Questions and Answers

 

Questions and Answers

1.  What do you understand when we talk about language acquisition?

Language acquisition is a creative process. It is a long and complex process by which the child acquires sufficient command of the language spoken in his family and social environment, so that he can interact in it. It takes place at a very young age. Language acquisition is a specifically human ability.

 

2.    How do you think language acquisition takes place?

Children acquire their first language in a long process, spanning five to six years and basing their success on constant interaction with other speakers, the acquisition develops in one way or another according to the linguistic environment in which they grow up. It begins with the babbling, which we consider a kind of training' and that from the six months are already oriented more and more towards the concrete imitation of sounds. At the end of the year, the process is accelerated and the already verbal stages begin to receive different names according to the number of words used: we speak of holophrastic stage and telegraph stage.

3.    What are the main theories of language acquisition?

Behavioral theory

According to this theory, in the early stages, children would reproduce all the sounds of all languages and parents would selectively reinforce, through attention or approval, those that corresponded to the native language. Reinforcement can be verbal or physical. This selective reinforcement would result in word production. Once the child was able to speak, it could produce an emission.

Innate theory

The greatest exponent of the innate theory of language acquisition is Chomsky. He was the first linguist to attempt to explain the properties. According to his theories there are universal rules that could differentiate between grammatical and non-grammatical sentences in any language. He proposed two levels of rules: one containing those of more general applicability and the other containing specific expressions of the general rules. These two levels would correspond to what he called deep structure and surface structure of language.

Vygotsky theory

Vygotsky’s theory encompasses not only the development of language but also that of other higher mental processes including all forms of intelligence and memory. His theoretical work has influenced studies on child cognitive development, especially on memory processes, problem solving, and the relationship between universal structural language-thinking and language-learning language in children.

Bruner theory

Jerome Bruner dismissed both imitation and innate and focused his studies of the origin of language on social interaction. He introduced the concept of LASS (Language Acquisition Support System) and maintained that the child would learn to speak through interaction with the mother.

4.    What does language acquisition mean for a person?

Language acquisition is a long journey that begins in the fluid world of the uterus and continues through childhood, adolescence and even beyond. During this long period of acquisition, the apprentice faces an extensive set of challenges. From the baby’s clumsy attempts to make the articulatory system of his mouth, throat and larynx produce the sounds specific to his mother tongue, to the much later complexities of producing and understanding the long narratives, language skills of the child undergo numerous changes.

5.     What other aspects does a child learn when acquiring a language?

When children acquire a language, they acquire the grammar of that language—the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules. They also acquire the pragmatic rules of the language as well as a lexicon. Children are not taught language. Rather, they extract the rules (and much of the lexicon) from the language(s) spoken around them.

6.    What happens in the holophrastic stage?

In the holophrastic stage of child language acquisition, the child’s phonological system differs in systematic ways from that in the adult grammar. The inventory of sounds and the phonemic contrasts are smaller, and there are greater constraints on phonotactic rules

7.    What is the relevant aspect in language acquisition?

In this sense, it has been proposed that one of the most relevant aspects for the acquisition of speech is precisely the perception of speech; especially that which happens from very early in life, even within the womb of the mother. Since this provides an overview of current scientific knowledge about the abilities of children under one year of age to perceive spoken language

 

8.    How are children’s language skills developing?

No one teaches children the rules of grammar or provides them with any explicit teaching of the language.  Rather, children extract the rules of the language they hear around them on their own, in effect "reinventing" the grammar of mature speakers. They do not require any specific type of environment to do this. Children exposed to different languages under different cultural and social circumstances, all develop their mother tongue during a narrow window of time, going through similar stages of development.

9.    How do babies, who have not yet learned the lexicon or rules of grammar, extract the words from the speech they hear around them?

Studies show that infants are remarkably good at extracting information from continuous speech. They seem to know what kind of cues to look for in the input that will help them to isolate words. One of the cues that English speaking children use to figure out word boundaries is stress.

 

10. What is the strategy children use to mark the beginning of a new word?

Stress is very salient to infants, and they are quick to acquire the rhythmic structure of their language. Researchers have shown that at just a few months old infants are able to discriminate native and non-native stress patterns. This is shown in production as well.