in learning their first language.
If they don't pick it up from parents, they'll pick it up from peers who speak the watered-down baby language because it's all they know.
If they don't have access to peers and their parents neglect them seriously, they don't learn it at all, even though they do hear SOME language from their parents.
Unless the parents are completely neglectful, kids get hours and hours every day for many years of exposure to people talking and parents ALWAYS use simplified language to respond and correct their children's errors so yes, you can generalise the environment they encounter because it's bloody similar between families and across cultures.
I'm sure it's true that kids have a harder time learning a first language the older they are. But is it easier for them to learn a first language than for an adult to learn a second? Kids spend years of total immersion before really picking up on the basics.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited February 2010
Teaching someone how to say a sentence properly is quite different from telling them why it is correct and explaining the grammatical rules behind it. The first is rote learning, literally repetition. The second is explicit learning.
Young children usually don't receive the second, they do often receive the first. But children will extrapolate from the rote learning baby talk and learn the grammatical rules underlying what they are learning. Hence they come up with new sentences that they were not taught how to say.
Either children are absolute geniuses or there's something unique going on at a certain period of development that enables them to do this. They certainly can't tell you how they know to say it correctly. If they were doing focused, explicit study behind the scenes, they'd be able to tell you why.
All I meant by hard is the difference in focused cognition involved. Cognition is effortful. Focusing on something takes effort. Directed study takes effort and a level of cognitive ability children do not have.
Time taken, speed of acquisition, all of that isn't what I meant by hard. I simply meant they can pick it up in a manner that is not entirely correlated with their ability to apply effortful cognition to a task. If I meant speed I would have said speed.
If it makes anyone happier, I'll say it: Adults are faster if they apply the appropriate level of effort to the task.
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Children learn general grammatical rules, sure. They also learn general physical laws, even earlier than they learn grammar. They learn cause-and-effect very early and are surprised by a box moving without a push at under a year of age. They expect things to fall, indicating knowledge of gravity, before they say their first words. Does that mean that there is a mechanism underlying that to facilitate the learning of physical laws, the way people say there is an underlying, innate universal grammar or a particular grammar-learning mechanism? Of course not. It just means we're good at pattern recognition.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
I wonder what the DSM says about anti-social personality disorders.
The recent events at UA-B got me thinking on that, and with as many people with personality disorders I see in my work, I'm kind of leaning toward treating and diagnosing these disorders much more stronger than we have in the past.
Typically, society's default attitude toward anti-social types was to give them space and let them express themselves. Yet now we see that being given space is often misconstrued by them as abandonment and ostracization, and their forms of self-expression often take the shape of violent outbursts.
There's so much projection and reflection and self-loathing associated with anti-socials, it seems like it's in society's best interest to get them some real help.
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.
What happened to you then, if you don't mind my asking?
Only i'm on antidepressants right now, prescribed by a GP, and I'm wondering if your situation has any relevance to mine.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
As someone that once suffered from a long-ish bout of situational depression, may I ask what you chronic depression sufferers think about your situation? Specifically, about changing it?
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
and their forms of self-expression often take the shape of violent outbursts.
And that studies of "Venting therapy" have shown they don't decrease aggressive behaviour - they increase it. Bottling up your anger actually results in less aggression, even in the long run!
surrealitycheck on
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
and their forms of self-expression often take the shape of violent outbursts.
And that studies of "Venting therapy" have shown they don't decrease aggressive behaviour - they increase it. Bottling up your anger actually results in less aggression, even in the long run!
It seems that encouraging "venting" condones releasing negative expressions of energy. I've always been skeptical of those against "bottling things up." "Bottling things up" usually is just a stupid way of saying "internalizing conflict," which is something we all should try to do. Then, cooler heads prevail and civil discourse happens.
However, it should be noted that I have an extremely low tolerance for people with a low threshold on the restraint of their own emotions.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
However, it should be noted that I have an extremely low tolerance for people with a low threshold on the restraint of their own emotions.
