Children's Language Acquisition

8 Key excerpts on "Children's Language Acquisition"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Learning to Read and Write

  The Role of Language Acquisition and Aesthetic Development: A Resourcebook

  • Ellen J. Brooks(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 or use can be considered in terms of the effect of context upon the interaction (sending and receiving of messages). In a limited number of situations, routines for language use exist. For example, answering the telephone or greeting a friend on the street are situations where the rules for language use already exist. In the majority of our communicative encounters, we must establish our own rules, and we do so based upon the given context. The language behavior of an individual attending a party with a close circle of friends is likely to be quite different from the language behavior exhibited by that person when he is attending a business cocktail party and meeting new clients for the first time. In language acquisition, children must learn the syntactic and semantic rules of language, as well as how to use language in context.

  Finally, speech refers to the sound system which is made up of phonemes. Speech can be used to deliver verbal language, but this is not always the case. The young infant babbling in the crib most certainly exhibits speech, but this is not necessarily purposeful communication. Nor is it language because the speech sounds do not serve a symbolic function or represent a shared code.

  How Language Is Learned: Theories of Acquisition

  The process by which a child acquires language is, at the very least, remarkable. From all the varied input, the child learns a vast number of words as well as extensive rules about the grammaticality of sentence structure, all in an astonishingly short period of time. To add to this amazing feat of learning, the child also comes to grasp the contextual usage of language in his specific speech community with considerable ease.

  How do we account for this great amount of learning that is consolidated in such a short period of time? This is one of the central questions of language development research, and the literature represents different points of view.

  This issue is embedded within the nativist vs. behaviorist controversy. The behaviorist perspective, most often associated with B.F. Skinner (1957), views the child entering the world as a blank slate.3

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Cognitive Development and Cognitive Neuroscience

  The Learning Brain

  • Usha Goswami(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 6 Contents Phonological development Lexical development Grammatical development Pragmatic development Summary

  6

  Language acquisition

  KEY TERMS

  Language acquisition device (LAD)

  An innate neural mechanism, first suggested by Chomsky, with the special job of acquiring the language the infant encounters.

  Phonotactic patterns of language

  Speech sounds that make up language, and the order in which these speech sounds can be combined to make lawful words.

  So far in this book, we have considered cognitive development largely independently of language. This is not accidental. Language acquisition has traditionally been studied separately from cognition, and as we have seen in previous chapters, there is strong commitment to the idea that basic concepts are pre-verbal. Another reason for the traditional distinction between language and thought was that language acquisition seemed such a remarkable feat for the infant brain that it was assumed that special capacities must be at work. These capacities were thought to be distinct from the capacities underpinning broader cognitive development. For example, it was postulated that infants were born equipped with a ‘language acquisition device’ or LAD, which had the special job of acquiring the spoken language of whichever culture the infant entered. Chomsky, the original proponent of the LAD, argued that infants are born with innate knowledge of the general rules that all languages obey, along with innate knowledge of permitted variations (e.g., Chomsky, 1957). Hence an infant can as readily acquire a language that makes heavy use of the passive tense (“The boy was bitten by the dog”), like Sesotho, as a language that does not, like English (“The dog bit the boy”; Bates, Devescovi & Wulfeck, 2001).

  More recently, it has become clear that language acquisition depends on the same kinds of learning mechanisms that underpin broader cognition. We have already seen in Chapters 1 to 5 that infants acquire a remarkable amount of information simply by looking at and listening to events that occur in their worlds. In the case of the physical, biological and psychological worlds, the primary sense is probably vision. In the case of language, the primary sense is audition. Infants acquire a remarkable amount of information simply by listening to what the people around them say. I will argue that infants use the same abilities to acquire language that they use to acquire knowledge about the physical, biological and psychological worlds, for example statistical and associative learning. The infant brain is automatically tracking statistical dependencies and conditional probabilities in language. Auditory perceptual information is replete with statistical patterns. There are acoustic cues to the phonotactic patterns of the language (the sounds that make up the language, and the orders in which they can be combined), to word boundaries and phrasing (largely carried by speech rhythm and duration cues), and to the emotional content of speech (largely carried by prosodic stress patterns and loudness cues). As in the visual world of objects and events, information that is initially gained passively via automatic neural encoding processes is rapidly supplemented by information gained through direct action by the infant, for example by imitation. In the case of language, infants start babbling and trying out sound combinations for themselves from very early on, and they also initiate verbal interactions by gooing and making comfort or distress sounds – in other words, they attempt to communicate

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Selected Readings on Transformational Theory

  • Noam Chomsky, J. P. B. Allen, Paul Van Buren(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Dover Publications

    (Publisher)

  6 Language Acquisition

  6.1 Introductory

  [There would seem to be at least three reasons why research into children’s acquisition of language is important.

