This written report has the purpose of informing students in a Health and Human Development class how a child acquires language. In this report, I will discuss the major theories of child language acquisition, identify the developmental stages of language acquisition and explore changes in the functions of language as a child transitions from babyhood to early adolescence.
Major theories of Language Acqusition
Many linguists have developed theories on how a child acquires language. However, none of these theories fully explains how this process occurs. All proposed theories will commonly fall into two main categories- Nature or Nurture. Nature refers to the innate ability babies are born with which allows the baby to acquire a language. We are biologically programmed to learn a language. Whereas, Nurture theories supports the belief that the environmental factors are what allow the baby to acquire language.
Below are the 4 main theories on Language Acquisition:
Nature:
The Nativist approach
The Nativist approach by Noam Chomsky, an American linguist believes that children are born with the innate capacity to process and learn language. Children are programmed or wired to make sense of words and utterances after being exposed to language in its surroundings. An innate feature, named LAD (Language Acquisition device) is responsible for the quick development of language acquisition in a child. Chomsky believes that all humans are born with a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in our brains which enables children to distinguish language more proficiently, and also provides children with innate understanding of underlying grammatical rules of their native language.
Examples to support Noam Chomsk...
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...bject] or combinations of three and four words. Inflections and suffixes are used more frequently .They start to use suffixes such as ‘-ed’, but most will be overused before standardization occurs. For example, stole is said to be stealed. They also learn to incorporate auxiliary verbs and modal auxiliaries at the age of 3 such as ‘little pigs always having fun’. They are more active in engaging in discourse and also start to amend their mistakes after being corrected by an adult. Children’s speech development improves drastically at this stage as their grammar becomes more consistent along with longer utterances containing more sophisticated lexemes
Beyond the age of three, the child continues to broaden their range of lexicons and begins to use increasingly complex structures and lexemes in their sentence which enables them to engage in discourse more fluently.
The process of collecting the data and analyzing it helped me in understanding how children develop their language. Children come up with novel terms all the time, but this is my first time to examine the development of rules such as plural making. I noticed that children’s language is complicated. They can learn rules inductively in such young age. Then, they start to apply these rules in almost all cases. Children’s language is truly remarkable.
18-22 months a two-word stage. 22-36 months the child is learning word modifications and rules for sentences. Age 3-7 or 8 years old mastering ASL
When most people think of the process of language development in “normal” children, the concepts that come to mind are of babies imitating, picking up sounds and words from the speakers around them. Trying to imagine that a child who cannot hear one single sound a person makes can learn to speak a language is absolutely fascinating. These children range from amazin...
This essay is about a child’s development and learning, focusing primarily on language development. It will describe the main stages of developmental "milestones" and the key concepts involved for children to develop their language skills, discussing language acquisition and social learning theory. The essay will also look into the key theorists involved in language development, primarily Vygotsky and Chomsky, and how these theories have had an impact on the way society views language and their implementation within schools. The essay will describe the factors affecting language development, both biological and environmental. While also discussing key arguments among theorists, one being the nature vs nurture debate, and how these play a part in the teaching in schools.
When infants are acquiring their first language, adults speak to them differently than they would speak to other adults. This kind of speech is formally named “Infant-Directed speech”, but is also referred to as “baby talk” and “motherese”. Infant-Directed (ID) speech has several properties that distinguish it from Adult-Directed (AD) speech. There is a debate over whether or not ID speech helps infants acquire language or is a hindrance in their language acquisition process Several experiments have been performed to test the effect of ID speech on infants’ language learning. These experiments all used different properties of ID speech. Overall, the experiments have proved that ID speech helps infants acquire language better than AD speech for different reasons. Further studies can be performed on ID speech to learn more about its effects on second language acquisition and on different ages.
According to Strickland (2001) language development is “The process by which children acquire their first language in early childhood.” As human beings we all have the capacity to develop language, whether we develop oral language, sign language, body language, etc. All these language systems help us to communicate, express our feelings, needs and thoughts. Exist many theories that suggest stages for the develop of language, one popular theory is from the Psychologist Jean Piaget, in his theory he suggests four stages of cognitive development, stating that in the Preoperational stage, by the age of seven years old ,children will develop language. Language is a cognitive process in which children start developing language by repeating what
Firstly, Language development is one of the major cognitive milestones achieved during childhood. At the age of three, there is an explosion of vocabulary development during this period.
Chomsky and Skinner and Theories Of Language Development Many psychologists have studied and researched into how we acquire language. Some have concluded that the ability to learn language is a genetically inherited skill. Others believe that language is learned following birth and is due to environmental factors. This is part of the nature vs. nurture debate.
Nativism is the belief that some of our abilities are within us from birth (innate) built into our brains and that these structures help us to acquire knowledge. For example colour preference or moral values could be deemed as “native” or even language which is looked at as being instinctual and hardwired into our brains. Nativists such as Noam Chomsky who is the most well-known theorist on nativism also believes linguistics is an innate characteristic. He believed that we are born with a “built-in template” as such, for language, and that this “template” would be the foundation for which all language is developed. His studies of children brought him to this conclusion as he discovered they learnt new languages very
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.
How do children acquire language? What are the processes of language acquisition? How do infants respond to speech? Language acquisition is the process of learning a native or a second language. Although how children learn to speak is not perfectly understood, most explanations involve both the observations that children copy what they hear and the inference that human beings have a natural aptitude for understanding grammar. Children usually learn the sounds and vocabulary of their native language through imitation, (which helps them learn to pronounce words correctly), and grammar is seldom taught to them, but instead that they rapidly acquire the ability to speak grammatically. Though, not all children learn by imitation alone. Children will produce forms of language that adults never say. For example, “I spilled milk on hisself” or “Debbie wants a cookie”. This demonstrates that children have the desire to speak correctly and have self-motivating traits to communicate. This supports the theory of Noam Chomsky (1972)-that children are able to learn grammar of a particular language because all intelligible languages are founded on a deep structure of universal grammatical rules that corresponds to an innate capacity of the human brain. Adults learning a second language pass through some of the same stages, as do children learning their native language. In the first part of this paper I will describe the process of language acquisition. The second part will review how infants respond to speech.
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.
Language acquisition is perhaps one of the most debated issues of human development. Various theories and approaches have emerged over the years to study and analyse this developmental process. One factor contributing to the differing theories is the debate between nature v’s nurture. A question commonly asked is: Do humans a...
Further in this term-paper I am going to describe the stages in child language acquistion starting from the very birth of an infant till the onset of puberty.
Language is the basis of human communication. It is a cultural and social interaction, and the way language is used is influenced by the circumstances in which it takes place (Emmitt, 2010, p. 49; Green, 2006, p. 2). Children become aware that there are different types of language, including languages used at home, at childcare and at school, as they observe and participate in various language situations (Fellowes & Oakley, 2014, p. 39). Some of these languages may be unfamiliar, and children will need to learn the different roles and uses of language. The different roles of language in a child’s life are, therefore, part of their growing understanding of how to behave in society and in a particular context. As they experience different types and uses of language, children develop an understanding of how to use language appropriately for any given situation.