Language Acquisition And cognitive Science

Language Acquisition And cognitive Science

1. Dissociations between laguage and general intelligence

   • Humans evolved brain circuitry, mostly in the left hemisphere surrounding the sylvian fissure that appears to be designed for language.There are syndromes showng the opposite dissociation, where intact language coexist with severe retardation, these cases show that language development dpes not depend on fully fuctioning general intelligence.

2. Imput

   • To understand how children learn language, we have to know what aspects of language they have access to
     • Context
       • Children do not hear sentences in isolation, but in a context. No child has learned language from the radio; indeed children rarely if ever learn language from television. Ervin tripp studied hearing children of deaf parents whose only access to English was from radio. The children did not learn any speech from that input. The reason is that without already knowing the language, it would be difficult for a child to figure out what the characters in the unresponsive televised words are talking about.
     • What and when children learn
       • People do not reproduce their parent's language exactly, rhe difference between parents language and the one their children ultimately acquire is small. Judging by their spontaneous speech, we can conclude that most children have mastered their mothers tongue some time in their threes. Human language is something close to full mastery, and in a short period of tim

3. positive evidence

   • Children do not need to hear a full-fledged language; as long as they are in a community with other children and have some source for individual words, they will invent one on their own, often in a single generation. The term "positive evidence" refers to the information available to the child about which strings of words are grammatical sentences of the target language
   • Negative Evidende
     • It 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 utterances is ungrammatical.

4. Maturation of the language system

   • Newport and Gleitman suggests, the maturation of language circuits during a child's early years may be a driving force underlying the course of language acquisition.Newport and Gleitman shows how sheer age seems to play an important role.

5. Motherese

   • Parents and caretakers in most parts of the world modify their speech when talking to young children. People im general use several registers in different social settings. Speech to children is slower, shorter, in some ways simpler, higher-pitched, more exaggerated in intonation more fluent and grammatically well formed
   • Prosody
     • humans speech has a pattern of melody, timing, and stress called prosody. Motherese have an exaggerated prosody of its own: a rise and fall contour for approving, a set of sharp staccato bursts for prohibiting, a rise pattern for directing attention, and smooth low legato murmurs for comforting. In all speech a number of prosodic properties of the speech wave, such as lengthening, intonation and pausing, are influenced by the syntactic structure of the sentence