Language acquisition
Encyclopedia
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use word
s to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax
, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary
. This language might be vocal as with speech or manual as in sign
. Language acquisition usually refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, rather than second language acquisition
, which deals with acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.
The capacity to acquire and use language is a key aspect that distinguishes humans from other organisms. While many forms of animal communication
exist, they have a limited range of nonsyntactically structured vocabulary tokens that lack cross cultural variation between groups.
A major concern in understanding language acquisition is how these capacities are picked up by infant
s from what appears to be very little input. A range of theories of language acquisition has been created in order to explain this apparent problem including innatism
in which a child is born prepared in some manner with these capacities, as opposed to the other theories in which language is simply learned.
felt that the word-meaning mapping in some form was innate. Sanskrit grammarians debated over twelve centuries whether meaning was god-given (possibly innate) or was learned from older convention—e.g. a child learning the word for cow by listening to trusted speakers talking about cows.
In modern times, empiricists like Hobbes and Locke
argued that knowledge (and for Locke, language) emerge ultimately from abstracted sense impressions. This led to Carnap
's Aufbau, an attempt to learn all knowledge from sense datum, using the notion of "remembered as similar" to bind these into clusters, which would eventually map to language.
Under Behaviorism
, it was argued that language may be learned through a form of operant conditioning
. In B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour (1957), he suggested that the successful use of a sign such as a word or lexical unit, given a certain stimulus, reinforces
its "momentary" or contextual probability. Empiricist
theories of language acquisition include statistical learning theories of language acquisition, Relational Frame Theory
, functionalist linguistics, social interactionist theory
, and usage-based language acquisition.
This behaviourist idea was strongly attacked by Noam Chomsky
in a review article in 1959, calling it "largely mythology" and a "serious delusion". Instead, Chomsky argued for a more theoretical approach, based on a study of syntax
.
provides innately and what are those behaviors that are realized by environmental exposure, which is nurture.
(Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, Roche, 2001), provides a wholly selectionist/learning account of the origin and development of language competence and complexity. Based upon the principles of Skinnerian behaviorism
, RFT posits that children acquire language purely through interacting with the environment. RFT theorists introduced the concept of functional contextualism
in language learning, which emphasizes the importance of predicting and influencing psychological events, such as thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, by focusing on manipulable variables in their context. RFT distinguishes itself from Skinner's work by identifying and defining a particular type of operant conditioning
known as derived relational responding, a learning process that to date appears to occur only in humans possessing a capacity for language. Empirical studies supporting the predictions of RFT suggest that children learn language via a system of inherent reinforcements, challenging the view that language acquisition is based upon innate, language-specific cognitive capacities.
theories, such as MacWhinney's
competition model, posit that language acquisition is a cognitive process that emerges from the interaction of biological pressures and the environment. According to these theories, neither nature nor nurture alone is sufficient to trigger language learning; both of these influences must work together in order to allow children to acquire a language. The proponents of these theories argue that general cognitive processes subserve language acquisition and that the end result of these processes is language-specific phenomena, such as word learning
and grammar acquisition
. The findings of many empirical studies support the predictions of these theories, suggesting that language acquisition is a more complex process than many believe.
, associated especially with the work of Noam Chomsky
, is currently one of the principal approaches to children's acquisition of syntax. The leading idea is that human biology imposes narrow constraints on the child's "hypothesis space" during language acquisition. In the Principles and Parameters
Framework, which has dominated generative syntax since Chomsky's (1980) Lectures on Government and Binding, the acquisition of syntax resembles ordering from a menu: The human brain comes equipped with a limited set of choices, and the child selects the correct options using her parents' speech, in combination with the context.
An important argument in favor of the generative approach is the Poverty of the stimulus
argument. The child's input (a finite number of sentences encountered by the child, together with information about the context in which they were uttered) is in principle compatible with an infinite number of conceivable grammars. Moreover, few if any children can rely on corrective feedback from adults when they make a grammatical error. Yet, barring situations of medical abnormality or extreme privation, all the children in a given speech-community converge on very much the same grammar by the age of about five years. An especially dramatic example is provided by children who for medical reasons are unable to produce speech, and therefore can literally never be corrected for a grammatical error, yet nonetheless converge on the same grammar as their typically developing peers, according to comprehension-based tests of grammar.
