How Does A Child Acquire Language?

“Oral language is a skill that is acquired naturally by the young. The importance of its development in early childhood cannot be overemphasised. It underpins the whole scope of learning and is employed to question, to seek information and to proffer ideas. A child who has a well – grounded ability in oral language will usually be nicely poised to cope with reading and writing. Anyone who lacks this will be at a disadvantage.” (J.Fellowes & G.Oakley, 2010, pp4) It is a vital component of every human beings life as it is a means of communication and interaction with their family, friends and

All language theorists acknowledge nature and nurture both play significant roles in children’s language development. However, the theoretical debate to whether nature or nurture is the dominant tool during a child’s language

Nature and nurture both play a significant role in language development. Language development refers to how children understand, organise, speak and use words in order to communicate at an effective, age-appropriate level (Karen Kearns, 2013, P.105). For centuries, theorists have been debating the roles of nature versus nurture. Although, each child’s language will develop at their own pace and there will be many individual differences based on culture, ethnicity, health and ability. As well as physical, social, emotional and cognitive development in which will contribute to a child’s language development.

First, children¡¯s acquisition of language is an innate mechanism that enables a child to analyze language and extract the basic rules of grammar, granted by Chomsky. It basically states that humans are born with a language acquisition device that, the ability to learn a language rapidly as children. However, there is one important controversy in language acquisition concerns how we acquire language; since Chomsky fails to adequately explain individual differences. From the behaviorists¡¯ perspectives, the language is learned like other learned behaviors. It is learned through operant

According to Hutchison (2015), around age four, children expand their vocabularies at an ever increasing rate and are able to incorporate new words into eight to ten word sentences, “but the most remarkable aspect of language development in early childhood is the understanding of grammar rules. By age four, young children in all cultures understand the basic grammar rules of their language. They accomplish this mostly by a figuring out process.

The communication with your child starts way before the youngster can speak. From their cry, smile, and the responses they give you to help you understand his or her needs. Language developments have different stages that children pass through to assist them in the development of speech and languages. There are a plethora of factors which can inhabitants’ a child language development. However, these are amongst the top causes for language development such as a child’s inborn ability to learn language and the language the child hears.

Dramatic steps in language acquisition are seen from ages two through six. The explosion of vocabulary is attributed to the connection of a new vocabulary word to new concept using a process called fast-mapping. Children only start to grasp the basics of grammar by constructing simple sentences. Overregularization occurs when acquired grammatical rules are used so consistently that they overuse the rules and miss the exceptions to the rules.

Carol Chomsky studied the syntactic acquisition of children ages 5-10 in 1969. In order to do this, she created a series of experiments that involved different complex syntactic structures to test approximately when children have mastered certain syntactic structures. Her book, The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10 (1969) focuses on 4 experiments: (1) the Easy to see experiment, (2) the Promise experiment, (3) the Ask/tell experiment, and the Pronominalization experiment. This paper focuses on the first experiment, conducting Carol Chomsky’s original experiment as well as a variant on both of the participant.

Lastly, it is important to include Norm Chomsky every time we talk about language acquisition. Through his studies we can say that children can learn a new language because of their innate ability in their brain to be able to classify different words, specifically grammatical terms. He suggested that we have a device in our brain which he called a Language Acquisition Device that allows children to notice the differences between two languages. In my opinion if all of us have this device. All the child needs to stimulate it to be able to learn those important first words that a child is going to need as they further exposed into a language.

However, it can be argued with (Bruner 1964) that social interaction doesn’t explain all the complexities of language acquisition. Almost every day the language we hear is often incorrect, poorly defined, incomplete and full of hesitations, mispronunciations and other errors, and yet despite this we still learn to talk following the correct grammatical rules. Again this indicates the idea of Chomsky’s (1968) LAD model that children are born ‘hard-wired’ with the innate knowledge of linguistic rules and so these rules help the baby make estimations and presumptions about the language it is hearing. From these estimations and presumption the child can work out grammatical sets of rules and when more language is exposed to them, the more their language develops. Even within Chomsky’s (1968) LAD theory, undoubtedly he believed the role and promotion of the ‘nature’ aspect is the core foundation on which language can develop. But his theory also requires the role of nurture

As part of language acquisition children make overgeneralisations. Conventionally, the importance in describing the process has been on how children go further than their original utterance and draw out the consistencies that will allow them to produce and comprehend an unlimited number of new sentences. However, in some instances it can be seen that children can overgeneralise, causing them to produce grammars and sentences that contain both correct and incorrect constructions (Bowerman, 1988).

Language is a communicative system of words and symbols unique to humans. The origins of language are still a mystery as fossil remains cannot speak. However, the rudiments of language can be inferred through studying linguistic development in children and the cognitive and communicative abilities of primates as discussed by Bridgeman (2003). This essay illustrates the skills infants have that will eventually help them to acquire language. The topics covered are firstly, the biological aspects, the contribution of the human brain to language development? Secondly, key theories of language development will be considered. Is the development innate? Is there a critical period? Thirdly, what must be learned? What are the rudiments infants must

In the other hand, behaviorists view language as complex and leaned skill, much like playing piano and dancing. B.F. Skinner argued that language represents nothing more than chains of responses acquired through reinforcement. Putting differently, children learn though process of reinforcement. For example, baby babbles “mama” the mother happily reward the baby with a hug and kisses and eventually will push the baby to say “mama” more and more; due to these reward children are motivated to repeat the behavior, thereby shaping their language and ensuring their development. Children’s language is being built up, this describe a way in which children environmental experiences influence and improve their language skills. Also that’s why parents

From a baby 's first word to their first complete sentence, there 's a lot to debate with their language development. The average child has a vocabulary of up to six-thousand words by the time they turn five years old (Brighthubcom, 2016). Language development is one of the most critical roles for an educator in both early childhood and primary settings. It is this ability of language development that is particularly interesting in the nature vs nurture debate. In order for educators to provide effective communication, it is important that they have the knowledge and understanding of the four key concepts of language, such as phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic development and the underlying theoretical perspectives that explain the processes of language acquisition and development.

Some linguistic models try to explain the development of second language acquisition. The three most common models are (1) the Universal Grammar Model, (2) the Competition Model, and (3) the Monitor Model. The Universal Grammar Model refers to the system of principles, conditions, and rules that are properties or elements of all human languages. At the same time, each language has grammatical rules that vary from one language to another. Thus, Chomky states that different languages have a limited possibility of different grammatical structures (1975). Therefore, second language learners base their second language acquisition on universal principles common to all languages, and on the force of the particular rules of each language. All of those can be concluded that as a human, especially as children, we have vary form of rules in language, in this case is second language.