Language acquisition: Difference between revisions
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| 12-18 months || Single word use; repertoire of 30-50 words (simple nouns, adjectives, and action words), which cannot as yet be joined in phrases but are used |
| 12-18 months || Single word use; repertoire of 30-50 words (simple nouns, adjectives, and action words), which cannot as yet be joined in phrases but are used one at a time does not use functors (the, and, can, be) necessary for syntax, but makes good progress in understanding |
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| 18-24 months || Two-word (telegraphic) phrases ordered according to syntactic rules; vocabulary of 50 to several hundred words; understands propositional rules |
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Language acquisition has been studied from the perspective of developmental psychology and neuroscience, which looks at learning to use and understand language parallel to a child's brain development. It has been determined through empirical research on developmentally normal children as well as through some extreme cases of language deprivation that there is a "sensitive period" of language acquisition in which human infants have the ability to learn any language. This plasticity is whittled down as a child becomes exposed to the specific sounds and structure of his or her language environment, and so the child quickly becomes a native speaker of that language. As Christophe Pallier noted, "Before the child begins to speak and to perceive, the uncommitted cortex is a blank slate on which nothing has been written. In the ensuing years much is written, and the writing is normally never erased. After the age of ten or twelve, the general functional connexions have been established and fixed for the speech cortex." According to the sensitive or critical period models, the age at which a child acquires the ability to use language is a predictor of how well he or she is ultimately able to use language. <ref>{{cite web|last=Pallier|first=Cristophe|title=Critical periods in language acquisition and language attrition|url=http://www.pallier.org/papers/Pallier.critical.period.attrition.chapter.2007.pdf}}</ref> However, there may be an age at which becoming a fluent and natural user of a language is no longer possible. Our brains may be automatically wired to learn languages, but this ability does not last into adulthood in the same way that it exists during development. By the onset of puberty (around age 12), language acquisition has typically been solidified and it becomes more difficult to learn a language in the same way a native speaker would. At this point, it is usually a second language that a person is trying to acquire and not a first. <ref>{{cite web|last=Sakai|first=Kuniyoshi L|title=Language Acquisition and Brain Development|url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3842755.pdf?acceptTC=true}}</ref> |
Language acquisition has been studied from the perspective of developmental psychology and neuroscience, which looks at learning to use and understand language parallel to a child's brain development. It has been determined through empirical research on developmentally normal children as well as through some extreme cases of language deprivation that there is a "sensitive period" of language acquisition in which human infants have the ability to learn any language. This plasticity is whittled down as a child becomes exposed to the specific sounds and structure of his or her language environment, and so the child quickly becomes a native speaker of that language. As Christophe Pallier noted, "Before the child begins to speak and to perceive, the uncommitted cortex is a blank slate on which nothing has been written. In the ensuing years much is written, and the writing is normally never erased. After the age of ten or twelve, the general functional connexions have been established and fixed for the speech cortex." According to the sensitive or critical period models, the age at which a child acquires the ability to use language is a predictor of how well he or she is ultimately able to use language. <ref>{{cite web|last=Pallier|first=Cristophe|title=Critical periods in language acquisition and language attrition|url=http://www.pallier.org/papers/Pallier.critical.period.attrition.chapter.2007.pdf}}</ref> However, there may be an age at which becoming a fluent and natural user of a language is no longer possible. Our brains may be automatically wired to learn languages, but this ability does not last into adulthood in the same way that it exists during development. By the onset of puberty (around age 12), language acquisition has typically been solidified and it becomes more difficult to learn a language in the same way a native speaker would. At this point, it is usually a second language that a person is trying to acquire and not a first. <ref>{{cite web|last=Sakai|first=Kuniyoshi L|title=Language Acquisition and Brain Development|url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3842755.pdf?acceptTC=true}}</ref> |
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This critical period is usually never missed by cognitively normal children- humans are so well prepared to learn language that it becomes almost impossible not to. Researchers are unable to experimentally test the effects of the sensitive period of development on language acquisition because it would be unethical to deprive children of language until this period is over. However, case studies on abused, language deprived children show that they were extremely limited in their language skills even after instruction. <ref>{{cite book|last=Curtiss|title=Genie: A Psycholinguistic study of a modern day "Wild Child"|year=1977|publisher=Academic Press}}</ref> |
This critical period is usually never missed by cognitively normal children- humans are so well prepared to learn language that it becomes almost impossible not to. Researchers are unable to experimentally test the effects of the sensitive period of development on language acquisition because it would be unethical to deprive children of language until this period is over. However, case studies on abused, language deprived children show that they were extremely limited in their language skills even after instruction. <ref>{{cite book|last=Curtiss|title=Genie: A Psycholinguistic study of a modern day "Wild Child"|year=1977|publisher=Academic Press}}</ref> |
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==Vocabulary acquisition == |
==Vocabulary acquisition == |
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Revision as of 19:38, 16 December 2011
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Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words to communicate. The capacity to successfully use language requires one to pick up a range of tools including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocalized as with speech or manual as in sign. Language acquisition usually refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language. This is distinguished from second language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.