Considerations such as these have led Chomsky, Jerry Fodor
, Eric Lenneberg
and others to argue that the types of grammar that the child needs to consider must be narrowly constrained by human biology (the nativist
position). These innate constraints are sometimes referred to as universal grammar
, the human "language faculty," or the "language instinct."
Further, while generative theory has several hypothetical constructs (such as movement, empty categories, complex underlying structures, and strict binary branching) that cannot possibly be acquired from any amount of linguistic input, it is unclear that human language is actually anything like the generative conception of it. Since language, as imagined by nativists, is unlearnably complex, subscribers to this theory argue that it must therefore be innate. A different theory of language, however, may yield different conclusions. While all theories of language acquisition posit some degree of innateness, a less convoluted theory might involve less innate structure and more learning. Under such a theory of grammar, the input, combined with both general and language-specific learning capacities, might be sufficient for acquisition.
Since 1980, linguists studying children, such as Melissa Bowerman
, and psychologists following Jean Piaget
, like Elizabeth Bates
and Jean Mandler, came to suspect that there may indeed be many learning processes involved in the acquisition process, and that ignoring the role of learning may have been a mistake.
In recent years, opposition to the nativist position has multiplied. The debate has centered on whether the inborn capabilities are language-specific or domain-general, such as those that enable the infant to visually make sense of the world in terms of objects and actions. The anti-nativist view has many strands, but a frequent theme is that language emerges from usage in social contexts, using learning mechanisms that are a part of a general cognitive learning apparatus (which is what is innate). This position has been championed by Elizabeth Bates
, Catherine Snow
, Brian MacWhinney
, Michael Tomasello
, Michael Ramscar, William O'Grady, and others. Philosophers, such as Fiona Cowie and Barbara Scholz with Geoffrey Pullum
have also argued against certain nativist claims in support of empiricism.
Some language acquisition researchers, such as Elissa Newport
, Richard Aslin, and Jenny Saffran
, believe that language acquisition is based primarily on general learning
mechanisms, namely statistical learning. The development of connectionist models that are able to successfully learn words and syntactical conventions supports the predictions of statistical learning theories of language acquisition, as do empirical studies of children's learning of words and syntax.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
have developed a computer model analyzing early toddler conversations to predict the structure of later conversations. They showed that toddlers develop their own individual rules for speaking with slots into which they could put certain kinds of words. A significant outcome of the research was that rules inferred from toddler speech were better predictors of subsequent speech than traditional grammars.
. Children with reduced abilities to repeat nonwords (a marker of speech repetition abilities) show a slower rate of vocabulary expansion than children for whom this is easy. It has been proposed that the elementary units of speech has been selected to enhance the ease with which sound and visual input can be mapped into motor vocalization. Several computational models of vocabulary acquisition have been proposed so far.
; that is, when they meet an unfamiliar word, children can use information in its context to correctly guess its rough area of meaning.
has been associated with phonological buffer integrity or length
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
s to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary
Vocabulary
A person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
. This language might be vocal as with speech or manual as in sign
Sign language
A sign language is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's...
. Language acquisition usually refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, rather than second language acquisition
Second language acquisition
Second-language acquisition or second-language learning is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the name of the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process...
, which deals with acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.
The capacity to acquire and use language is a key aspect that distinguishes humans from other organisms. While many forms of animal communication
Animal communication
Animal communication is any behavior on the part of one animal that has an effect on the current or future behaviour of another animal. The study of animal communication, is sometimes called Zoosemiotics has played an important part in the...
exist, they have a limited range of nonsyntactically structured vocabulary tokens that lack cross cultural variation between groups.
