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Lindsay Coffin ENGL 3301 Professor Musselman November 4, 2012 Style: Wikipedia Word count: 937

Language Acquisition

Language acquisition is the process by which children and adults develop the ability to use language. The term also refers to the field of research on that process. Linguists, psychologists, sociologists, neurologists, and speech pathologists are a few of the types of scientists that participate in this research. This article focuses on child language acquisition – for more on the adult process, see [link:Second Language Acquisition]. The words 'acquisition' and 'development' are preferred in this domain over the word 'learn' because of the complex way language is built in the brain, although different kinds of learning are involved.1

[table of contents]

Areas of acquisition

Phonetics & Phonology

Acquisition of the [link:phonetics] (the set of sounds) and [link:phonology] (how those sounds interact as a system) of a language begins as early as 1 month of age, at which time infants have been shown to differentiate between similar sounds in speech.2 Children go through stages in their production of pre-linguistic sounds, becoming more speech-like until around the first birthday, when the first word is typically uttered.3

Inaccurate pronunciation of the target language is one of the most easily recognized marks of child speech. As they get older, children have an easier time producing some sounds than they do with others. Some sounds are inherently easier for children worldwide to acquire, such as /t/ and /b/, which also happen to be some of the most common sounds among the world's langauges.4 Children tend to take longer acquiring sounds that are more rarely used in their target language5, or that are simply more difficult to pronounce. In English, for example, some of the latest sounds to develop are /ð/ and /θ/ (see [link:IPA] for explanation of phonetic symbols), even though those sounds occur in very common words like 'the' and 'bath'. They appear later because they are more difficult to produce.4

Semantics

[link:Semantics] refers to words and their meanings. In developing their semantic knowledge, children undergo different stages of meaning. First they understand words in a referential sense, with a one-to-one correspondence between a word and the thing it refers to (such as “Daddy”).6 Next they develop the sense of a word representing a class of objects, meaning that there are other “Daddies” aside from the one they've come to associate the word with. Finally, a more abstract knowledge of the meaning of a word is grasped, and a child can explain what it means to someone else.6 The highest level of understanding of meaning is shown with the development of metaphor and humor, such as sarcasm.7 Theories, such as [link:fast mapping], have been put forth to explain the acquisition of words and their meanings. Another important part of the development of semantics is the use of [link:semantic roles], or the parts that different words play in an utterance.

Morphology & Syntax

Some of the most famous language acquisition research has been done in the fields of [link:morphology] and [link:syntax]. Syntax is the grammar of a language, and morphology is the interaction of the grammar and the phonology (for instance, in English we generally form plurals by adding /s/, /z/, or /əz/ to the ends of words). Linguists are interested in this development in particular because its study is useful in modeling how the brain processes grammar and language in general, which is something the scientific community is still uncertain of.8 Children acquire grammatical rules very quickly and systematically in all languages, leading some linguists (beginning with the work of [link:Noam Chomsky]) to support a [link:generative grammar].9 Others focus more heavily on the role of input and learning, subscribing to a [link:cognitive linguistics] point of view.

Another famous scientist involved in the study of grammar acquisition was psychologist [link:Roger Brown]. He carried out the first [link:longitudinal studies] to develop a hierarchy of morphological acquisition, known as [link:Brown's 14 morphemes].10 These are a set of stages children progress through in their linguistic development. The stages are assessed by [link:MLU], or mean length of utterance, which is an average of morphemes per utterance typically taken from a sample of 100 utterances. Although his studies were done on English-speaking children, the ordering of Brown's stages is found to be more or less the same in children of all languages.11

The wug test by Jean Berko Gleason is another well-known study in language acquisition. Toddlers were presented with an unfamiliar object and told it was called a 'wug'. When prompted for the plural form, toddlers unanimously offered “wugs,” following the standard grammatical rule rather than one of the variations, like “wuggen”.12 Children show a working knowledge of grammatical rules, often overgeneralizing them to create words like “eated” and “mouses”.13

