I heard a statistician at a recent conference speak about an exam their organization is administering. He was fine with all the quantitative types of explanations. However, someone asked about students with ESL, and while his answers were quite authoritarian ("this is the way it is, dammit!"), I remained skeptical. He made these assertions:

1) Vocabulary development slows down significantly at age 17. This may be true. Does anyone know?

2) This seemed more dubious: Those with other languages have the most trouble with words that have an Anglo-Saxon etymology because they don't have their roots in Latin. Further (and this part I just didn't even get!), students with ESL especially have problems with short words and words about boats. Come again? Is there a shred of truth in this man's message?

BTW, he continually used the word "irregardless" which added to my skepticism!

None of those corresponds very closely with anything I know, though none is completely implausible and they might in fact all have some truth to them.

Of course our vocabulary acquisition slows down. When we're very young we get up to something absurd like ten new words a day, and we must slow down to a trickle once we get past the critical period in childhood. Possibly this goes as late as 17, though I would have guessed earlier, 13 or less. Language acquisition comes from childhood absorption, not from school study.

Well, for any two languages, if you have cognates in your own of course they're easier to acquire. European languages have a large common base of Latin/Greek words, and it doesn't require any effort to memorize these, only the way the morphologies correspond: -ation = -ation = -ación = -azione = -acão.

But I'm pretty sure when I first learnt French I didn't have any cognates in mind for livre, chien, and these are effectively just indivisible basic words that are learned as such, just like oui, donc, pourquoi; and all these are very very firmly in my mind now, just as much as or more so than the words I would 'invent' on the fly, like réputation.

And boats? Well nautical vocabulary is more than usually impenetrable even to us native speakers, luffing and forard and belay and... but only because we don't ever have occasion to use it up here on dry land. I can't see how that'd make it more difficult in any interesting way.

These seem to bear little relation to my experience as a language teacher.

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1) Vocabulary development slows down significantly at age 17. This may be true. Does anyone know?

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We stop learning new sounds quite early in childhood. Some people put as early as five, some even earlier. This doesn't mean we stop learning new words just that our repertoire of sounds has been wired in by then making it hard for Chinese speakers to separate "l" and "r", Somalis to separate "b" and "p" and me to separate the Spanish "r" and "rr".
It's true but trite that by our mid teens we slow down our vocabulary acquisition. This is because by then we have already learned almost all of the common vocabulary that we need. Specialist acquisition goes on throughout our lives (on this board rather quicker than elsewhere) but the figure of 17 seems arbitrary and the implication that we slow down because of some kind of intrinsic failing in ourselves seems unwarranted.

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Those with other languages have the _most_ trouble with words that have an Anglo-Saxon etymology because they don't have their roots in Latin.

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The Anglo-Saxon problem is interesting but again paints too narrow a picture. English has tens of thousands of words that aren't Anglo Saxon but don't have Latin or Greek roots and surely the same principle would apply to them - trek (Afrikaans), moccasin (American Indian), algebra (Arabic), ketchup (Chinese), robot (Czech), galore (Gaelic), ukulele (Hawaiian), kosher (Hebrew), thug (Hindu), tycoon (Japanese), amok (Malay), safari (Swahili) and on and on.

The difficulty isn't in the fact that they are Anglo Saxon it's in the fact that they aren't recognised as related to words in the learner's first language.

(In a lesson today the words "moss" and "fern" came up and one of my students recognised their meanings instantly. Both words are direct cognates to Bengali words. Bengali is his mother tongue.)

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Further (and this part I just didn't even get!), students with ESL especially have problems with short words

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Well yes and no. The short words they generally have difficulty with are "a", "the" and prepositions. This is just because languages use them in such a varying way. To compare, for example English and German. In German you need to have "the" in front of country names - "I live in the Switzerland" -which sounds ridiculous in English. As for prepositions that even varies from English speaking country to English speaking country. Do your kids play in the street or on the street? Do you visit people in hospital or in the hospital? The usage has to be learned on a case by case basis and that's always tricky.

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and words about boats.

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No more so than any other specialist vocabulary I'd have said. Words about microsurgery, words about electrical engineering, words about goldfish breeding, words about words will all be just as difficult or just as easy. For a skilled Arabian sailor words about boats would most likely come very easily because he already has the concepts in place. For someone who has never set foot on a boat the new concepts would need to be learned with the words.

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Those with other languages have the most trouble with words that have an Anglo-Saxon etymology because they don't have their roots in Latin.

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Presumably he is talking here only about students whose first language is one of the Romance languages? I would assume a German or Dutch speaker would have less trouble with those words.

As Bob has said, English has thousands of words that originated in other languages from across the globe. However, many of those words would have also been imported into their first language and would therefore be recognisable. Admittedly English "borrows" these words much more readily than do other languages; but "algebra", for instance, is almost the same in all the main European languages.