A major concern in understanding language acquisition is how these capacities are picked up by infant
Infant
A newborn or baby is the very young offspring of a human or other mammal. A newborn is an infant who is within hours, days, or up to a few weeks from birth. In medical contexts, newborn or neonate refers to an infant in the first 28 days after birth...
s from what appears to be very little input. A range of theories of language acquisition has been created in order to explain this apparent problem including innatism
Innatism
Innatism is a philosophical doctrine that holds that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge, and that therefore the mind is not a 'blank slate' at birth, as early empiricists such as John Locke claimed...
in which a child is born prepared in some manner with these capacities, as opposed to the other theories in which language is simply learned.
History
PlatoPlato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
felt that the word-meaning mapping in some form was innate. Sanskrit grammarians debated over twelve centuries whether meaning was god-given (possibly innate) or was learned from older convention—e.g. a child learning the word for cow by listening to trusted speakers talking about cows.
In modern times, empiricists like Hobbes and Locke
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
argued that knowledge (and for Locke, language) emerge ultimately from abstracted sense impressions. This led to Carnap
Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism....
's Aufbau, an attempt to learn all knowledge from sense datum, using the notion of "remembered as similar" to bind these into clusters, which would eventually map to language.
Under Behaviorism
Behaviorism
Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
, it was argued that language may be learned through a form of operant conditioning
Operant conditioning
Operant conditioning is a form of psychological learning during which an individual modifies the occurrence and form of its own behavior due to the association of the behavior with a stimulus...
. In B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour (1957), he suggested that the successful use of a sign such as a word or lexical unit, given a certain stimulus, reinforces
Reinforcement
Reinforcement is a term in operant conditioning and behavior analysis for the process of increasing the rate or probability of a behavior in the form of a "response" by the delivery or emergence of a stimulus Reinforcement is a term in operant conditioning and behavior analysis for the process of...
its "momentary" or contextual probability. Empiricist
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
theories of language acquisition include statistical learning theories of language acquisition, Relational Frame Theory
Relational frame theory
Relational frame theory, or RFT, is a psychological theory of human language and cognition. It was developed largely through the efforts of Steven C...
, functionalist linguistics, social interactionist theory
Social interactionist theory
Social Interactionist Theory is number of proven hypotheses of language acquisition methods in which a variety of its forms including written, spoken, or visual as a social tool consisting of a complex system of symbols and rules on the question of language acquisition and development—the...
, and usage-based language acquisition.
This behaviourist idea was strongly attacked by Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
in a review article in 1959, calling it "largely mythology" and a "serious delusion". Instead, Chomsky argued for a more theoretical approach, based on a study of syntax
Syntactic Structures
Syntactic Structures is an seminal book in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. It laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar...
.
Social interactionism
Social interactionist theory consists of a number of hypotheses on language acquisition. These hypotheses deal with written, spoken, or visual social tools which consist of complex systems of symbols and rules on language acquisition and development. The compromise between “nature” and “nurture” is the “interactionist” approach. In addition, for years, psychologists and researchers have been asking the same question. What are the language behaviors that natureNature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
provides innately and what are those behaviors that are realized by environmental exposure, which is nurture.
Relational frame theory
The relational frame theoryRelational frame theory
Relational frame theory, or RFT, is a psychological theory of human language and cognition. It was developed largely through the efforts of Steven C...
(Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, Roche, 2001), provides a wholly selectionist/learning account of the origin and development of language competence and complexity. Based upon the principles of Skinnerian behaviorism
Behaviorism
Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
, RFT posits that children acquire language purely through interacting with the environment. RFT theorists introduced the concept of functional contextualism
Functional contextualism
Functional contextualism is a modern philosophy of science rooted in philosophical pragmatism and contextualism. It is most actively developed in behavioral science in general and the field of behavior analysis in particular...
in language learning, which emphasizes the importance of predicting and influencing psychological events, such as thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, by focusing on manipulable variables in their context. RFT distinguishes itself from Skinner's work by identifying and defining a particular type of operant conditioning
Operant conditioning
Operant conditioning is a form of psychological learning during which an individual modifies the occurrence and form of its own behavior due to the association of the behavior with a stimulus...
known as derived relational responding, a learning process that to date appears to occur only in humans possessing a capacity for language. Empirical studies supporting the predictions of RFT suggest that children learn language via a system of inherent reinforcements, challenging the view that language acquisition is based upon innate, language-specific cognitive capacities.