When people get angry in front of me I just find it embarassing, like they've suddenly started crying for a bottle. The most pathetic sight in the world is a grown adult losing their temper.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
However, it should be noted that I have an extremely low tolerance for people with a low threshold on the restraint of their own emotions.
When people get angry in front of me I just find it embarassing, like they've suddenly started crying for a bottle. The most pathetic sight in the world is a grown adult losing their temper.
For me, it's not just when people get angry. I find people more often are quite eager to display wholly unaware expressions of sentimentalism or perceived emotional depth with little regard to their own self or those around them. Even more so, when this occurs, those in question seem to think this singles them out as being especially superior people.
Just look for anyone who thinks Evanescence makes profoundly inspirational music, or has any article of clothing with Biblical scripture on it.
By and large, unchecked emotional responses are the harbinger of bad personal choices to come.
I wonder what the DSM says about anti-social personality disorders.
The recent events at UA-B got me thinking on that, and with as many people with personality disorders I see in my work, I'm kind of leaning toward treating and diagnosing these disorders much more stronger than we have in the past.
Typically, society's default attitude toward anti-social types was to give them space and let them express themselves. Yet now we see that being given space is often misconstrued by them as abandonment and ostracization, and their forms of self-expression often take the shape of violent outbursts.
There's so much projection and reflection and self-loathing associated with anti-socials, it seems like it's in society's best interest to get them some real help.
It basically says that they are untreatable. Personality disorders are nearly untreatable, period. It is just SO difficult to change someone's personality outright.
What is the evidence in favor of a neurological critical period of language development in children?
If I recall correctly there's no direct evidence for a critical period of language development - no-one has been able to find anything specific in the brain that matures and directly causes the ability to pick up language. As mentioned however severe neglect (as is the case in feral children) will cause a general lack of development in the brain, which will affect overall cognitive development and also how we pick up language.
Timetables for neural developmental events cannot be mapped onto how we acquire and produce language. However you might talk about sensitive periods for language learning - simply because of the overall maturation of neural systems that children go through (paraphrased from a chapter in a book on language development).
Some psychologists (most notably Michael Tomasello) argue that there are several milestones in language learning - mostly from around 8-10 months - because children go through a so-called 'cognitive revolution' in that they are now able to understand others as intentional beings, thus making them able to share attention with others, which is the first step of acquiring language.
Children learn general grammatical rules, sure. They also learn general physical laws, even earlier than they learn grammar. They learn cause-and-effect very early and are surprised by a box moving without a push at under a year of age. They expect things to fall, indicating knowledge of gravity, before they say their first words. Does that mean that there is a mechanism underlying that to facilitate the learning of physical laws, the way people say there is an underlying, innate universal grammar or a particular grammar-learning mechanism? Of course not. It just means we're good at pattern recognition.
Just to play the devil's advocate on this, isn't most of the evidence of children's understanding of cause-and-effect et al. mainly based on a rather weak research paradigm? Preferential looking task has its strengths, but certainly also its weaknesses. When it comes to physical laws, how are you even to say that our innate understanding of it doesn't come from the general maturation of the brain on its own (this isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely interested!).
OK, we'll ignore those studies and just look at them by the time they've learned to talk. They've STILL learned cause and effect, gravity and a bunch of other laws without being explicitly taught them.
Understanding of physical laws certainly comes with development and increased cognitive abilities, but I don't think that there is a particular mechanism designed for learning them, the way some people claim there is a genetically-coded universal grammar or at least a grammar-learning mechanism. It just isn't needed. Pattern recognition and years of exposure are a sufficient explanation.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
It basically says that they are untreatable. Personality disorders are nearly untreatable, period. It is just SO difficult to change someone's personality outright.
I think it would at least be better to get a head start on either getting these people the therapy they need or to usher them into a place where their behavior could be monitored. At the very least, more thorough diagnostic work could keep these people disqualified from holding certain jobs or buying firearms.