  • (i) It is interesting in its own right.
  • (ii) The results of studies in language acquisition may throw light on a variety of educational and medical problems, e.g. aphasia, speech-retardation and cognitive development.
  • (iii) Since the study of language acquisition may confirm or disconfirm the universal categories postulated by linguistic theories with an explicitly mentalist basis, it is clear that the phenomena of language acquisition are relevant to the development of linguistic theory.

  Many linguists and non-linguists have studied language acquisition without making any real effort to define how the results of their studies might be applied, and without wishing to prove anything about the nature of language. The result of this rather casual approach has been a mass of observations which inevitably tend to be of an anecdotal and therefore unsystematic nature. Moreover, the lack of any coherent theory of language acquisition means that the link between the data and what we assume to be the ‘facts’ of language acquisition are necessarily extremely tenuous. For example, it is difficult to describe, let alone explain, the facts of slow speech development without knowing precisely what constitutes normal speech development. Unfortunately we know very little at the present time about what constitutes normal speech development. This is due partly to the immense practical difficulties involved in studying child speech but also to the fact that there is no linguistic theory yet available which provides a sufficiently detailed apparatus to enable us either to describe the facts or to catalogue them comprehensively.

  It may be useful, before turning to Chomsky’s views on the subject, to give some indication of the practical and theoretical difficulties involved in studying language acquisition. Firstly, it is difficult for obvious practical reasons to study input-data, that is the amount and nature of speech to which the child is exposed over a period of two to three years (what Chomsky calls ‘primary linguistic data’). It is clear that such studies are necessary if we wish, for example, to test Skinner’s theory that language is learned by ‘reinforcement’, or to find out precisely what is learned by the child and what we must assume to be part of his innate capacity for acquiring language.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  More than Nature Needs

  • Derek Bickerton(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 7

  Language “Acquisition”

  There is one thing (perhaps the only thing) on which virtually all writers on child language are agreed: that in the beginning there is a child, A, and a language, B, that A does not yet have, and that A aims (consciously or otherwise) at acquiring B by a specifically targeted effort of some kind. This effort may or may not be helped by unconscious knowledge internal to A, depending on one’s theoretical bias, but it is one that may best be characterized by the terms learning or acquisition and treated as a task rather than a set of automatic reactions.

  Granted Chomsky has often spoken of the “growth” of language, comparing it to the growth of physical organs such as arms and legs: “Language development really ought to be called language growth because the language organ grows like any other body organ” (Chomsky 1983), and accordingly “language learning is not something that the child does; it is something that happens to the child” (Chomsky 1988: 34). Yet over the years he has shown considerable ambivalence about the nature of acquisition. At the same time as he was making such statements, he was elaborating the notion of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) that required assumptions no different from those of other models.

  The relationship of LAD to UG and the “knowledge of language” discussed in Chapter 2 rather resembles the relationship of the Trinity in Christian theology; they sometimes appear to be distinct from one another but are really aspects of a single entity. The LAD as a repository of “knowledge of language” supplies the child with a set of hypotheses about all possible languages that can be tested against primary linguistic data, enabling the child to identify the grammatical system of the local language (Chomsky 1965, 1972). In introducing the principles-and-parameters model of UG, Chomsky states that as regards “theory of language acquisition, we assume that the child approaches the task equipped with UG

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Architecture of Cognition

  • John R. Anderson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  7  | Language Acquisition

  A MAJOR ISSUE in the field of cognitive science is whether language is cut from the same cloth as the other cognitive processes. The basic premise in this book is that all higher-level cognitive functions are achieved by the same underlying architecture. This chapter will show that some features of language can be explained by the architectural assumptions presented earlier. Here I am concerned with the acquisition of syntax as it is manifest in children’s generations.1 I have chosen this domain because the strongest claims for the uniqueness of language have concerned syntax. It has been argued that children need language-specific knowledge to figure out the syntax of their native language. Generation provides the clearest evidence about a child’s syntactic knowledge, and most of the data on children’s syntax have come from analyses of their generations. I will argue here that the syntax of natural language mirrors the structure of procedural control. Thus, a concern with syntax dictates a focus on the procedural component of ACT. Therefore, this chapter will mainly use ideas from Chapters 4 and 6 about skill organization and acquisition.2

  Language Performance

  In ACT, language is produced by a set of productions that approaches generation of a sentence as a problem-solving task. The speaker begins with a meaning to convey, decomposes this meaning into a set of components, and then turns to the subproblems of generating each component. Each subproblem is similarly decomposed until the speaker gets down to meaning units, which correspond to words or to phrase-structure patterns. The ability to generate syntactically correct utterances amounts to having problem-solving operators that specify how to decompose the problem and what phrase-structure patterns to use. These problem-solving operators are realized as goal-structured productions in ACT. The phrase structure that is ubiquitous in natural languages derives from hierarchical goal structures.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  An Introduction to Child Language Development

  • Susan H.Foster- Cohen(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1 What do children bring to the language acquisition task?