Pragmatics

[link:Pragmatics] is the social aspect of language. Use of politeness forms (like “thank you”), turn-taking, [link:speech acts], and changes in [link:register] all fall under pragmatic knowledge.14 Infants start developing turn-taking very early on, babbling with their caregivers in a manner that seems conversational before they can actually talk.3 Children also show pragmatic development by using different registers in different contexts.15

Speech acts used in everyday adult speech are generally not overt – “Would you mind carrying this?” is used in place of, “I request that you carry this.”16 Young children tend to not mitigate their speech acts, producing utterances such as, “Give me that crayon,” which would seem rude in adult speech.17 Researchers observe speech acts to measure children's pragmatic knowledge.

Purposes of research

Language acquisition research increases the understanding of language as a physical, neurological, psychological, and social process. Modern research has focused on neurological imaging18, atypical language development19, cognitive processes20, and the effects of input, including [link:bilingualism] and child-directed speech (or [link:baby talk]).

Acknowledgments

The composition of this article was recommended by Professor Cecelia Musselman, whose advice was essential in getting the research started. The organization of information was greatly influenced by other Wikipedia articles and the Wikipedia content guidelines, as well as by the pedagogical style of Professor Heather Littlefield, whose course in language acquisition provided an excellent base knowledge. Notes

1. ^ Berko Gleason 2009, p. 2 2. ^ Eimas 1971 3. ^ Oller 2000 4. ^ Stoel-Gammon 1998 5. ^ Vihman 1992 6. ^ Clark 1993 7. ^ Horgan 1981 8. ^ Berko Gleason 2009, p.237 9. ^ Chomsky 1957 10. ^ Brown 1973 11. ^ Berko Gleason 2009, p.149 12. ^ Berko 1958 13. ^ Berko Gleason 2009, p.162 14. ^ Hymes 1967 15. ^ Andersen 2000 16. ^ Austin 1975 17. ^ Piaget 1926/1974 18. ^ Kuhl 2010 19. ^ Goodwin 2012 20. ^ Pinker 2010

References

Andersen, E. (2000). Exploring register knowledge: The value of “controlled improvisation.” In L. Menn & N.B. Ratner (eds.), Methods for studying language production (225-248). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Austin, John (1975). How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berko, Jean (1958). The child's learning of English morphology. Word 14 (150-177). Berko Gleason, Jean; Bernstein Ratner, Nan, eds. (2009). The Development of Language, 7th edition. Boston: Pearson. Brown, Roger (1973). A first language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chomsky, Noam (1957). Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton. Clark, E. (1993). The lexicon in acquisition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Eimas, P.D.; Siqueland, E.R.; Jusczyk, P.; Vigorito, J. (1971). Speech perception in infants. Science 171 (303-306). Goodwin, Anthony; Fein, Deborah; Naigles, Letita R. (2012). Comprehension of wh-questions precedes their production in typical development and Autism Spectrum Disorders. Autism Research 5:2 (109-123). Horgan, D. (1981). Learning to tell jokes: A case study of metalinguistic abilities. Journal of Child Language 8 (217-227). Hymes, Dell (1967). Models of the interaction of language and social setting. Journal of Social Issues 23:2 (8-28). Kuhl, Patricia (2010). Brain mechanisms in early language acquisition. Neuron 67 (713-727). Piaget, Jean (1926/1974). The language and thought of the child (M. Gabains, Trans.). New York: New American Library. Pinker, Steven (2010). The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, USA 107 (8893-8999). Oller, D.K. (2000). The emergence of the speech capacity. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Stoel-Gammon, C. (1998). Sounds and words in early language acquisition: The relationship between lexical and phonological development. In R. Paul (ed.), Exploring the speech-language connection (25-52). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes. Vihman, M.M. (1992). Early syllables and the construction of phonology. In C.A. Ferguson, L. Menn, & C. Stoel-Gammon (eds.), Phonological development: Models, research, implications. Timonium, MD: York Press.