Children's Language Acquisition
Children's language acquisition refers to the process through which children learn and develop language skills. This includes the ability to understand and produce speech, as well as comprehend and use grammar and vocabulary. It is a complex and multifaceted process that involves both biological and environmental factors, and it is a key area of study in developmental psychology.
6 Key excerpts on "Children's Language Acquisition"
eBook - ePub- Kristin Denham, Anne Lobeck(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...9 Studying language in the brain Psycholinguistics As you read about in earlier chapters, a central question of linguistics is how we acquire knowledge of language as children. A great deal of evidence suggests that humans are born with the capacity to acquire language and are equipped with some inherent knowledge of language, making the complex task of acquiring language relatively easy, regardless of intellectual capacity, circumstances, or the language that one is exposed to. Psycholinguistics, or the psychology of language, encompasses a great many aspects of the study of language. Some claim, as Noam Chomsky himself has (1972), that linguistics itself can be considered a branch of psychology since psychology is the study of the mind and behavior, and the study of language is an important component of understanding the human mind and human behavior. Psycholinguistics is typically understood to include the study of the acquisition of language by children (sometimes known as L1 acquisition); the processing of language at all levels (phonological, morphological, syntactic, and at the discourse level); and the storage and access of words in the lexicon. Experimental methodologies common in psychology, such as eye-tracking, reaction time, and neural imaging, are often used to assess various aspects of language production, processing, and storage. First language acquisition Child language acquisition provides us with a great deal of evidence for our innate capacity for language. Neuropsychologist Eric Lenneberg compares the acquisition of language to innate abilities in other species, including eyesight in cats and flight in birds...
eBook - ePubLanguage and Literacy for the Early Years
9780857257413
- Sally Neaum(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Learning Matters(Publisher)
...However, the interplay of an innate capacity to acquire language and social interaction characterises our current understanding of language acquisition and development. It underpins advice to parents and our early years setting guidance, and informs intervention strategies for children who require additional support. SUMMARY This chapter has asked you to consider how we learn to speak. Different theories to explain this process have been explored, including questions that remain unanswered by different theoretical perspectives. The chapter concludes that the current understanding of language learning is one that acknowledges that we have an innate capacity to acquire language but that an interactive social context is necessary for a child to learn to speak. FURTHER READING Saxton, M (2010) Child Language. Acquisition and Development. London: SAGE. Tomasello, M (2003) Constructing a Language. A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. London: Harvard University Press. Whitehead, M (2010) Language and Literacy in the Early Years 0–7. 4th Edition. London: SAGE....
eBook - ePubThe Cognitive Sciences
An Interdisciplinary Approach
- Carolyn P. Sobel, Paul Li(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...8 The Role of Linguistics in Cognitive Science Language Acquisition First-Language Acquisition Stages in First-Language Acquisition The Social Aspect of First- Language Acquisition Second-Language Acquisition Bilingualism Language Deprivation Language Acquisition in Abused or Feral Children Language Acquisition in the Deaf and Hearing Impaired Language Loss (Language Attrition) Causes of Languages Loss Aphasia The Role of Computational Linguistics Computational Modeling of Language Language and Thought L inguists search for the underlying commonalities among languages. Some reconstruct rules of languages no longer spoken, and some focus on the rules of languages currently spoken. The data they describe contribute to our knowledge of the types of rules and principles underlying languages. From these data we can infer much about the functioning of the cognitive processes that produce them. As you read in Part 1, cognitive psychology attempts to understand the processes our minds engage in, the cognitive architecture that makes it all possible. Thus, language is of great interest to those of us in the field of cognitive psychology, concerned as we are with issues of learning and of the representation of knowledge in the brain. The following is a look at some of the areas in cognitive psychology in which language plays a major role and where the overlap with linguistics is plain. LANGUAGE ACQUISITION First-Language Acquisition It is helpful to address at this point, because it is far from obvious, the way in which human infants acquire a language (or languages, for many learn more than one in the environment in which they are raised). The word infant indicates this state of affairs: Its meaning in Latin, from which we borrowed it, is “not speaking”. How do you generally judge when an infant has become no-longer-an-infant? Probably you consider key elements in this judgment to be whether the child walks and talks...
eBook - ePub- 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...
eBook - ePub- Michael Tomasello(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
...This would seem to be the way that people master a variety of cognitive skills, and there is no reason to think that language is any different in this regard. Importantly, when we focus in this way on language use and usage-based operations, we must perforce invoke in our acquisition theory a variety of cognitive and social-cognitive processes that originate from outside the domain of language per se (perception, memory, joint attention, intention-reading, categorization, analogy, and so on). In all, these are exciting times in the language sciences, including the study of child language acquisition. New discoveries in a science often follow upon the development of novel methodologies and the new observations that these enable. And so, it is only in recent years that large corpora of both written and spoken language have become available—with even larger ones on the way—and many of these can be searched automatically, enabling larger quantities and thus the use of more powerful statistical techniques. In the study of language development, the CHILDES corpora make it “relatively” easy to answer specific questions about spontaneous spoken speech. In addition, new experimental approaches to child language acquisition are being devised at an ever-increasing rate, drawing on experience both from adult cognitive science (including adult psycholinguistics) and from other areas of developmental psychology. There are thus a variety of new measurement techniques to identify basic psycholinguistic representations and processes, ranging from priming techniques to the identification of the intonational contours encapsulating utterances to the tracking of eye movements during language comprehension and production to the computational modeling of various learning processes. But these new methodological techniques will be of long-term benefit to the field only if we get our theoretical house in order...
eBook - ePubLanguage And Learning
An Interactional Perspective
- John Nicholls, Gordon Wells, Gordon Wells(Authors)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...When people interact with each other through language, the production of grammatically well-formed sentences is not an end in itself, but a means for acting in the world in order to establish relationships with others, to communicate information and to engage with them in joint activities. A child is thus born into a community of language users and his learning of language forms part of his socialization as a member of that community. Acquiring control of the complex patterns of his native language is, therefore, on this second account, a matter of learning how to do things with language—‘learning how to mean,’ as Halliday (1975a) puts it. Through interacting with those in his environment, the child thus both acquires the resources of the language of his community and learns how to make use of those resources in order to achieve a variety of purposes in relation to different people in different situations. Both these accounts of language acquisition recognize that children must be equipped with the ability to learn a human language (in contrast to other species, which do not seem able to do so). Both also recognize that they will only learn if they grow up in a language-using environment. Where they differ is in whether they attribute the main responsibility for what is learned to the child or to the environment. In Chomsky’s view, all that is required of the environment is the provision of instances of language in use in order to trigger the innate language acquisition device (LAD). To him, the fact that all normally functioning human beings learn their native language, despite wide differences in the nature of the ‘primary linguistic data’ to which they are exposed, makes it clear that the input plays little part in determining the particular course that development will take...