Emergentism
EmergentistEmergentism
In philosophy, emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind, and as it contrasts with reductionism. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is in some sense more than the "sum" of the properties of the system's parts...
theories, such as MacWhinney's
Brian MacWhinney
Brian James MacWhinney is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He specializes in first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and the neurological bases of language, and he has written and edited several books and over 100 peer-reviewed...
competition model, posit that language acquisition is a cognitive process that emerges from the interaction of biological pressures and the environment. According to these theories, neither nature nor nurture alone is sufficient to trigger language learning; both of these influences must work together in order to allow children to acquire a language. The proponents of these theories argue that general cognitive processes subserve language acquisition and that the end result of these processes is language-specific phenomena, such as word learning
Vocabulary development
Vocabulary development is the process whereby speakers of language enhance their working vocabularies with new words.During his/her infancy, a child builds a vocabulary by instinct, with little effort. Infants imitate words that they hear and then associate those words with objects and actions....
and grammar acquisition
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
. The findings of many empirical studies support the predictions of these theories, suggesting that language acquisition is a more complex process than many believe.
Generativism
Generative grammarGenerative grammar
In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
, associated especially with the work of Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
, is currently one of the principal approaches to children's acquisition of syntax. The leading idea is that human biology imposes narrow constraints on the child's "hypothesis space" during language acquisition. In the Principles and Parameters
Principles and parameters
Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles and specific parameters that for particular languages are either turned on or off...
Framework, which has dominated generative syntax since Chomsky's (1980) Lectures on Government and Binding, the acquisition of syntax resembles ordering from a menu: The human brain comes equipped with a limited set of choices, and the child selects the correct options using her parents' speech, in combination with the context.
An important argument in favor of the generative approach is the Poverty of the stimulus
Poverty of the stimulus
In linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus is the assertion that natural language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a language, and therefore that this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity...
argument. The child's input (a finite number of sentences encountered by the child, together with information about the context in which they were uttered) is in principle compatible with an infinite number of conceivable grammars. Moreover, few if any children can rely on corrective feedback from adults when they make a grammatical error. Yet, barring situations of medical abnormality or extreme privation, all the children in a given speech-community converge on very much the same grammar by the age of about five years. An especially dramatic example is provided by children who for medical reasons are unable to produce speech, and therefore can literally never be corrected for a grammatical error, yet nonetheless converge on the same grammar as their typically developing peers, according to comprehension-based tests of grammar.
Considerations such as these have led Chomsky, Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...
, Eric Lenneberg
Eric Lenneberg
Eric Heinz Lenneberg was a linguist and neurologist who pioneered ideas on language acquisition and cognitive psychology, particularly in terms of the concept of innateness....
and others to argue that the types of grammar that the child needs to consider must be narrowly constrained by human biology (the nativist
Psychological nativism
In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are 'native' or hard wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to empiricism, the 'blank slate' or tabula rasa view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but...
position). These innate constraints are sometimes referred to as universal grammar
Universal grammar
Universal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.Usually credited to Noam Chomsky, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest themselves without being taught...
, the human "language faculty," or the "language instinct."
Empiricism
Since Chomsky in the 1950s, many criticisms of the basic assumptions of generative theory have been put forth. Critics argue that the concept of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is unsupported by evolutionary anthropology, which tends to show a gradual adaptation of the human brain and vocal chords to the use of language, rather than a sudden appearance of a complete set of binary parameters delineating the whole spectrum of possible grammars ever to have existed and ever to exist. (Binary parameters are common to digital computers but not, as it turns out, to neurological systems such as the human brain.)Further, while generative theory has several hypothetical constructs (such as movement, empty categories, complex underlying structures, and strict binary branching) that cannot possibly be acquired from any amount of linguistic input, it is unclear that human language is actually anything like the generative conception of it. Since language, as imagined by nativists, is unlearnably complex, subscribers to this theory argue that it must therefore be innate. A different theory of language, however, may yield different conclusions. While all theories of language acquisition posit some degree of innateness, a less convoluted theory might involve less innate structure and more learning. Under such a theory of grammar, the input, combined with both general and language-specific learning capacities, might be sufficient for acquisition.
