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Language Acquisition

The Course of Language Acquisition

The Biology of Language Acquisition

Introduction

Modularity. Do children learn language using a "mental organ," some of whose principles of organization are not shared with other cognitive systems such as perception, motor control, and reasoning

Language and Thought.A famous hypothesis, outlined by Benjamin Whorf (1956), asserts that the categories and relations that we use to understand the world come from our particular language, so that speakers of different languages conceptualize the world in different ways

Human Uniqueness. A related question is whether language is unique to humans.

What is Learned

Learning and Innateness. All humans talk but no house pets or house plants do, no matter how pampered, so heredity must be involved in language.

Evolution of Language Most obviously, the shape of the human vocal tract seems to have been modified in evolution for the demands of speech.

Dissociations between Language and General IntelligenceHumans evolved brain circuitry, mostly in the left hemisphere surrounding the sylvian fissure, that appears to be designed for language, though how exactly their internal wiring gives rise to rules of language is unknown (see the Chapter by Zurif).

the maturation of language circuits during a child's early years may be a driving force underlying the course of language acquisition

language acquisition begins very early in the human lifespan, and begins, logically enough, with the acquisition of a language's sound patterns

Shortly before their first birthday, babies begin to understand words, and around that birthday, they start to produce them (see Clark, 1993; Ingram, 1989)

Around 18 months, language changes in two ways. Vocabulary growth increases; the child begins to learn words at a rate of one every two waking hours, and will keep learning that rate or faster through adolescence

Explaining Language Acquisition

How do we explain children's course of language acquisition -- most importantly, their inevitable and early mastery? Several kinds of mechanisms are at work.

Learnability theory has defined learning as a scenario involving four parts (the theory embraces all forms of learning)

To understand how X is learned, you first have to understand what X is. Linguistic theory is thus an essential part of the study of language acquisition

The solution to the problem must be that children's learning mechanisms ultimately don't allow them to make what would otherwise be a tempting generalization.

Input

language acquisition is ordinarily driven by a grammatical sample of the target language

Negative evidence refers to information about which strings of words are not grammatical sentences in the language, such as corrections or other forms of feedback from a parent that tell the child that one of his or her utterances is ungrammatical.

Conclusion

The topic of language acquisition implicate the most profound questions about our understanding of the human mind, and its subject matter, the speech of children, is endlessly fascinating. But the attempt to understand it scientifically is guaranteed to bring on a certain degree of frustration.