Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition

1. Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to percive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it) as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.

   • 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 beginto understand words, and around that birthday,theybstart to produce them. around 18 months, language, changes in two ways. Vocabulary growth increases; the child begins to learn words at a rate of one every two walking hours, and will keep learning that rate or faster through adolescence. All parts of all language are acquired before the child turns four.
     • What and when children learn: Different experiments show that children between the ages of 3 and 5 have already mastered language and their rules, even when most of them hasn't been presented or used yet, they mostly had grasped the abstract structural relations in sentences and acquire a grammar of the same design as that spoken by their parents.
       • The child's language-learning algorithm: the most basic problem in understanding how children learn language surges from the fact that the input of children consists in sounds and situations while their output is a grammar specifying, for that language, the order of arrangement of abstract entities like nound, verbs, subjects, phrase structures, control and command. one possibility is that the child sets up a massive correlation matrix, but this seems impossible to do because said features are not audibly marked in parental speech.
   • The Biology of Language Acquisition: Human language is made possible by special adaptations of the human mind and body that occurred in the course of human evolution, and which are put to use by children in acquiring their mother tongue.
   • What is Learned: To understand how something is learned, you first have to understand what that something is. Linguistic research tries to do three things: Characterize the facts of the language to learn Examine the structure of other languages try to find which aspects of grammar are universal, to know on what children's languages, to know on what children's language acquisition mechanisms find easy and hard to learn.
     • Positive Evidence: Refers to the information available to the child about which strings of words are grammatical sentences of the target language. Understanding for "grammatical" those sentences that sound natural in colloquial speach, not necessarily those that would be deemed "proper English"
     • Motherese: Refers to the way parents usually modify their speech while talking to young children, making it slower, shorter, simpler, higher-pitch, exaggerated intonation, more fluent and grammatically well-formed. Thia way of talking doesn't seem to help or harm their learning of language.
     • Prosody: Refers to the pattern of melody, timing and stress that every normal human speech has. This can mark the sounds of speech as opposed to other noises; help distinguish statements, questions and imperatives; delineate major sentence boundaries and highlight new words.
     • 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. It's proven that children do not need negative evidence to learn grammatical rules properly.
     • Context: Children learn new words through the context of the people around them and is considered as a reasonable idealization.