Blank-slate as compared to most other mammals, who are often born with knowledge of how to walk, feed, or even hunt. These skills usually come pretty quickly, most mammals have their young on their own within a year. Humans can’t even walk for a year. Many other mammals walk on their first day.

We also have case studies that if humans are not taught language then they won’t, and can’t, speak. Genie comes to mind.

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win311fwg 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Genie could't speak because she was deprived of exposure to normal human interaction, not because of lack of being taught. It is apparent you've never been around a child because otherwise you'd have quickly recnoized that most of them do speak before anyone tries to teach them how.

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preg_match 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I’ve obviously been around children, and I do qualify speaking to children as “teaching them how to speak”.

If you speak math problems to your child you are… wait for it… teaching them arithmetic. That’s what teaching is.

Arithmetic is not something that just naturally exists in the world, it’s a purely human construct. It does have to be taught in one way or another, otherwise people won’t know it. And, unlike language, I seriously doubt parents are just speaking arithmetic randomly in conversation that often. Your kid most definitely will not just “pick up” arithmetic.

In fact, I doubt a kid would even pick up language if you never spoke to them directly, and instead they just heard bits in passing between adults.

	▲	win311fwg 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> If you speak math problems to your child you are… wait for it… teaching them arithmetic. That’s what teaching is. Exposure to something and being taught something are usually recognized as being quite different, but it is clear now that you just want to play a game of semantics, so we can put and end to that. > I doubt a kid would even pick up language if you never spoke to them directly, and instead they just heard bits in passing between adults. Kids not being able pick up on language by listening to a recording of adults speaking about some random thing is supported by the research so there is likely some validity to the latter half of your claim, with some assumptions about what you mean about "heard in passing", but the research also strongly suggests that kids can pick up on language if those adults are surrounded by additional context. For example, if adults in the same room were talking about a visible object in front of them then the research suggests that the child would be able to pick up the language even when not directly spoken to. Why do you doubt the research?