The capacity to acquire and use language is a key aspect that distinguishes humans from other organisms. Although it is difficult to pin down what aspects of language are uniquely human, there are a few design features that can be found in all known forms of human language, but that are missing from forms of animal communication. [1] For example, many animals are able to communicate with each other by signaling to the things around them, but this kind of communication lacks the arbitrariness of human vocabularies (in that there is nothing about the sound of the word "dog" that would hint at its meaning). Other forms of animal communication may utilize arbitrary sounds, but are unable to combine those sounds in different ways to create completely novel messages that are automatically understood by another. Hackett called this design feature of human language "productivity." It is crucial to the understanding of human language acquisition that we are not limited to a finite set of words, but rather must be able to understand and utilize a complex system that allows for an infinite number of possible messages. So, while many forms of animal communication exist, they differ from human languages in that they have a limited range of non-syntactically structured vocabulary tokens that lack cross cultural variation between groups.[2]
A major concern in understanding language acquisition is how these capacities are picked up by infants from what appears to be very little input. Input in the linguistic context is defined as "All words, contexts, and other forms of language to which a learner is exposed, relative to acquired proficiency in first or second languages" [3] It is difficult to believe, considering the hugely complex nature of human languages, and the relatively limited cognitive abilities of an infant, that infants are able to acquire most aspects of language without being explicitly taught. Children within a few years of birth understand the grammatical rules of their native language without being explicitly taught, as one learns grammar in school. [4] A range of theories of language acquisition have been proposed in order to explain this apparent problem. These theories include innatism in which a child is born prepared in some manner with these capacities, as opposed to other theories in which language is simply learned as one learns to ride a bike. The conflict between the traits humans are born with and those that are a product of one's environment is often referred to as the "Nature vs. Nurture" debate. As is the case with many other human abilities and characteristics, it appears that there are some qualities of language acquisition that the human brain is automatically wired for (a "nature" component) and some that are are shaped by the particular language environment in which a person is raised (a "nurture" component).
History
Philosophers in ancient societies were interested in how humans acquired the ability to understand and produce language, well before empirical methods for testing those theories were developed, but for the most part they seemed to regard language acquisition as a subset of man's ability to acquire knowledge and learn concepts.[5] Some early, observation based ideas about language acquisition were proposed by Plato, who felt that word-meaning mapping in some form was innate. Additionally, Sanskrit grammarians debated for over twelve centuries whether humans' ability to recognize the meaning of words was god-given (possibly innate) or passed down by previous generations and learned from already established conventions —e.g. a child learning the word for cow by listening to trusted speakers talking about cows.[6]
In a more modern context, empiricists like Hobbes and Locke argued that knowledge (and for Locke, language) emerge ultimately from abstracted sense impressions. These arguments lean towards the "nurture" side of the argument- that language is acquired through sensory experience. This led to Carnap's Aufbau, an attempt to learn all knowledge from sense datum, using the notion of "remembered as similar" to bind these into clusters, which would eventually map into language.
Proponents of Behaviorism argued that language may be learned through a form of operant conditioning. In B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour (1957), he suggested that the successful use of a sign such as a word or lexical unit, given a certain stimulus, reinforces its "momentary" or contextual probability. Because operant conditioning is contingent on reinforcement by rewards, a child would learn that a specific combination of sounds stands for a specific thing through repeated successful associations made between those two things. A "successful" use of a sign would be one in which the child is understood (for example, a child saying "up" when he or she wants to be picked up) and is rewarded with the desired response from another person, therefore reinforcing the child's understanding of the meaning of that word and making it more likely that he or she will use that word in a similar situation in the future. Some Empiricist theories of language acquisition include statistical learning theories of language acquisition, Relational Frame Theory, functionalist linguistics, social interactionist theory, and usage-based language acquisition.