It basically says that they are untreatable. Personality disorders are nearly untreatable, period. It is just SO difficult to change someone's personality outright.
That's a pretty big generalization.
The personality disorder I know the most about is borderline, and that certainly is treatable. There's a subset of cognitive therapy called dialectical behavior therapy that, in combination with antidepressants, is effective at treating borderline.
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.
If that's true, they've made significant advances since I last studied abnormal psych, which was a few years ago.
Personality disorders are hard to treat because they encompass so much about the person and how the interact with the world. You don't just need to alter one behaviour or one thought pattern, you need to alter everything.
psyck0 on
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited February 2010
They're also ego syntonic rather than say schitzophrenia which is ego dystonic.
I hope I got that first term right. It's the opposite of dystonic. :P
Anyway the point is people treat their personality as a part of themselves and attempt to change it as attacks that they get defensive about.
That is the major roadblock to personality change. Most people could change their personality quite a lot were they willing to put in the effort. There's nothing truly set about a personality. You could probably conceivably overcome genetic influences if you worked hard enough and consistently enough at it. Plasticity is an amazing thing.
Also I wanted to say I appreciate the input by people more knowledgeable about the specifics of language than I. It prompted me to look more deeply into what I was talking about and I learnt some new stuff I didn't know. It seems what I knew was out of date since I haven't done any more specialised study of language yet.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
If you want to read about language development, read Steven Pinker. Chomsky talks about the linguistics side nicely but he's no psychologist. Pinker is a world-famous cognitive psychologist with several books. I disagree with his conclusion that we are innately predisposed to learn language (at least, no more than we are predisposed to learn to dance or use tools or anything else- we're just predisposed to learn) but his books, particularly The Language Instinct, are excellent.
Posts
Rates of neurogenesis and synaptic pruning.
Yes, but I was talking about the oft-repeated canard that adults find it harder to learn a second language than a child. Going by time taken, adults have it significantly easier.
I don't think you can generalize "the linguistic environment that children encounter" that way— and although it's not quantifiable evidence, I think it's telling that children everywhere grow up to speak a perfect copy of the dialect that their peers speak, regardless of how much personal attention they get in learning their first language.
If they don't have access to peers and their parents neglect them seriously, they don't learn it at all, even though they do hear SOME language from their parents.
Unless the parents are completely neglectful, kids get hours and hours every day for many years of exposure to people talking and parents ALWAYS use simplified language to respond and correct their children's errors so yes, you can generalise the environment they encounter because it's bloody similar between families and across cultures.
Young children usually don't receive the second, they do often receive the first. But children will extrapolate from the rote learning baby talk and learn the grammatical rules underlying what they are learning. Hence they come up with new sentences that they were not taught how to say.
Either children are absolute geniuses or there's something unique going on at a certain period of development that enables them to do this. They certainly can't tell you how they know to say it correctly. If they were doing focused, explicit study behind the scenes, they'd be able to tell you why.
All I meant by hard is the difference in focused cognition involved. Cognition is effortful. Focusing on something takes effort. Directed study takes effort and a level of cognitive ability children do not have.
Time taken, speed of acquisition, all of that isn't what I meant by hard. I simply meant they can pick it up in a manner that is not entirely correlated with their ability to apply effortful cognition to a task. If I meant speed I would have said speed.
If it makes anyone happier, I'll say it: Adults are faster if they apply the appropriate level of effort to the task.
The recent events at UA-B got me thinking on that, and with as many people with personality disorders I see in my work, I'm kind of leaning toward treating and diagnosing these disorders much more stronger than we have in the past.
Typically, society's default attitude toward anti-social types was to give them space and let them express themselves. Yet now we see that being given space is often misconstrued by them as abandonment and ostracization, and their forms of self-expression often take the shape of violent outbursts.
There's so much projection and reflection and self-loathing associated with anti-socials, it seems like it's in society's best interest to get them some real help.
What happened to you then, if you don't mind my asking?
