Language acquisition is the most important field in the study of Linguistics. If we could not acquire languages so easily, Linguists would not have a lot to study. Children learn language in the most amazing way – no matter the country, class, or ethnicity all children follow a similar patter of acquisition and normally have complete control of the language by puberty. Before Chomsky, language acquisition was not as well understood. Because of his ideas about the innateness of language and the potential for a critical period, linguists have spent the past decades studying infants and children trying to understand the language process. Research has shown that day old infants listen to and can even analyze language; and that this keeps getting stronger as they age. The fact that there are specific stages that all children have in common when they acquire a language shows that there is a obvious consistency to language acquisition. In addition the fact that children go through this process relatively easily, especially when compared to adults learning a second language, …show more content…
This stage normally begins when an child is about sixteen to twenty-four months, and the utterances in it are about two or three words.Telegraphic speech is characterized by including mostly verbs and nouns with very little use of function words like determiners, auxiliaries and prepositions. Examples of telegraphic speech could be as follows: “Andrew want that” “no sit there” and “ride truck”. (cite the book) In all of these examples the meaning of the utterance is clear, however the grammar is for the most part incorrect. The child does not know how to conjugate or negate verbs correctly. Overextension is also applied in telegraphic speech because a child can overextend patterns of verb conjugation. For example they might say *goed instead of went because they noticed a pattern of adding –ed to make verbs past
Over thousands of years language has evolved and continued to develop to what we know it as today. Throughout the years, it has been studied how we learn language and the benefits of learning it as well as the deficits of not learning it. While studying language it is important to consider the language acquisition device, language acquisition support system, and Infant-Directed and Adult-Directed Speech. Not only is it important to learn language in general, but there are specific sensitive periods in which a human must learn the language in order to obtain developmental milestones. The sensitive period is also crucial when learning a second language and can greatly affect the human when speaking that language. During the sensitive period while a child is learning language it is important that they learn the specifics about language structure and the aspects of language. Once the child has learned the aspects of language, they are also emerged into learning universal grammar. Lastly, the learning of language has influenced ontogeny and phylogeny in various ways. This influence will continue to arise as change occurs and humans and the world continue to develop and evolve.
The notion that there is empirical evidence to prove that humans have a critical period to acquire a language is, indeed, an ample fulfillment. This remarkable phenomena in which language acquisition takes part in is known as the critical period hypothesis. From the earliest incoherent babble to the utterance of a child’s first word, scientists have been able to unravel the mystery of understanding language acquisition. The critical period hypothesis originally came from linguist and neurologist, Eric Heinz Lenneberg. Linguists believe that language, in itself, has a critical component for learning. There is substantial proof for a critical period in language which stems from studies on bilinguals, deaf children who use sign language, and extreme cases of feral children like Victor and Genie that has shed light upon language acquisition.
The biological theoretical perspective comes from a man named Noam Chomsky. He believed that all children have a language acquisition device. This is defined in the book as “a biological endowment enabling the child to detect the features and rules of language, including phonology, syntax, and semantics”. The evidence found was that throughout cultures, children tend to have the same language milestones. Most begin at age two to four months by cooing and develop at 13 months with their first words.
- As I was baby-sitting young children, I realised that the child was using telegraphic speech [short grammatically incorrect sentences (McDevvitt, T. Ormrod, J. Cupit, G. Chandler, M. Aloa, V.)]. She used telegraphic speech to state or demand for things in her surroundings such as ‘pretty bird’.
Child development language is a process by which children come to communicate and understand language during early childhood. This usually occurs from birth up to the age of five. The rate of development is usually fast during this period. However, the pace and age of language development vary greatly among children. Thus, the language development of a child is usually compared with norms rather than with other individual children. It is scientifically proven that development of girls language is usually at a faster rate than that of boys. (Berk, 2010) In other terms language development is also a crucial factor that reflects the growth and maturation of the brain. However, this development usually retards after the age of five making it very difficult for most children to continue learning language. There are two major types of language development in children. These include referential and expressive language development styles. In referential language development, children often first speak single words and then join the words together, first into –word sentences and then into th...
There are four aspects of language development: phonology, semantics, grammar, and pragmatics. During the first two years of a child’s life, great strides in language development are made. Infants between birth and six months begin making sounds that start with reflexive verbalizations like crying because of distress and transitioning to cooing during social interactions. After the cooing stage, vocalizations to transition into babbling. Babbling is the repetitive vocalizations of consonants and vowels, like “dada.” Babbling lasts through the twelfth month, and jargon begins to take its place. Jargon, per Bjorklund and Hernandez Blasi, is “strings of sound filled with a variety of intonations and rhythms to sound like meaningful speech” (Bjorklund & Hernandez Blasi, 2012). During the nineteen to twenty-four-month stage, children can learn many new words and possess the knowledge of anywhere between ten and twenty
Chomsky (1968) suggests that children are born with an innate specialised mechanism in their brains (Language Acquisition Device) that allows them to identify the structure-dependence of a language and to be able to use these structures efficie...
Children will then start to produce two-word utterance around two years of age. The first utterance of the sentence usually begin start with the child's earlier holophrastic utterance, children begin to form actually two-word utterance with clear syntactic and semantic relations, each word has it own contour. During this period, t...
Language is a multifaceted instrument used to communicate an unbelievable number of different things. Primary categories are information, direction, emotion, and ceremony. While information and direction define cognitive meaning, emotion language expresses emotional meaning. Ceremonial language is mostly engaged with emotions but at some level information and direction collection may be used to define a deeper meaning and purpose. There is perhaps nothing more amazing than the surfacing of language in children. Children go through a number of different stages as language develops. According to Craig and Dunn, (2010), “Even before birth, it appears that infants are prepared to respond to and learn language” (p. 112). Children develop these skills quickly with nature and nurture influences. Researchers have proposed several different theories to explain how and why language development occurs. This paper is an overview of the process of early childhood language development with research evidence supporting the information stated.
