Language in a human is a wired feature in the human’s brain
which allows humans express thoughts, communicate, and problem solve. Language
is used by people daily to express things verbally, physically, visually, and
through writings that a person does. An
important part of being able to communicate is to have a well-established
structure of language and being able to comprehend the functions of language.
Before being able to communicate or repeat back a language an individual as a
child has to acquire language effectively. Through language acquisition a
person will acquire the ability to and capacity for perceiving and
comprehending language as well as produce and use words or sentences to
communicate (Savignon, 1983). This
presentation is going to cover language including the theories of language
acquisition, language’s function, and the structure of language.
There are several theories on language acquisition in humans
that combine the importance of either nature or nurture in how a human acquires
language and uses it to communicate. The general acknowledgement has been that
some aspects of language acquisition result from nature and the way that the
human brain has been wired as well as some components being shaped by
particular language environments, the nurture side of the debate, which shows
why individuals raised in different cultures, acquire different languages. One
of the first theories of language was by B.F. Skinner who believed that
language development was through means of environmental influence and that
children learned language based on associating words with meanings (Ambridge
& Lieven, 2011). Noam Chomsky heavily
criticized Skinner’s theory believing that there was no way for children to
acquire tools needed for processing an infinite number of sentences if the child
relied solely on input alone (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011). Chomsky believed that language was much more than just
acquiring words and that there was a structure to language, the idea of
Universal Grammar. According to Ambridge
and Lieven (2011), Chomsky proposed the idea of innate, biological grammatical
categories like verbs and nouns which facilitate the entire language
development in a child as well as the overall language processing in
adults. It is through the grammatical
information that a person finds the different components, nouns and verbs, in
order to process words into phrases and communicate.
In general there are three approaches or general theories to
the acquisition of language in people. The first theory is the imitation theory
which is reminiscent of Skinner’s theory and states that children learn grammar
by memorizing the words and sentences of their language (Ambridge & Lieven,
2011). The basis of this theory is that children memorize language and that is
how a child acquires it, a child must hear or see the word being used to commit
the word to memory and a child learns English rather than Spanish since the
child is getting the input words in English. This theory of course is filled
with problems, such as the massive amount of memory it would require for a
person to commit all the words and sentences to memory and children produce
words and grammar that are not in the adult language such as using nana in place
of banana (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011).
The second theory is the reinforcement theory that goes on
the premise that a child is taught language through a system of rewards.
According to Ambridge and Lieven (2011), the basic idea is that a child learns
to speak like an adult because the adult teaches the child by praising the
child or rewarding the child in some way for doing the right thing. If a child
says something incorrect such as calling a pig a cow the parent corrects the
child’s mistake immediately and the child learns new words. The third theory the active construction of a
grammar theory maintains that a child invents the rules of grammar for
themselves (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011). This theory doesn’t discount the role
that the environment around a child has but explains how children create
incorrect phrases or novel sentences that may have never been heard such as hitted,
and why the child may be imperious to being corrected by an adult.
In order to have a meaningful communication with an
individual language has to be processed in a system of symbols and sounds that
follows certain rules. The system of communication has to follow certain
criteria in order to be registered and considered a language. There are various
structures that make up language in an individual beginning with phonetics. This is the first step of language in which
an infant or child begins speech sounds also known as babbling. It is the stage which a child is producing
non-meaningful sequences of consonants and vowels (Savignon, 1983). Through babbling a baby seems to pick up rhythm and
intonation of language which helps the baby to progress into the next structure
of language phonology in which phoneme production takes place. Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound that
has meaning within a language (Savignon, 1983). In this stage a baby starts to
produce words with meaning, such as when the baby wants a bottle the baby may
state ba or da, unaware that the b and d are allophones of different phonemes
(Savignon, 1983). The baby doesn’t have
the grammar knowledge developed at this point to know this distinction and
therefore may say both b or d interchangeably in words but mean the same thing
each time they say the word. As the baby progresses through this structure of
language development the baby will begin to develop an awareness of phonemic
contracts and how the b and the d are different so the baby will begin to
acquire particular sounds over the progression of time (Savignon, 1983).
The morphology stage is the stage of words for a child
learning the structure of language. A child is very busy learning about the
phonemic distinctions and learning about consonant clusters, but the child is
also learning words. Firstly a child may learn about words of familiar objects
like bottle or of the people that are in the child’s world like mom, dad, or
grammy. The child additionally starts to pick up on activities and come up
words like verbs and other important concepts like mine and gimme (Savignon,
1983). In this structure a baby learns holophrastic stages and begins to
combine words together into the two word stage. A child may make combinations
like an agent and an action together such as baby sleep, in order to convey
that a baby is sleeping. There are a variety of different things the child can
do to combine important words together with crucial semantic relationships such
as possessor and possession combinations, mommy book, action and locative
combinations like sit chair, or demonstrative and entity like this shoe
(Savignon, 1983). The two word stage of the child is the beginning of being
telegraphic. The syntax stage is the stage of phrases and sentences. There is
no real three word stage after the two word stage, babies progress from the two
words and begin to move beyond the using content or important words like nouns
with adjectives or verbs and begin to use aspects of morphological and
syntactic development. In the syntax
development a child learns the rules that governs language and how words can be
meaningfully arranged together to form phrases and sentences, such as the rule
of the coming before and not after a noun.
So for a child they would say ‘read the book,’ not ‘read book the.’
Children also learn about plurals, negatives, and interrogatives; so the child
learns about stringing together do and not to make don’t, or learning about
interrogatives which start out as just the use of rising intonations and
progress from there (Savignon, 1983).