Skinner's behaviourist idea was strongly attacked by Noam Chomsky in a review article in 1959, calling it "largely mythology" and a "serious delusion".[7] Instead, Chomsky argued for a more theoretical approach to language acquisition, based on a study of syntax.
General approaches
Social interactionism
Social interactionist theory consists of a number of hypotheses on language acquisition. These hypotheses deal with written, spoken, or visual social tools which consist of complex systems of symbols and rules on language acquisition and development. The compromise between “nature” and “nurture” is the “interactionist” approach. In addition, for years psychologists and researchers have been asking the same question: what are the language behaviors that nature provides innately and what are those behaviors that are realized by environmental exposure, which is nurture.
Relational frame theory
The relational frame theory (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, Roche, 2001), provides a wholly selectionist/learning account of the origin and development of language competence and complexity. Based upon the principles of Skinnerian behaviorism, RFT posits that children acquire language purely through interacting with the environment. RFT theorists introduced the concept of functional contextualism in language learning, which emphasizes the importance of predicting and influencing psychological events, such as thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, by focusing on manipulable variables in their context. RFT distinguishes itself from Skinner's work by identifying and defining a particular type of operant conditioning known as derived relational responding, a learning process that to date appears to occur only in humans possessing a capacity for language. Empirical studies supporting the predictions of RFT suggest that children learn language via a system of inherent reinforcements, challenging the view that language acquisition is based upon innate, language-specific cognitive capacities.[8]
Emergentism
Emergentist theories, such as MacWhinney's competition model, posit that language acquisition is a cognitive process that emerges from the interaction of biological pressures and the environment. According to these theories, neither nature nor nurture alone is sufficient to trigger language learning; both of these influences must work together in order to allow children to acquire a language. The proponents of these theories argue that general cognitive processes subserve language acquisition and that the end result of these processes is language-specific phenomena, such as word learning and grammar acquisition. The findings of many empirical studies support the predictions of these theories, suggesting that language acquisition is a more complex process than many believe.[9]
Syntax
As syntax began to be studied more closely in the early 20th century in relation to language learning, it became apparent to linguists, psychologists, and philosophers that knowing a language was not merely a matter of associating words with concepts, but that a critical aspect of language involves knowledge of how to put words together- sentences are usually needed in order to communicate successfully, not just isolated words. [10]
Generativism
Generative grammar, associated especially with the work of Noam Chomsky, is currently one of the principal approaches to children's acquisition of syntax.[11] The leading idea is that human biology imposes narrow constraints on the child's "hypothesis space" during language acquisition. In the Principles and Parameters Framework, which has dominated generative syntax since Chomsky's (1980) Lectures on Government and Binding, the acquisition of syntax resembles ordering from a menu: The human brain comes equipped with a limited set of choices, and the child selects the correct options using her parents' speech, in combination with the context.[12][13]
An important argument in favor of the generative approach is the Poverty of the stimulus argument. The child's input (a finite number of sentences encountered by the child, together with information about the context in which they were uttered) is in principle compatible with an infinite number of conceivable grammars. Moreover, few if any children can rely on corrective feedback from adults when they make a grammatical error.[14] Yet, barring situations of medical abnormality or extreme privation, all the children in a given speech-community converge on very much the same grammar by the age of about five years.[12] An especially dramatic example is provided by children who for medical reasons are unable to produce speech, and therefore can literally never be corrected for a grammatical error, yet nonetheless converge on the same grammar as their typically developing peers, according to comprehension-based tests of grammar.[15][16]
Considerations such as these have led Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Eric Lenneberg and others to argue that the types of grammar that the child needs to consider must be narrowly constrained by human biology (the nativist position).[17] These innate constraints are sometimes referred to as universal grammar, the human "language faculty," or the "language instinct." [18]
Empiricism
Although Chomsky's theory of a generative grammar has been popular with some linguists since the 1950's many criticisms of the basic assumptions of generative theory have been put forth by cognitive-functional linguistics who argue that language structure is created through language use. [19] These linguists argue that the concept of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is unsupported by evolutionary anthropology, which tends to show a gradual adaptation of the human brain and vocal chords to the use of language, rather than a sudden appearance of a complete set of binary parameters delineating the whole spectrum of possible grammars ever to have existed and ever to exist. On the other hand, cognitive-functional theorists use this anthropological data to show how human beings have evolved the capacity for grammar and syntax to meet our demand for linguistic symbols. (Binary parameters are common to digital computers but may not be applicable to neurological systems such as the human brain.)
