The Words You Think In

The memory board’s archive is where a vocabulary lives, and a known word fills one desk tray as a single chunk. This lesson is about how those words and their rules get into a child’s archive, when that gets hard, and whether the words then change what the owner sees.

Before you start. How Memory Works pictured memory as an office: a desk (working memory, what you are holding in mind right now) with about four trays, each holding one meaningful chunk, and an archive (long-term memory) where everything you know is filed. A word you know fills one tray as a single chunk. The Mind Being Built showed a child’s mind being built in stages, and How Psychology Knows What It Knows gave you the habit of asking whether a striking finding replicated, meaning whether it came out the same when someone else ran it again. Four of the findings here are disputed or did not replicate cleanly, and the lesson says which.

The idea in 30 seconds

In Nicaragua from the late 1970s, deaf children brought together in schools created a new sign language, and the grammatical rules came mainly from the children who arrived at 10 or younger.
The ability to learn a language’s grammar falls with age; a 2018 study of 669,498 people put the decline starting at about 17, though whether the drop is sharp or gradual is disputed.
Children who say “goed” are not copying anyone: they have found the “-ed” rule and applied it to an exception, and they do it more for verbs they have heard less often.
The strong claim that you cannot think what your language has no word for is wrong; the weak claim, that words make some differences quicker to notice, has some support and some failed replications.

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