Since 1980, linguists studying children, such as Melissa Bowerman
Melissa Bowerman
Melissa Bowerman was a leading researcher in the area of language acquisition. She was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics....
, and psychologists following Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"....
, like Elizabeth Bates
Elizabeth Bates
Elizabeth Bates was a Professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego...
and Jean Mandler, came to suspect that there may indeed be many learning processes involved in the acquisition process, and that ignoring the role of learning may have been a mistake.
In recent years, opposition to the nativist position has multiplied. The debate has centered on whether the inborn capabilities are language-specific or domain-general, such as those that enable the infant to visually make sense of the world in terms of objects and actions. The anti-nativist view has many strands, but a frequent theme is that language emerges from usage in social contexts, using learning mechanisms that are a part of a general cognitive learning apparatus (which is what is innate). This position has been championed by Elizabeth Bates
Elizabeth Bates
Elizabeth Bates was a Professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego...
, Catherine Snow
Catherine E. Snow
Catherine Elizabeth Snow is an educational psychologist who has contributed significantly to theories of bilingualism and language acquisition through parent-child interaction. More recently, Snow's research has focused on early childhood literacy, investigating linguistic and social factors that...
, Brian MacWhinney
Brian MacWhinney
Brian James MacWhinney is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He specializes in first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and the neurological bases of language, and he has written and edited several books and over 100 peer-reviewed...
, Michael Tomasello
Michael Tomasello
Michael Tomasello is an American developmentalpsychologist. He is a co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.-Life:...
, Michael Ramscar, William O'Grady, and others. Philosophers, such as Fiona Cowie and Barbara Scholz with Geoffrey Pullum
Geoffrey Pullum
Geoffrey Keith "Geoff" Pullum is a British-American linguist specialising in the study of English. , he is Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh....
have also argued against certain nativist claims in support of empiricism.
Statistical learning
Statistical learning suggests that in learning language, a learner would use the natural statistical properties of language to deduce its structure, including sound patterns, words, and the beginnings of grammar. The statistical abilities are effective but also limited by what qualifies as input, what is done with that input, and by the structure of the resulting output.Some language acquisition researchers, such as Elissa Newport
Elissa L. Newport
Elissa L. Newport is George Eastman Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the University of Rochester. She specializes in language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on the relationship between language development and language...
, Richard Aslin, and Jenny Saffran
Jenny Saffran
Jenny Saffran is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She specializes in language acquisition and early cognitive development, and she also conducts research on music cognition. Saffran views language acquisition as based on general cognitive processes such as...
, believe that language acquisition is based primarily on general learning
Learning
Learning is acquiring new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves.Human learning...
mechanisms, namely statistical learning. The development of connectionist models that are able to successfully learn words and syntactical conventions supports the predictions of statistical learning theories of language acquisition, as do empirical studies of children's learning of words and syntax.
Chunking
Chunking theories of language acquisition constitute a group of theories related to statistical learning theories in that they assume that the input from the environment plays an essential role; however, they postulate different learning mechanisms. The central idea of these theories is that language development occurs through the incremental acquisition of meaningful chunks of elementary constituents, which can be words, phonemes, or syllables. Recently, this approach has been highly successful in simulating several phenomena in the acquisition of syntactic categories and the acquisition of phonological knowledge. The approach has several features that make it unique: the models are implemented as computer programs, which enables clear-cut and quantitative predictions to be made; they learn from naturalistic input, made of actual child-directed utterances; they produce actual utterances, which can be compared with children’s utterances; and they have simulated phenomena in several languages, including English, Spanish, and German.Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is a research institute based in Leipzig, Germany, founded in 1997. It is part of the Max Planck Society network....
have developed a computer model analyzing early toddler conversations to predict the structure of later conversations. They showed that toddlers develop their own individual rules for speaking with slots into which they could put certain kinds of words. A significant outcome of the research was that rules inferred from toddler speech were better predictors of subsequent speech than traditional grammars.
