steps in children acquiring a language

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Steps In Children Acquiring A Language

Esra TAMEREmine ÖZKURT

I. Steps in children acquiring a languageA. Definition of LanguageB. How does language develop?

a. Learning Perspective (Skinner)b. Nativist Perspective ( Chomsky)c. Interactionist Perspectived. Cognitive Perspective ( Piaget)

C. The Critical Age Period HypothesisD. Stages

a. Prelinguistic (Babbling) (0-12 months)

b. The Holophrastic Period (12- 18 months)

c. The Telegraphic Period (18-24 months)

d. Early Grammar (24-60 months)E. Conclusion

the systematic, meaningful arrangement of symbols and rules.

a symbolic code used in communication.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUGE IN OUR LIFE

to communicate with other people,

transfer information

creates a rich cultural heritage.

HOW DOES LANGUAGE DEVELOP?

starts with making limited kinds of sounds

spelling forming sentences learning basic grammatical rules

HOW CAN WE EXPLAIN THIS RAPID LANGUAGE

PROGRESS?1.Learning Perspective 2.Nativist Perspective3.Interactionist Perspective

4.Cognitive Perspective

1.LEARNING PERSPECTIVE

It argues that children imitate what they see and hear.

conditioning, punishment and reinforcement.

The main theorist associated with this perspective is B. F. Skinner.

2.NATIVIST( INNATIST) PERSPECTIVE It’s all in your mind

Humans are biologically programmed to gain knowledge.

The main theorist’s of this perspective is Noam Chomsky.

All humans have a language acquisition device and this device contains knowledge of grammatical rules.

He points out that a child could not possibly learn a language through imitation alone.

3. INTERACTIONIST PERSPECTIVE Learning from inside and out

It concerns with the interaction between environmental and biological factors.

It tends to view children as having a strong biological tendency to acquire a language.

Bruner recommends parents to employ some strategies to facilitate acquisition.

One of them is scaffolding which means using a language at a level that is slightly beyond what children can comprehend.

Another one is infant directed speech or motherese.

It means that speaking in a higher pitch and slowly to infants.

The next one is expansion and recast.

When the child begins to produce sounds, adults responds with more complex forms.

Then, the child imitates more complex forms.

Felix eated.

Yes, that’s right,Felix ate his dinner.

THE CRITICAL AGE PERIOD HYPOTHESIS

The hypothesis says that animals, including humans, are genetically programmed to acquire certain kinds of knowledge and skill at specific times in life.

There is an ideal time to acquire a language in a linguistically rich environment.

After that ideal time, language acquisition becomes much more difficult and requires conscious and regular studies.

History has documented a few ‘’ natural experiments’’. Two of the most famous cases are those of Genie and Victor.

Genie Victor

In 1799, a boy known as Victor was found naked in the woods in France.

He was about twelve years old

A young doctor Itard devoted five years to socializing Victor and trying to teach him language.

There was little progress in his language ability.

Victor responded only to sounds that had meaning for him in the forest such as animal sounds or the sounds of rain.

Genie,a thirteen –years-

old girl was discovered in California.

had spent more than eleven years tied to a chair in a small darkened room.

beaten when she made any kind of noise.

undeveloped physically, emotionally and intellectually.

had no language.

She was cared for and educated with the participation of many teachers and therapists.

She lived an a foster home and attended special schools.

Genie made remarkable progress in becoming socialized and cognitively aware.

She developed deep personal relationship

Genie’s language was not like that of a typical five-year old.

There was a larger than normal gap between comprehension and production.

She used grammatical forms inconsistently and overused formulaic and routine speech.

If language input doesn’t occur until after this time, the individual will never achieve a full command of language- especially grammatical systems.

4.COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE OF PIAGET Who was Piaget?He was a developmental

psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children.

His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"

While studying his children, Piaget developed theories concerning how children learn.

Theory of Cognitive Development

According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based.

Piaget’s Theory Differs From Others’ in Several Ways

It is concerned with children, rather than all learners.

It focuses on development, rather than learning.

It proposes discrete stages of development marked by qualitative differences.

The goal of this theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant , and then the child develops into an individual.

To explain his theory, Piaget used four stages of cognitive development.

1.Sensory- Motor Stage

In this stage, the emphasis is on movement and physical reactions.

Senses, reflexes and motor abilities develop rapidly.

