Saying * gived instead of gave or *gooses instead of geese are some examples of this. If any correction is made, it is regarding the accuracy of the statements rather than their syntax.Īnother observation that learning theories cannot predict is the pattern of acquisition of irregular verb and noun forms. On the contrary, adults often imitate the childish speech of children when speaking to them. However, adults generally do not encourage children to speak like them. Skinner (1957) argued that language acquisition happens through the same mechanisms of operant conditioning that operated on other human and animal behaviour. However, imitation may play a role in the acquisition of accents, speech mannerisms and specialized vocabulary. Children often make errors that adults don’t make. The sentences produced by children acquiring language do not show imitation of adults. While children do imitate adult behaviour to some extent, this alone cannot account for language development. The simplest form of language acquisition would be simple imitation of adult language. Using such techniques (and others), psycholinguists try to determine at what age children understand the difference between phonemes, morphemes and understand syntax. Here children look longer at scene that are consistent with what they are hearing. Another technique is the preferential looking technique. This can be used to see whether an infant can detect the difference between who stimuli. If they are presented with habituated (or familiar) stimuli and then a novel stimulus pops up, the rate of sucking increases. It has been observed that babies prefer novel stimuli as opposed to stimuli that are familiar. This paradigm measures the rate of sucking an artificial pacifier as a measure of interest by the infant in a novel stimulus. One technique is the sucking habituation paradigm. Research methods that we can employ with adults is not always possible with infants. Figure 5.1 Language Acquisition Milestones Grammatically complex utterances emerge around two and a half years. These are utterances which lack grammatical elements (Brown & Bellugi, 1964). At the same time, we start to get two-word utterances. Children produce single-word utterances around 10 to 11 months followed by an extraordinary expansion of vocabulary around 18 months. This is different from vocal play in that it contains true syllables (generally CV syllables as in ‘wa wa’ for ‘water’). Babbling is observed between 6 to 9 months. This vocal play involves sounds that appear similar to speech but containing no meaning. At around 6 weeks, we start getting cooing sounds followed by vocal play between 16 weeks and 6 months (Stark, 1986). These include crying, sucking noises and burps. However, we must note that output doesn’t always assure us a clear picture of the cognitive processes that are going on within the infants’ minds.Īs seen in Figure 5.1, infants make vegetative sounds from birth. This process can be broadly divided into stages based on the characteristics of the infants’ output. The rapidity of first language acquisition is astounding to anyone who has tried to learn a second language as an adult. Language development is perhaps one of the greatest mysteries in psycholinguistics. This is the claim that all languages have some underlying common structure within which all surface structures of language emerge. Poverty of the stimulus is often used as an argument for universal grammar. All of these phenomena are often labelled the “poverty of the stimulus” (Berwick, Pietroski, Yankama, & Chomsky, 2011). There is also a lack of examples of all the grammatical structures in a language for children to derive all linguistic rules from analysing the input. Sometimes there are contractions such as gonna and wanna and words are not necessarily separated in continuous speech. Adult speech is full of slips-of-the-tongue, false starts and errors. For one thing, children hear an imperfect input. In other words, children cannot learn the rules of grammar by mere exposure to a language (Chomsky, 1965). 5.1 Language Development Chomsky and the Poverty of the StimulusĬhomsky demonstrated that children acquire linguistic rules or grammar without an inexhaustive sample of the acquired language.
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