The Importance Of Language Acquisition

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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

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