“The development of representational thought provides the means for children to understand that words can stand for people, objects, actions, places, feelings, and ideas” (Nicolson & Shipstead, 1998, p. 28). At this age a child’s language is expended to the point that he/she is able to communicate his/her desired or ideas, rather than pointing toward an object or saying separate words in order for their caregiver to understand what he/she wants. Child’s language ability is increasing rapidly at this age, by talking to his/her parents, siblings or peers. Even Though child knows many words and can talk in a sentence, their pronunciation and grammar is yet to come. “Proponents argue that children’s mental representations of words closely resemble adult surface forms, in contrast to their pronunciation which is characterized by errors that are governed by rules that change during phonological acquisition” (Dodd & Mcintosh, 2009, p.1028). The pronunciation is acquiring through child’s practice by talking to parents and peers. Also, child is not able to apply grammar to their language, rather they learn as they hear how other people use the language and repeat after them but maybe switching words around or missing some of them as they
Typically, the first year of a child’s life focuses on motor skills. It is not until the second year, that language development begins to take the main focus on the child’s life. Language is an innate feature that we are all born with, however if a child’s environment is not a loving, positive, safe or happy environment, the development of language may become flawed or disrupted (Shiver, 2016). For this reason, it is essential to provide children with an environment they can trust, and feel safe and secure. This process can be referred to as the nature nurture theory. Research shows us that there are windows of opportunity throughout one’s life to be able to acquire and develop language. The development of syntax and grammar takes place during the preschool years and can end at ages five to six (Shiver, 2016). However, in saying this, the ability to learn new words is always possible and for this reason, new words can be learnt all throughout life. Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, has been extremely influential in the studies of child development. Piaget claimed that there are four stages where children can cognitively function. His studies show that children are born into the Sensorimotor Stage. This stage lasts until the child is around two years old. It is towards the end of this stage that the development of language starts becoming the focus of the child’s life, and up until the age of two, the acquired language is basically cooing or other sounds made by the mouth, until the age of two where language can consist of basic words or sentences. The child’s acquired language is mimicked and copied from their parents and those around them, learning the sound patterns of words and conversations and also the skill of taking turns, which is essential for conversation (Shiver, 2016). The next stage of development defined by Piaget is the Preoperational Stage. This stage lasts
There are three main theories of child language acquisition; Cognitive Theory, Imitation and Positive Reinforcement, and Innateness of Certain Linguistic Features (Linguistics 201). All three theories offer a substantial amount of proof and experiments, but none of them have been proven entirely correct. The search for how children acquire their native language in such a short period of time has been studied for many centuries. In a changing world, it is difficult to pinpoint any definite specifics of language because of the diversity and modification throughout thousands of millions of years.
Still today, it is the commonly held belief that children acquire their mother tongue through imitation of the parents, caregivers or the people in their environment. Linguists too had the same conviction until 1957, when a then relatively unknown man, A. Noam Chomsky, propounded his theory that the capacity to acquire language is in fact innate. This revolutionized the study of language acquisition, and after a brief period of controversy upon the publication of his book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, in 1964, his theories are now generally accepted as largely true. As a consequence, he was responsible for the emergence of a new field during the 1960s, Developmental Psycholinguistics, which deals with children’s first language acquisition. He was not the first to question our hitherto mute acceptance of a debatable concept – long before, Plato wondered how children could possibly acquire so complex a skill as language with so little experience of life. Experiments have clearly identified an ability to discern syntactical nuances in very young infants, although they are still at the pre-linguistic stage. Children of three, however, are able to manipulate very complicated syntactical sentences, although they are unable to tie their own shoelaces, for example. Indeed, language is not a skill such as many others, like learning to drive or perform mathematical operations – it cannot be taught as such in these early stages. Rather, it is the acquisition of language which fascinates linguists today, and how it is possible. Noam Chomsky turned the world’s eyes to this enigmatic question at a time when it was assumed to have a deceptively simple explanation.
Language is crucial to young children’s development; it is essential for learning and communicating with others. Children learn most effectively through being involved in rich experiences and practical activities promoted through play, and adults need to join this play talking with and listening to them. There have been several theories about how young children acquire language. Some argued that the environment is an important factor, while others state that language is innate and that environment has a minor role in shaping knowledge.
The subtlety of language acquisition has been the most fundamental question in the study of linguistics and human development. From Bow-wow Theory to Yo-He-Ho Theory, the major theories on language origins and learnability emerged at mid-20th century and has been heavily debated ever since. Among them, the idea of universal grammar in which is usually credited to linguist Noam Chomsky, remains the most notable and controversial theory over time. He introduced and developed the t heory from 1950s to 1970s as he proposed and championed linguistic nativism in language acquisition. Chomsky supports that language mastery involves knowledge of linguistic rules and conventions, which he later named that as ‘cognizance’. He believes that cognizance is present in some particular regions in human’s brain where it inherently contributes to the acquisition and usage of language. Such language faculty is the initial root of all linguistic grammatical rules and principles; it is the mental archetype of all languages. To begin with, Chomsky chooses to focus on children’s acquisition of language because children have the least pre-existing knowledge of language compared to adults. Children in this case are the primal study in the innateness of language. By looking into children’s interaction in language acquisition, Chomsky reasons his arguments with “primary linguistic data” where Primary linguistic data is the first-ever language experience in childhood. This learning experience simultaneously interacts and activates the initial cognizance of children, resulting to one’s linguistic knowledge from the exposed language. It is the crucial knowledge for the comprehension of speech and language. By studying children’s language acquisition, it is irr...