Language Acquasition

How do children acquire language? What are the processes of language acquisition? How do infants respond to speech? Language acquisition is the process of learning a native or a second language. Although how children learn to speak is not perfectly understood, most explanations involve both the observations that children copy what they hear and the inference that human beings have a natural aptitude for understanding grammar. Children usually learn the sounds and vocabulary of their native language through imitation, (which helps them learn to pronounce words correctly), and grammar is seldom taught to them, but instead that they rapidly acquire the ability to speak grammatically. Though, not all children learn by imitation alone. Children will produce forms of language that adults never say. For example, "I spilled milk on hisself" or "Debbie wants a cookie". This demonstrates that children have the desire to speak correctly and have self-motivating traits to communicate. This supports the theory of Noam Chomsky (1972)-that children are able to learn grammar of a particular language because all intelligible languages are founded on a deep structure of universal grammatical rules that corresponds to an innate capacity of the human brain. Adults learning a second language pass through some of the same stages, as do children learning their native language. In the first part of this paper I will describe the process of language acquisition. The second part will review how infants respond to speech.

Language is multifaceted. It contains both verbal and non-verbal aspects that children seem to acquire quickly. Before birth, virtually all the neurons (nerve cells) are formed, and they migrate into their proper locations in the brain in the infant. When a baby is born, it can see and hear and smell and respond to touch, but their perceptions are limited at such a young age. The brain stem, a primitive region that controls vital functions like heartbeat and breathing, has completed its wiring. Elsewhere the connections between neurons are wispy and weak. But over the first few months of life, the brain's higher centers explode with new synapses. "For the large majority of people, the dominant area in language processing is in the middle of the left hemisphere of the brain, in particular in Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area" (Siegler, 1998, p. 142). This helps an infant to be biologically prepared to face the stages of language acquisition. According to the textbook "Children's Thinking", written by Robert S. Siegler (1998) there are four main components to language acquisition. These components are phonology, semantics (meaning), grammar (syntax), and communication (pragmatics). Phonology is the study of how speech sounds are organized and how they function. It is the main linguistic accomplishment during the first year of life. The phonology of language refers to fundamental sounds units and the rules for combining them. Each language has a certain number of sounds called phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound that affects the meaning of a word. Infants are able to identify hundreds of variations of sounds. For example, an infant who is 6 months old can detect the difference between "ma" and "pa". According to Siegler (1998), "most children do not gain full phonological competence until roughly school age"(p. 147). An infant's first year is mainly receiving messages but also working on being able to produce messages. As they physically develop, infants form the ability to make sounds. Some of these initial sounds are cooing, vowel-like utterances occasionally accompanied by consonants and babbling, which are consonant-vowel combinations (Siegler, 1998). During the first 6 months of life, physiological changes, such as the shape of oral cavity, tongue development, motor control of lips, and tooth eruption, also take place that contribute to speech development. One of the infant's tasks is to identify phonemes or the melodies of parent's voice patterns. According to the film, Discovering Psychology: Language Development (2001), infants show an early sensitivity to prosody, which is fluctuations of the voice, patterns of intonations, and melodies/rhythms in speech that communicate the meaning that's contributes the context. This rise-fall theory of melodies is universal across cultures. Infants read adults patterns of speech associated within a context and learn the meaning of language. For example, if a child were about to engage in a dangerous situation, such as crawling by a flight of stairs, a mother would convey her message by telling her infant to "Stop! No! Don't do that!" in a louder voice and in a sharp tone. In contrast, a melody that may be comforting to the infant is when the mother is using "motherese", such as before they are to fall asleep to help the infant feel secure and safe. This helps infants to learn the phonology of their language and prepares them for the next stage of learning, which is semantics.

Semantics is the meaning of words or combination of words. It is the meaning in a language. Shortly before babies have their first birthday, they begin to understand words, and around that birthday, they start to produce them (Clark, 1993). Usually, when an infant produces their first words, they refer to "objects and actions that interest them, that they are relatively concrete, and that they want" (Siegler, 1998, p. 149). This one-word stage lasts about 12 months to18 months. Most of the words infants produce are objects: food (juice, cookie), body parts (eyes, nose), vehicles (car, boat, plane), toys (blocks, doll), animals (cat, dog), and people (baby, mama/dada). At this time children usually intertwine the use of gestures and words to call attention to an object or an event, most often issuing a command or a request. According to Bee (2000), an infant who wants something or doesn't want something will manipulate their parent to change their surroundings. For example, "A baby who wants you to hand her favorite toy may stretch and reach for it, opening and closing her hand, making whining sounds or other heartrending noises" (Bee, 2000, p. 230-231). For another example, a child might throw their bottle down to show that they no longer want it or they may point at specific objects they want the parent to see. Children will also use gestures as well as one-word phrases. This is called holophrases. Siegler (1998) quote holophrases "express the meaning of the entire phrases" (p. 149). In this case, a child would say "ball" to communicate that they "want the ball" or "the dog took the ball". Around 18 months, language changes in two ways. Vocabulary growth increases and the child