  Chapter summary

  In this chapter, the issue of whether children bring innate knowledge of linguistic principles to the language acquisition task is raised in broad, mostly philosophical, terms. The issue of how one can know what children know (innate or not) is discussed. Two approaches to language acquisition research are identified — the 'observational' and the 'logical' — and examples of each are given.

  Introduction

  Perhaps the most hotly debated topic in child language research today concerns how children's mental and physical capabilities help them learn languages, and what they know in those months and years before their talk is recognisable. There are those who believe that children 'know' a great deal about language — much more than might at first appear from what they say (or are able to say). There are others, however, who believe that children know very little about language, and must work it all out from hearing (or seeing, in the case of sign languages) the language of others and from their own attempts to use language.

  The reason why we can't decide what infants know or don't know is that we cannot observe knowledge directly. We can't get inside children's heads, but have to use more or less subtle methods of observation and experimentation that we hope will give us the clues we need. However, children's behaviour, even in response to the most controlled experiment, is often ambiguous and could be interpreted in more than one way. And they certainly can't sit down and tell us any of what they know, until they are at least three or so. In fact, even then, they can only tell us what is available to conscious reflection. Most of what anyone, child or adult, 'knows' about language is not directly accessible, and must be probed in ways only slightly more direct than with small children. (A detailed discussion of how children learn to talk about language is contained in Chapter 8

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  How Children Learn to Write

  Supporting and Developing Children's Writing in School

  • Dorothy Latham(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  connectionism. As a model of language development it is based on the idea of the interconnected operation of the large number of neurons in the human brain, which together form very complicated functional networks (Bancroft, 1995, in Lee and Das Gupta). Messer concludes that none of the various important theories of language acquisition are completely satisfactory, but that the connectionist view provides an alternative to the parameter setting ideas of Chomsky (Messer, 1999, in Messer and Millar).

  Although Messer holds that environmental influences are strong, he thinks the special social environment created by adults for children is not likely by itself to make the acquisition of language possible. Thus both the structures in the brain, whether more specific or more general, and whether more restrictive or more loosely constraining in their effects, and the environmental influences and experiences from the social context of language are features essential to learning to speak (Messer, 1999, in Messer and Millar). Both are essential, but neither one alone is sufficient. The argument thus restates itself as a matter of the relative emphases between these two major participants in the process. Messer suggests that in recent research more attention is being paid to the way adults actually speak to children, and that this is the way forward. He states ‘For too long, research has been influenced by grand theories. Instead, we need to spend more time watching and listening to children.’ (Messer, 2000.)

  □ Young Children’s Uses of Language in the Early Stages

  One of the most striking of the phenomena of early language use is that of the monologue. Sometimes referred to as

  egocentric speech ,

  it is a sort of sporadic running commentary uttered by the child, usually accompanying play or activity of some sort, and not emitted in the expectation of any particular response from those around him. Early noted by Piaget, who also began to realize the progressive differences in the quality of play, it often happens when the child is absorbed in doing something of interest, and may fulfil the function of maintaining self-directive thoughts to do with the ongoing activity (Piaget, 1959). An example of monologue is the following, playing with toy cars in the sandpit: ‘I’m going to make it go up here…Brmm brmm brmm…Whee eeee ee! It’s coming down now…Wheeeeee Now the red one’s going…Brmmm brmmm brmmm…It’s crashing, it’s crashing!’ This function of language appears around 2 years old, and continues until around the ages of 4 to 6. At the same time children are developing their abilities to engage in dialogue

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Language Learning in Ministry

  Preparing for Cross-Cultural Language Acquisition

  • Jan Edwards Dormer(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • William Carey Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Though phrases such as “learning an additional language” are also used, the learning of any language subsequent to the native (first) language is still commonly referred to as SLA. Another term to clarify is acquisition. Though language learning and language acquisition are often used interchangeably, we will see that the word acquisition is the more precise term to indicate the process of developing full communicative competence. When a person is able to use a language to communicate with others, we can say the language has been acquired. Learning, on the other hand, sometimes refers to gaining knowledge about the language by studying its grammar and vocabulary. A Short History of the Study of SLA The field of SLA study began developing in earnest in the mid-1900s. Early theories of SLA were derived from studies of how children acquire their first language, with the assumption that acquiring additional languages must be similar to acquiring a first language. Over time, second language acquisition came to be seen as a separate, though similar, process. Theories about and methodologies for SLA flourished throughout the latter half of the 1900s. The new millennium has seen a focus on research studies carried out to confirm or disprove theories, and increased research involving brain studies have been made possible thanks to innovative technology. We will look at four theoretical perspectives of SLA (Lightbown and Spada 2013). Each has sought to explain a piece of the SLA puzzle, and each has added some clarity to the complexity of how we acquire additional languages. The behaviorist perspective One of the earliest explanations of SLA came from the era of B. F. Skinner, who wrote Verbal Behavior in 1957 (Chomsky 1959), and his studies on behaviorism. Learning a new language was seen as a stimulus and response process: a person hears new words, repeats them, and thus learns a language

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book