The final stages of language structure are semantics and
pragmatics. These two structures while different are similar in that semantics
is the child finding the literal meaning of phrases and sentences while in
pragmatics the child is finding mean in context of discourse (Savignon, 1983).
When children are just learning new words they may not know the meaning of
them. There are different theories on how children acquire meanings but
basically children in general have to make guesses about the meanings of words.
Children are exposed to a stream of words in a speech or sentence and the child
has to use particular words and contexts in order to guess the meaning of the
words the child does not know (Savignon, 1983). This in combination with a sort
of trial and error process in which the child may take the new word like dog
and associate it with objects that are not dogs such as a cat, allows the child
work through and process the word eventually coming upon its meaning. In this process of trial and error a child
may use two concepts overgeneralizations and underextensions. In over
generalizations the child keys in on an aspect like a semantic ground to find
things that are similar, so learning the word fly a child may call dust, small
insects, or dirt flies because of the size similarity, this is
overgeneralization. In underextensions
the child is doing the opposite of overgeneralization such as the case of a
child only recognizing or calling a ball a ball when it is under a table. The child fails in realizing that the table
does not play a part in the inherent ball and it is actually by accident.
The function of language deals with the specific purpose of
why a person is saying what they are saying. In communication there are
specific things that humans do such as apologizing to someone for making a
mistake, expressing an idea that a person had about a product, or asking a
question about something. These things
are all functions of language that are used by people in order to communicate a
purpose for the language and communication that the person is using. Humans use
language for a lot of informal and formal purposes and the way that a person
uses language in each different setting with specific grammatical structures
and vocabulary is often combined with each different kind of language function.
There are several types of language functions depending on a variety of things
such as the setting a person is in where they need to communicate.
What the person wants to communicate and how the person
wants to communicate. In a situation where the person needs to ask for
directions they are using the function of asking questions in order to get the
information that they need from the communication that is taking place. The
basics is that a lot of what humans say is for a specific purpose such as to
compare and contrast things, to summarize information, or to predict
something. These specific purposes for
communication are the functions of communication. According to Anderson (2010)
the use to which a language is put, the purpose of an utterance rather than the
particular grammatical form to an utterance takes is the language function.
Most of what a person says is functional since a person is stating a lot of
stuff with a purpose such as to express likes and dislikes, sequencing
information, agreeing or disagreeing with people, or even greeting and making
introductions with new people. All of
these examples are functions of language since all of them have a purpose in
language.
Language in a human is a wired feature in the human’s brain
which allows humans express thoughts, communicate, and problem solve. Language
is used by people daily to express things verbally, physically, visually, and
through writings that a person does. An
important part of being able to communicate is to have a well-established
structure of language and being able to comprehend the functions of language.
The presentation covered the three general theories to the acquisition of
language. The first theory is the imitation theory which is reminiscent of
Skinner’s theory and states that children learn grammar by memorizing the words
and sentences of their language (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011). The second
theory is the reinforcement theory that goes on the premise that a child is
taught language through a system of rewards. According to Ambridge and Lieven
(2011), the basic idea is that a child learns to speak like an adult because
the adult teaches the child by praising the child or rewarding the child in
some way for doing the right thing. The third theory the active construction of
a grammar theory maintains that a child invents the rules of grammar for
themselves (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011). This theory doesn’t discount the role
that the environment around a child has but explains how children create
incorrect phrases or novel sentences that may have never been heard such as hitted,
and why the child may be imperious to being corrected by an adult.
The presentation also covered the six general structures to
language that a person follows in order to learn vocabulary and the usage of
words. This is the first step of language in which an infant or child begins
speech sounds also known as babbling.
It is the stage which a child is producing non-meaningful sequences of
consonants and vowels (Savignon, 1983). Through
babbling a baby seems to pick up rhythm and intonation of language which helps
the baby to progress into the next structure of language phonology in which
phoneme production takes place.
Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound that has meaning within a
language (Savignon, 1983). In this stage a baby starts to produce words with
meaning, such as when the baby wants a bottle the baby may state ba or da,
unaware that the b and d are allophones of different phonemes (Savignon,
1983). The morphology stage is
the stage of words for a child learning the structure of language. A child is
very busy learning about the phonemic distinctions and learning about consonant
clusters, but the child is also learning words. In this structure a baby learns
holophrastic stages and begins to combine words together into the two word stage.
A child may make combinations like an agent and an action together such as baby
sleep, in order to convey that a baby is sleeping. In the syntax development a
child learns the rules that governs language and how words can be meaningfully
arranged together to form phrases and sentences, such as the rule of the coming
before and not after a noun. The final
stages of language structure are semantics and pragmatics. These two structures
while different are similar in that semantics is the child finding the literal
meaning of phrases and sentences while in pragmatics the child is finding mean
in context of discourse (Savignon, 1983).
Finally, the presentation covered the functions of language.
The function of language deals with the specific purpose of why a person is
saying what they are saying. Humans use language for a lot of informal and
formal purposes and the way that a person uses language in each different
setting with specific grammatical structures and vocabulary is often combined
with each different kind of language function. Most of what a person says is
functional since a person is stating a lot of stuff with a purpose such as to
express likes and dislikes, sequencing information, agreeing or disagreeing
with people, or even greeting and making introductions with new people. All of these examples are functions of
language since all of them have a purpose in language.
References:
Ambridge,
B., & Lieven, E.V.M. (2011). Language Acquisition: Contrasting theoretical
approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Savignon, S. J. (1983). Communicative competence: Theory and
classroom practice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
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