Only i'm on antidepressants right now, prescribed by a GP, and I'm wondering if your situation has any relevance to mine.
And that studies of "Venting therapy" have shown they don't decrease aggressive behaviour - they increase it. Bottling up your anger actually results in less aggression, even in the long run!
It seems that encouraging "venting" condones releasing negative expressions of energy. I've always been skeptical of those against "bottling things up." "Bottling things up" usually is just a stupid way of saying "internalizing conflict," which is something we all should try to do. Then, cooler heads prevail and civil discourse happens.
However, it should be noted that I have an extremely low tolerance for people with a low threshold on the restraint of their own emotions.
When people get angry in front of me I just find it embarassing, like they've suddenly started crying for a bottle. The most pathetic sight in the world is a grown adult losing their temper.
For me, it's not just when people get angry. I find people more often are quite eager to display wholly unaware expressions of sentimentalism or perceived emotional depth with little regard to their own self or those around them. Even more so, when this occurs, those in question seem to think this singles them out as being especially superior people.
Just look for anyone who thinks Evanescence makes profoundly inspirational music, or has any article of clothing with Biblical scripture on it.
By and large, unchecked emotional responses are the harbinger of bad personal choices to come.
It basically says that they are untreatable. Personality disorders are nearly untreatable, period. It is just SO difficult to change someone's personality outright.
If I recall correctly there's no direct evidence for a critical period of language development - no-one has been able to find anything specific in the brain that matures and directly causes the ability to pick up language. As mentioned however severe neglect (as is the case in feral children) will cause a general lack of development in the brain, which will affect overall cognitive development and also how we pick up language.
Timetables for neural developmental events cannot be mapped onto how we acquire and produce language. However you might talk about sensitive periods for language learning - simply because of the overall maturation of neural systems that children go through (paraphrased from a chapter in a book on language development).
Some psychologists (most notably Michael Tomasello) argue that there are several milestones in language learning - mostly from around 8-10 months - because children go through a so-called 'cognitive revolution' in that they are now able to understand others as intentional beings, thus making them able to share attention with others, which is the first step of acquiring language.
Hope this helped somewhat.
Just to play the devil's advocate on this, isn't most of the evidence of children's understanding of cause-and-effect et al. mainly based on a rather weak research paradigm? Preferential looking task has its strengths, but certainly also its weaknesses. When it comes to physical laws, how are you even to say that our innate understanding of it doesn't come from the general maturation of the brain on its own (this isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely interested!).
Understanding of physical laws certainly comes with development and increased cognitive abilities, but I don't think that there is a particular mechanism designed for learning them, the way some people claim there is a genetically-coded universal grammar or at least a grammar-learning mechanism. It just isn't needed. Pattern recognition and years of exposure are a sufficient explanation.
I think it would at least be better to get a head start on either getting these people the therapy they need or to usher them into a place where their behavior could be monitored. At the very least, more thorough diagnostic work could keep these people disqualified from holding certain jobs or buying firearms.
That's a pretty big generalization.
The personality disorder I know the most about is borderline, and that certainly is treatable. There's a subset of cognitive therapy called dialectical behavior therapy that, in combination with antidepressants, is effective at treating borderline.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Personality disorders are hard to treat because they encompass so much about the person and how the interact with the world. You don't just need to alter one behaviour or one thought pattern, you need to alter everything.
I hope I got that first term right. It's the opposite of dystonic. :P
Anyway the point is people treat their personality as a part of themselves and attempt to change it as attacks that they get defensive about.
That is the major roadblock to personality change. Most people could change their personality quite a lot were they willing to put in the effort. There's nothing truly set about a personality. You could probably conceivably overcome genetic influences if you worked hard enough and consistently enough at it. Plasticity is an amazing thing.
Also I wanted to say I appreciate the input by people more knowledgeable about the specifics of language than I. It prompted me to look more deeply into what I was talking about and I learnt some new stuff I didn't know. It seems what I knew was out of date since I haven't done any more specialised study of language yet.