Sounds to me to be a classic case of "BBB".

Don't believe a word the man says; there is far more erudition on this board, that's for sure.

There is a related thread here where we've been discussing brain development. I'm afraid all my precise links to research are more narrow than this idea, but the concept is the same. Our brains develope unevenly. Because different clusters of cells are developing at different times, there will be windows of opportunity for learning different things. Language, speaking, reading - these things are best taught at younger ages, when the auditory, vocal and other language-related clusters are growing.

Some of this is difficult to really determine, however, because when kids begin school behind everyone else, the fall behind at astonishing levels. The most important factor in how children's language capacities develope is how much their primary care-giver speaks to them. Watching tv and just talking to other children won't do it!

Kids must speak with adults, and they must hear a variety of vocabulary to really learn. What's really important is that grown-ups get beyond "custodial" interractions with kids (clean your room, chew with your mouth closed, shut up I'm talkin on the phone) and talk about things beyond the care and maintenance of a child. Kids need to participate in higher linguistic experiences! This is just another reason why reading to children from birth is so important! (oh look, CW is on her soapbox again!) Reading is such a simple way to share a wide variety of language with children. Then, when they get to the difficult task of trying to read, they only need to learn to decode - they don't need to learn what all the words mean. My son could SAY micropachysephalasaurus LONG before he could decode it . . . in fact, knowing what the word was supposed to say helped him learn how to decode.

They've done studies showing the effects of a mother's linguistic interactions with her child, and how that aids or discourages language development. I lead you to the PLA (Public LIbrary Association) website for the scripts for parent training sessions on this topic - the power points are pretty good, if you have that software.

In the USA, illiteracy is now considered a national health emergency by the NICHD, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, an economic issue by the Federal Reserve, and of course a national education issue.

That said, Ima gonna go get a beer . . . nothing good, Richard, just some carbonated swill that's been in my fridge for a while.

Some folks think that word should be spelled micropachycephalosaurus.What do YOU think?

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What do YOU think?

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I can truthfully say I've never thought about it before now.

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Originally posted by jerry thomas:
Some folks think that word should be spelled __http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/dinos/de_4/5cc0671.htm.__What do YOU think?

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Ack! I've misspelled again!

Ack! I've misspelled again!

Must be all the overdue books.

Another way that I am constantly different from my profession's stereotype - I'M REALLY BAD WITH DETAILS!

I can truthfully say I've never thought about it before now.


When arnie makes one of those dry comments, I just crack up...partly because I look at that Churchill avatar, and it just fits perfectly with the post!

CW, I often make spelling errors myself (as the wordcrafters know). In fact, I did a limerick on OEDILF with the word "lept" that Bob caught for me. I knew it didn't look right!

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Originally posted by Kalleh:


When arnie makes one of those dry comments, I just crack up...partly because I look at that Churchill avatar, and it just fits perfectly with the post!

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How did we come to consider wry wit to be dry wit? Interesting, don't you think? Does that mean that there is wet humor? Moist humor? Sort of a humidification scale of humor?

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Originally posted by Caterwauller:



How did we come to consider wry wit to be dry wit? Interesting, don't you think? Does that mean that there is wet humor? Moist humor? Sort of a humidification scale of humor?

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Consider that the four classical humours were blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile - all WET! Some are runnier than others, soooo, it's my supposition that bilious humour would be drier than sanguine, and phlegmatic humour would be the driest of all.

I have always found people with phlegmatic temperments to have the driest senses of humor. Interestingly, most would class me as a Sanguine temperment . . . and yet I can have a very dry wit. SO unpredictable!

We've discussed this here before, but it seems that the Brits' humor is dryer than ours. I think that's one reason why I like them so much! I will sit and read some posts here and just giggle at the very dry humor. It is definitely my style, though I don't really have a dry humor.

But then there are some obvious and very famous Brits that aren't so dry - Benny Hill being the prime example.

I offer a hypothesis on "small words" comment.
The speaker misinterpreted the feedback. The difficulty may be with the "helping" words in English: "the home was to have been built..."

The challenge is not with understanding any individual word, but in getting the order to correspond to the case and tense.

One of my colleages found this radio interview with several neuro-scientists about brain development in infants, most of which relates to this original thread. Thought some of you might be interested.

Wow, that was interesting, CW. It seems that babies are born being able to learn any language (i.e. "babies of the world" they said), but by 6 months they start to specialize.

More support for the importance of talking to babies and young children!

Heck, now that my kids are older, I talk to my dog! She knows my inflections, for example, when I am mad at her and when I am happy. When I take her out, she knows the difference between "go potty" and "now go BM."

Makes me wonder how you talk to Shu!!!!!!!!

Well, he is quite the talker, too, so we definitely are competitive! Yet, I think he wins.