Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work in linguistics has earned him the Kyoto Prize and the Helmholtz Medal. He writes and lectures widely on philosophy, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy.It does appear that young children have a much richer capacity to develop and to acquire many languages simultaneously than adults have.
The primary assumption goes back to Eric Lenneberg, who founded the contemporary field of biology of language. His thesis–which was pretty much everyone’s–was that language development was like other forms of growth and development. Almost invariably, growth and development has what’s called a critical period. There’s a particular period of maturation in which, with external stimulation of the appropriate kind, the capacity will pretty suddenly develop and mature. Before that and later than that, it’s either harder or impossible.
There’s a critical period of human maturation during which the visual system develops binocular vision under normal circumstances–under deprivation, it won’t. But I think at roughly 4 months of age, roughly, under normal stimulation, binocular vision will develop.
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