Kuhl Describes Something That Affects Our Ability To Learn Language Summary

Children’s language development usually begins in their first three months. They will begin by learning to use their voice and enjoying vocal play. Babies will watch faces and mouths to try and copy movements and sounds.

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.

* We do not always know the stages of development of the child’s mother tongue.

Deborah Fallows, the author, strives to show her readers that, while everyone does learn to talk, not conversing enough with children could negatively affect the way they learn language. She cites multiple sources, tells of her credentials, appeals to emotion, and ultimately creates an effective argument supporting her

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.

Finally, many people wrongly believe that being raised around two languages will cause their child to be delayed in their speech

32) in which case a child learning a new language can hear the new words, repeat the words and the caregiver can repeat the word again for annunciation or give the child a smile for approval in which the way a child said the word. Just like infants, children of any age can be supported in language development by that of positive reinforcement of their understanding of the language being spoken to

Language is a code made up of rules that include what words mean, how to make words, how to put them together, and what word combinations are best in what situations. Speech is the oral form of language. The purpose of this study is to find out the developmental stages the child goes through in the acquisition of language from birth to 5 years.

An interesting study was conducted by Pricilla Dunstan, a mother with an ear for sound, after she had her own baby and became aware of the different sounds her baby made in direct correlation with specific needs (Dunstan Baby Language, 2015). Careful and extensive study around the world concluded that all baby regardless of gender, race, religion, or creed, made the same 5 sounds for the same reasons (Priscilla Dunstan on Oprah, 2012). These sounds are universal; as is the ability for a child to learn any language and the sounds of individual languages.

certain languages simply do not use some of the sounds and so the children eventually stop using

Numerous theories try to explain the process of language acquisition. These theories fall into one of two camps. The environmentalist (or connectionist) theory of language acquisition asserts that language is acquired through environmental factors (Halvaei et al. 811). Theorists in this camp believe that a child learns language by gaining information from the outside world and then forming associations between words and objects. The nativist (or rationalist) approach, on the other hand, asserts that it is innate factors that determine language acquisition. Noam Chomsky, often described as “the father of modern linguistics”, falls into this camp as he believes that speech is the result of hidden rules of language that are hidden somewhere in the brain (Rahmani and Abdolmanafi 2111). Steven Pinker, a colleague of Chomsky, is a renowned psychologist, cognitive scientist and linguist who discusses his own theories on language acquisition in his book Words and Rules.

I agreed with this statement before reading Lightbrown & Spada’s text and Coelho Chapter eight because I have been around many children and I always see a child doing what I thought was imitating what they see their parents doing or talking like their parents. Behaviorism was a theory of learning that was very influential in the 1940’s and 1950’s, in the United States. B. F. Skinner believed that through behaviorism language is learned through imitation and repetition. According to Lightbrown and Spada’s reading “Traditional behaviorists hypothesized that when children imitated the language produced by those around them, their attempts to reproduce what they heard received ‘positive reinforcement’. This could take the form of praise or just successful communication” (L&S, 10). The problem with behaviorism is that imitation and practice alone cannot explain some of the forms created by children. Children are actively figuring out the rules of their languages and most language learning comes from receiving auditory or written comprehensible input. Reading Chapter eight in Coelho, she states that “Children are born with the physical ability to produce the sounds of any language, as their early babbling shows. At this stage, babies around the world sound alike. By the time they are a year old, however, infants have begun to restrict their language production to the sounds they hear around them. They imitate the

In America, English exists as the standard language. For that reason, it is understood that children will learn this as their primary language. However, according to the “National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders” website, “about two to three children per 1,000 are born deaf or hard of hearing”(Quick Statistics [NIDCD Health Information]) . Moreover, an article by Karen Kalivoda points out that “depending on the age of onset and the severity of the hearing loss, an individual's spoken language development may be radically affected”. Babies learn to speak by parroting the sounds around them; however, a deaf child does not hear these noises and, therefore, the child does not “develop their language” skills

However, Pinker (1994) then goes onto note that the particular sub-stage of reduplicated babbling occurs around 7-8 months, and states that the children will exercise phonemes and syllable patterns that are not specific to a singular language, but rather are seen as common across a variety of languages. Yet, Pinker (1994) does also argue that the children are able to distinguish between phonemes of their own mother tongue, which has been seen from birth, and this is seen to be more prominent by the time the child reaches the age of around 10 months. Pinker (1994) refers to this as the children no longer being ‘universal phoneticians’, and states that the children will no longer distinguish foreign phonemes.

* In the educational field, the teaching learning cycle is a model used in contemporary teaching in both school and adult educational settings. Rothery (1996 in Derewianka & Jones 2012, pg 43) who originally developed the model used this to aim at disadvantaged children for teaching literacy and writing in the KLA (Key learning areas) who were from socially disadvantaged areas. Over time the model has been phased across other areas of the English language such as listening, speaking, reading as well as writing. The key involvement of the teacher also known as ‘expert other’ in the teaching learning cycle is guiding the learner to understand key concepts in academic literacy through use of scaffolding strategies to transform students