Actions discovered first by accident are repeated and applied to new situations to obtain the same results.

They have object permanence competence.

In this stage Piaget shows linguistic skills as basically physical.(monopoly game)

2.Preoperational Stage: ages two through seven

The child is not yet able to think logically.

The most evident feature of this stage is egocentric.

Child sees objects from only one point of view; his own.

Lack of conservation: They can’t realize that if nothing is added or taken away, the amount stays the same regardless of alterations in shape or appearance.

(monopoly game)

3.The Concrete Operational Stage: ages seven through eleven

The child is able to perform mental operations.

They think about physical actions that she or he previously performed.

The primary characteristic of this stage is its reversibility. The child can mentally reverse the direction of his or her thought.

simple mathematical operations.

Operations are called ‘’concrete’’ because they apply only to those objects that are physically present.

Conservation

ability to classify objects.

another person’s point of view.

(monopoly game)

4.Formal Stage/ Ages Eleven through Sixteen

Children are now able to reason logically about abstract and hypothetical ideas.

using language to express and debate abstract theoretical concepts.

conceiving all the possible ways as they can solve a problem.

approaching a problem from a point of views.

developing an inner value system and a sense of moral judgment.

(monopoly game)

STAGES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

1.PRELINGUISTICS (Babbling)

First few months

During the first few months infants cry,coo and begin to babble certain sounds. Initially making sounds is unconscious and reflexive reaction but still it is important in terms of indicating baby’s needs.

APPROXIMATELY 6 TO 12 MONTHS

During the first years of life the infant’s job is to uncover the sounds of that language. Firstly these sounds they make are similar no matter what language their parents speak.

From around six months they begin to lose the ability to discriminate between sound that are not phonemic in their own language.

For example;Japanese infants can no longer hear the difference between [r] and [l] which don’t contrast in Japanese whereas babies in English-speaking homes retain this perception.

They have begun to learn the sounds of the language of their parents.

Before that they appear to know the sounds of human language in general.

Children all around the world seem to do same kind of babbling even deaf baby’s babble vocally at this stage even though they are not getting any linguistic input from speech.

This fact indicates that babbling is an internally driven behavior not a response to external stimulation.

The early babbles consist mainly of repeated consonant-vowel sequences like mama dada gaga, later babbles are more varied.

While making this sounds baby also observes responses that are given by people around him/her.

2. APPROXIMATELY 12-18 MONTHS One-word utterance-

It is accepted that this stage is the most critical stage of language development.

The child begins to produce her first meaningful words and also uses gestures to communicate at this stage. For example; reaching upwards to indicate that she wants to be lifted up.

The child also tries to explain many things with only a single word like BALL to express GIVE ME THAT BALL.

That is called holophrastic stage.

At this stage she realizes that sound are related to meanings and apprehends the meaning of words.

3.Approximately 18 To 24 Months -telegraphic speech-

Baby starts to put words together and they speak in the shortest way with two or three words so this stage called telegraphic speech stage.

At this stage the child has a vocabulary of 400 words.

Baby starts making multi-word utterances that lack function words like conjunctions, articles.

 describing events-- Me fallvocational relations-- toy in box

 

4.EARLY GRAMMAR (24 TO 60 MONTHS)

During this stage a child acquires some grammatical devices such as determiners, pronouns, past tense…

They continue to go through acquisition of auxiliary verbs, prepositions and using syntactic transformations.

They can learn the grammar rules, sentence structure.

They engage in more social conversations with peers at this stage.

They have almost normal speech with good command over syntax, semantics and also have ability of defining words or correcting their own grammatical mistakes because they involve conscious awareness of the properties of language.

By the age of 5 most children have a vocabulary of over 1.500 words.

 

REFERENCES:1.Shaffer, D.R.(2001). Developmental Psychology (6th ed.). USA, Wadsworth.

2.Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., Hyams, N.(2007). An Introduction To Language (8th Ed.). USA.

3.Rahimpour, M. ‘’Developmental Stages Of Child Language’’. Journal Of Faculty Of Letters And Humanity. Vol.47, No.190, Pp.57-70

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/ling001/acquisition.htmlhttp://aggslanguage.wordpress.com/chomsky/ http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/lang-acq.cfm http://iteslj.org/Articles/McGlothlin-ChildLearn.htmlhttp://gelisimveogrenme.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/piagetye-gc3b6re-dil-gelic59fiminin-evreleri.pdf

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