"LANGUAGE ACQUISITION" HOW CHILDREN ACQUIRE LANGUAGE.

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words 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 infants 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.

HOW CHILDREN ACQUIRE LANGUAGE.

HOW CHILDREN ACQUIRE LANGUAGE Over the last few decades research into child language acquisition has been revolutionized by the use of ingenious new techniques which allow one to investigate what in fact infants (that is children not yet able to speak) can perceive when exposed to a stream of speech sound, the discriminations they can make between different speech sounds, differentspeech sound sequences and different words. However on the central features of the mystery, the extraordinarily rapid acquisition of lexicon and complex syntactic structures, little solid progress has been made. The questions being researched are how infants acquire and produce the speech sounds (phonemes) of the community language; how infants find words in the stream of speech; and how they link words to perceived objects or action, that is, discover meanings. In a recent general review in Nature of children's language acquisition, Patricia Kuhl also asked why we do not learn new languages as easily at 50 as at 5 and why computers have not cracked the human linguistic code.

 

How Children Learn Languages

Learning a language—learning a first language or learning a fourth—is an exceptional accomplishment for anybody. Yet everyone completes this process and does so successfully at least once in their life.

Linguists—those researchers who devote their lives and thoughts to studying the intricacies and nuances of language—call the learning process "doubtless the greatest intellectual feat any one of us is ever required to perform." Yet this achievement is often taken completely for granted. For non-linguists (like most of us), the magnitude of this accomplishment only becomes apparent when we step back and think of everything that goes into the first few faltering steps we take toward language.

Recent theories point to social interaction as the primary condition that allows children to learn language. You don't need to be a linguistics professor or a developmental psychologist to understand how children learn language. Just being a parent is enough to pick up on a lot of lessons. Here are some typical milestones to help you understand how children learn language.

How do children develop?

Like the rest of us, children are individuals. What makes them different from adults, as a whole, is that children are reared in adult worlds according to adult expectations. Children learn to model their behaviour on what goes on around them, be it dress codes, body language, table manners or language uses, usually first through their caregivers and later through peers in their family, neighbourhood or school. That is, children are learning how to function adequately in their environment, and much of this learning takes place through language itself. We talk to children to tell them about our adult world and they learn about the world from what we tell them. But they also learn about our language, from how we use it to tell them about other things. This means that language learning is going on whenever language is used around children.

Do all children learn at the same rate?

Language acquisition is not a competitive sport either. Children are not aiming to reach or surpass some level of language or some time frame that someone else set for them. They are competing only with themselves, on their own terms. The child whose speech is most advanced at the age of 2 is not necessarily going to be a higher achiever at age 20 than the child who was slower to learn language. Language is only part of what children have to learn and a child who seems slower might be learning in a different way, or concentrating on other things.

Children won't learn anything which they are not ready for -- they may parrot things that you or someone else tries to 'teach' them, but a parrot only learns to parrot. What your child is ready for is not found in books or in someone else's children. It's found in your child, and to learn about your child you must also give yourself -- and your child -- time. Your children are as new to you as everything they are learning about is to them.

What strategies do children use in learning language?

All human beings, young and old, follow two kinds of learning strategy. One, drawing on physical ability, is that we learn in stages (we make sure we can walk before we run). The other, drawing on intellectual ability, is that we generalize from past experience (if you see an insect that you never saw before and that looks like a cockroach you're likely to think it may be a cockroach). These strategies help us explain child productions in the whole of language, from pronunciation through vocabulary and grammar to skills like how to hold a conversation. The following examples deal with pronunciation and word learning because they concern the most common questions received at Ask-a-Linguist. In what follows, we give only rough guidelines for the ages associated with particular stages of development. As said above, a child's physical and cognitive progress is best assessed against the child itself, so that specific age ranges matter less than the child's progress from one stage to the next. Resources detailing milestones in overall child development are included at the end of this article.