Further, the generative theory has several hypothetical constructs (such as movement, empty categories, complex underlying structures, and strict binary branching) that cannot possibly be acquired from any amount of linguistic input, it is unclear that human language is actually anything like the generative conception of it. Since language, as imagined by nativists, is unlearnably complex, subscribers to this theory argue that it must therefore be innate. A different theory of language, however, may yield different conclusions. While all theories of language acquisition posit some degree of innateness, a less convoluted theory might involve less innate structure and more learning. Under such a theory of grammar, the input, combined with both general and language-specific learning capacities, might be sufficient for acquisition.[citation needed]
Since 1980, linguists studying children, such as Melissa Bowerman, and psychologists following Jean Piaget, like Elizabeth Bates and Jean Mandler, came to suspect that there may indeed be many learning processes involved in the acquisition process, and that ignoring the role of learning may have been a mistake.[citation needed]
In recent years, the debate surrounding the nativist position has centered on whether the inborn capabilities are language-specific or domain-general, such as those that enable the infant to visually make sense of the world in terms of objects and actions. The anti-nativist view has many strands, but a frequent theme is that language emerges from usage in social contexts, using learning mechanisms that are a part of a general cognitive learning apparatus (which is what is innate). This position has been championed by Elizabeth Bates,[20] Catherine Snow, Brian MacWhinney, Michael Tomasello,[2] Michael Ramscar,[21] William O'Grady,[22] and others. Philosophers, such as Fiona Cowie[23] and Barbara Scholz with Geoffrey Pullum[24] have also argued against certain nativist claims in support of empiricism.
Statistical learning
Statistical learning suggests that in learning language, a learner would use the natural statistical properties of language to deduce its structure, including sound patterns, words, and the beginnings of grammar. The statistical abilities are effective but also limited by what qualifies as input, what is done with that input, and by the structure of the resulting output. [25]
Some language acquisition researchers, such as Elissa Newport, Richard Aslin, and Jenny Saffran, believe that language acquisition is based primarily on general learning mechanisms, namely statistical learning. The development of connectionist models that are able to successfully learn words and syntactical conventions[26] supports the predictions of statistical learning theories of language acquisition, as do empirical studies of children's learning of words and syntax.[27]
Chunking
Chunking theories of language acquisition constitute a group of theories related to statistical learning theories in that they assume that the input from the environment plays an essential role; however, they postulate different learning mechanisms. The central idea of these theories is that language development occurs through the incremental acquisition of meaningful chunks of elementary constituents, which can be words, phonemes, or syllables. Recently, this approach has been highly successful in simulating several phenomena in the acquisition of syntactic categories[28] and the acquisition of phonological knowledge.[29] The approach has several features that make it unique: the models are implemented as computer programs, which enables clear-cut and quantitative predictions to be made; they learn from naturalistic input, made of actual child-directed utterances; they produce actual utterances, which can be compared with children’s utterances; and they have simulated phenomena in several languages, including English, Spanish, and German.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have developed a computer model analyzing early toddler conversations to predict the structure of later conversations. They showed that toddlers develop their own individual rules for speaking with slots into which they could put certain kinds of words. A significant outcome of the research was that rules inferred from toddler speech were better predictors of subsequent speech than traditional grammars.[30]
Representation of language acquisition in the brain
Recent advances in functional neuroimaging technology have allowed for a better understanding of how language acquisition is manifested physically in the brain. Language acquisition almost always occurs in children during a period of rapid increase in brain volume. At this point in development,a child has much more neural connections than he or she will have as an adult, allowing for the child to be more able to learn new things than he or she would be as an adult.