Vocabulary acquisition
The capacity to acquire the ability to incorporate the pronunciation of new words depends upon the capacity to engage in speech repetitionSpeech repetition
thumb|250px|right|[[Children]] copy with their own [[mouth]]s the words spoken by the mouths of those around them. This enables them to learn the [[pronunciation]] of words not already in their [[vocabulary]]....
. Children with reduced abilities to repeat nonwords (a marker of speech repetition abilities) show a slower rate of vocabulary expansion than children for whom this is easy. It has been proposed that the elementary units of speech has been selected to enhance the ease with which sound and visual input can be mapped into motor vocalization. Several computational models of vocabulary acquisition have been proposed so far.
Meaning
Children learn on average 10 to 15 new word meanings each day, but only one of these words can be accounted for by direct instruction. The other nine to 14 word meanings need to be picked up in some other way. It has been proposed that children acquire these meanings with the use of processes modeled by latent semantic analysisLatent semantic analysis
Latent semantic analysis is a technique in natural language processing, in particular in vectorial semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms. LSA assumes that words that are close...
; that is, when they meet an unfamiliar word, children can use information in its context to correctly guess its rough area of meaning.
Neurocognitive research
According to several linguists, neurocognitive research has confirmed many standards of language learning, such as: "learning engages the entire person (cognitive, affective, and psychomotor dominas), the human brain seeks patterns in its searching for meaning, emotions affect all aspects of learning, retention and recall, past experience always affects new learning, the brain's working memory has a limited capacity, lecture usually results in the lowest degree of retention, rehearsal is essential for retention, practice [alone] does not make perfect, and each brain is unique" (Sousa, 2006, p. 274). In terms of genetics, the gene ROBO1ROBO1
Roundabout homolog 1 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the ROBO1 gene.- Function :Bilateral symmetric nervous systems have special midline structures that establish a partition between the two mirror image halves. Some axons project toward and across the midline in response to long-range...
has been associated with phonological buffer integrity or length
See also
- Creole languageCreole languageA creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
- Glossary of language teaching terms and ideasGlossary of language teaching terms and ideasLanguage teaching, like other educational activities, may employ specialized vocabulary and word use. This list is a glossary for English language learning and teaching using the communicative approach.- Accuracy - Burnout :...
- Language acquisition through motor planningLanguage acquisition through motor planningLanguage Acquisition Through Motor Planning is an Augmentative Alternative Communication approach designed to give individuals who are non-verbal or have limited verbal abilities a method of independently and spontaneously expressing themselves through the use of a voice output communication device...
(LAMP) - Language developmentLanguage developmentLanguage development is a process starting early in human life, when a person begins to acquire language by learning it as it is spoken and by mimicry. Children's language development moves from simple to complex. Infants start without language. Yet by four months of age, babies can read lips and...
- List of language acquisition researchers
- Metalinguistic awarenessMetalinguistic awarenessMetalinguistic Awareness refers to the ability to objectify language as a process as well as a thing. The concept of Metalinguistic Awareness is helpful to explaining the execution and transfer of linguistic knowledge across languages Metalinguistic Awareness refers to the ability to objectify...
- Origin of LanguageOrigin of languageThe origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...
- Passive speakers (language)Passive speakers (language)A passive speaker is someone who has had enough exposure to a language in childhood to have a native-like comprehension of it, but has little or no active command of it....
- Second language acquisitionSecond language acquisitionSecond-language acquisition or second-language learning is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the name of the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process...
- Second language attritionSecond language attritionSecond-language attrition occurs whenever the learner uses the second language to an “insufficient degree or due to environmental changes the language use is limited and another language is becoming the dominant one .- Definition :“Almost everybody who has learned a foreign language shares the...