Tilak Senasinghe
(Lanka-e-News -24.May.2026, 3.30 A.M. ) A friend of mine had recently sent me a video of a young child from our country, who does not have sufficient knowledge of English and has never set foot in America, speaking English with an American accent. However, since it was a video program lasting almost an hour, I did not have the opportunity to watch it. However, a few weeks later, I received another email from my friend. It said, "Do you even now accept that science cannot find solutions to everything?" Somehow, I was inspired to watch that video after that.
The fact that some young children speak foreign languages that are unfamiliar to them and that they have not previously learned systematically is a source of amazement to my friend and many people in today's society. Although attempts have been made to interpret such talents as divine gifts, miracles, or inherited traits, modern science has confirmed that this is a unique biological ability in the human brain. According to neuroscience, the brain's neuroplasticity (the brain's flexibility and high capacity to absorb new information) during childhood plays a significant role in this. Since this unique neural formation that affects multilingualism gradually decreases with age, the innate speed of learning new words and languages in young children from the age of language acquisition is very high compared to adults.
Two main regions function in the structure of the human brain to control linguistic behavior, and they are named after the scientists who first discovered them scientifically. The first is Broca's Area, which controls speech and language production, and the second is Wernicke's Area, which controls language comprehension. Modern brain scanning tests such as fMRI have revealed that children who are exposed to multiple languages at a young age have all of their languages stored in a shared neural network in Broca's area. However, when they learn a new language as adults, it is stored in a separate neural region. Therefore, learning an additional language as they get older requires a lot of effort, while it happens very naturally and naturally to children.
Explaining this process further, psychology points out that children's brains are like "sponges" that delicately absorb sounds and visual stimuli from the surrounding environment. Especially in the current digital age, children are constantly exposed to different accents of the English language through YouTube, TV cartoons or computer games. While adults deliberately learn grammar rules, children directly store and reproduce these sound patterns in their brains as if they were a language they know.
When looking at linguistic research, although there is no scientific evidence that all languages in the world originated from a common primary language (Proto-Human Language), the concept of "Universal Grammar" pointed out by the famous American linguist Noam Chomsky is also extremely important here. According to Chomsky, a human child is born with an innate biological tool that can understand the structure of any language in the world, which he has called the 'Language Acquisition Device' (LAD). Accordingly, instead of studying grammar books and rules, young children quickly and automatically identify the structural rules of the relevant language through this innate tool in their brain, using the sound stimuli (Exposure) they hear from their environment or through current digital media.
But there is another point that deserves special attention here. That is, whether the unknown language that these children speak is 100% correct. When speaking an unknown language, many people use fake, meaningless, or made-up words instead of words they do not remember or do not know. There are several specific terms in linguistics and psychology to describe this process. One of them is a neologism, which is when someone suddenly creates and uses a completely new, fake word that does not actually exist in the language to express the idea they want. Especially in the early stages of learning a foreign language, many people unknowingly combine the sounds they know and produce such words.
It is called 'Foreignizing / Borrowing', which is the use of a fake foreign word according to the pronunciation of the other language spoken. In today's society, some people have also heard of using 'Aniva' instead of the English words " definitely, " " absolutely, " or " for sure when speaking in English. It is a crude conversion of the Sinhala word 'Aniva' to English. But since a large number of people constantly say the word 'Aniva', which can be pronounced very easily, instead of these words, it can sneak into the English language without warning.
In addition, even if an unknown word is not replaced by a false word, trying to convey an idea by using another group of words or a description (paraphrasing) to fill in the gap in that word is called 'Circumlocution'. This is a communication strategy commonly used in language learning. Similarly, speaking a series of completely meaningless, false sounds and words rapidly to indicate that someone knows a language that they do not know at all, or to cover up a gap in that language, is called 'Jargon' or 'Gibberish'.
In addition, there is also talk in society about the phenomenon of speaking a language that has never been learned, known in psychological research as Xenoglossy. Although often interpreted in religious or spiritual circles as memories of a previous life, scientific examination shows that the vast majority of these are either gibberish or fragments of language that arise from hearing the aforementioned gibberish or hidden memories that the child has unknowingly absorbed from the environment (cryptomnesia).
The fact that young children speak foreign languages with no direct instruction is not a supernatural miracle or divine power. It is a beautiful combination of two scientific factors: the innate language acquisition device (LAD), an evolutionary gift of the human brain, and the neuroplasticity of the child's brain. Children who activate this neural system with the slightest stimulus from the external environment or the Internet amazingly master new languages, and it is more scientifically accurate to view it as a wonderful process in human biology rather than a miracle.
Accordingly, although analyzing emotional experiences such as love, kindness, and pleasure with science is a futile task, like finding the number of grams per kilometer, I would also like to address this note to my friend, stating that the above facts will be sufficient to accept that it is not a miracle for young children to speak a language they do not know.
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by (2026-05-24 11:04:14)
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