| Average Age | Language Development |
|---|---|
| 6 months | Cooing, changes to distinct babbling by introduction of consonants |
| 1 year | Beginning of language understanding; one-word utterances |
| 12-18 months | Single word use; repertoire of 30-50 words (simple nouns, adjectives, and action words), which cannot as yet be joined in phrases but are used one at a time does not use functors (the, and, can, be) necessary for syntax, but makes good progress in understanding |
| 18-24 months | Two-word (telegraphic) phrases ordered according to syntactic rules; vocabulary of 50 to several hundred words; understands propositional rules |
| 2 years | New words every day; three or more words in many combinations; functors begin to appear; many grammatical errors and idiosyncratic expressions; good understanding of language |
| 3 years | Full sentences; few errors; vocabulary of around 1,000 words |
| 4 years | Close to adult speech competence |
The Sensitive Period
Language acquisition has been studied from the perspective of developmental psychology and neuroscience, which looks at learning to use and understand language parallel to a child's brain development. It has been determined through empirical research on developmentally normal children as well as through some extreme cases of language deprivation that there is a "sensitive period" of language acquisition in which human infants have the ability to learn any language. This plasticity is whittled down as a child becomes exposed to the specific sounds and structure of his or her language environment, and so the child quickly becomes a native speaker of that language. As Christophe Pallier noted, "Before the child begins to speak and to perceive, the uncommitted cortex is a blank slate on which nothing has been written. In the ensuing years much is written, and the writing is normally never erased. After the age of ten or twelve, the general functional connexions have been established and fixed for the speech cortex." According to the sensitive or critical period models, the age at which a child acquires the ability to use language is a predictor of how well he or she is ultimately able to use language. [32] However, there may be an age at which becoming a fluent and natural user of a language is no longer possible. Our brains may be automatically wired to learn languages, but this ability does not last into adulthood in the same way that it exists during development. By the onset of puberty (around age 12), language acquisition has typically been solidified and it becomes more difficult to learn a language in the same way a native speaker would. At this point, it is usually a second language that a person is trying to acquire and not a first. [33]
This critical period is usually never missed by cognitively normal children- humans are so well prepared to learn language that it becomes almost impossible not to. Researchers are unable to experimentally test the effects of the sensitive period of development on language acquisition because it would be unethical to deprive children of language until this period is over. However, case studies on abused, language deprived children show that they were extremely limited in their language skills even after instruction. [34]
Vocabulary acquisition
The capacity to acquire the ability to incorporate the pronunciation of new words depends upon the capacity to engage in speech repetition.[35][36][37][38] Children with reduced abilities to repeat nonwords (a marker of speech repetition abilities) show a slower rate of vocabulary expansion than children for whom this is easy.[39] It has been proposed that the elementary units of speech has been selected to enhance the ease with which sound and visual input can be mapped into motor vocalization.[40] Several computational models of vocabulary acquisition have been proposed so far.[41][42][43][44][45][46][47]
Meaning
Children learn on average 10 to 15 new word meanings each day, but only one of these words can be accounted for by direct instruction.[48] The other nine to 14 word meanings need to be picked up in some other way. It has been proposed that children acquire these meanings with the use of processes modeled by latent semantic analysis; that is, when they meet an unfamiliar word, children can use information in its context to correctly guess its rough area of meaning.[48]
Neurocognitive research
According to several linguists, neurocognitive research has confirmed many standards of language learning, such as: "learning engages the entire person (cognitive, affective, and psychomotor dominas), the human brain seeks patterns in its searching for meaning, emotions affect all aspects of learning, retention and recall, past experience always affects new learning, the brain's working memory has a limited capacity, lecture usually results in the lowest degree of retention, rehearsal is essential for retention, practice [alone] does not make perfect, and each brain is unique" (Sousa, 2006, p. 274). In terms of genetics, the gene ROBO1 has been associated with phonological buffer integrity or length [49]
Although it is difficult to determine without invasive measures which exact parts of the brain become most active and important for language acquisition, fMRI and PET technology has allowed for some conclusions to be made about where language may be centered. Koriyoshi Sakai proposed based on several neuroimaging studies that there may be a "grammar center" where language is primarily processed in the left lateral premotor cortex (located near the pre central sulcus and the inferior frontal sulcus. Additionally, these studies proposed that first language and second language acquisition may be represented differently in the cortex. [50]
See also
- Creole language
- Glossary of language teaching terms and ideas
- Language acquisition through motor planning (LAMP)
- Language development
- List of language acquisition researchers
- Metalinguistic awareness
- Origin of Language
- Passive speakers (language)
- Second language acquisition
- Second language attrition
References
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{{cite web}}: Missing or empty|title=(help) - ^ Sakai, Kuniyoshi L. (2005). "Language Acquisition and Brain Development". Science. 310: 815–819.
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