For over a hundred years, experts have said that the errors children make while learning to talk are what cause languages to change over time. This idea started with linguists like Henry Sweet in the 1800s, who claimed that if kids learned languages perfectly, languages would stay the same. This view has spread to psychology and even to everyday people. Many believe that children's mistakes plant the seeds for new ways of speaking that spread through groups.
A new paper published in Psychological Review, however, says this belief is wrong. In the paper, researchers at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics argue that language change over generations does not come from children's learning errors. Instead, the real driver is how people use language in daily conversations, especially among teens and young adults. These older speakers adapt words, create new ones, and interact in ways that let changes stick.
The role of everyday language use
The paper explains that small children's mistakes, like saying "goed" instead of "went," usually disappear as they grow up. Kids also lack the social influence needed for others to copy them. Social influence means the power to affect how people act or speak. In contrast, teens and adults have more authority and creativity in talks, so their innovations can spread. Innovation here means making small new changes in language.
The authors review old arguments for the child-driven idea and find weak proof that errors from early learning spread widely. They point to real-life examples where changes start in adult groups, like slang from youth cultures.
The paper corrects a common public myth and calls for researchers to check facts more carefully, even if ideas are old. It suggests focusing less on child errors and more on social, historical, and interactive factors. These include how people talk in groups, past events shaping language, and daily exchanges. By doing this, experts can better understand why languages evolve. Overall, the study urges the field to value social settings over just inborn thinking patterns when studying change.