How children learn language

How children learn language

Language learning for children is natural. Babies are born with the ability to learn it and that learning begins at birth. All children, no matter what language their parents speak, learn language much the same way. How children learn language can be classified into two:

1.      The child Learning language unconsciously (The child  learn the first Language)

That is the period of after the baby was born up to puberty period.

2.      The child learn language consciously ( Learning Second Language)

That is the period of the child learn language after puberty

Language learning must be separated into two distinct, but related Psychological process. Those are speech production and speech understanding. This learning takes place is explained as follow:

A.        Development of speech production.

            When babies are born, they can make and hear all the sounds in all the languages in the world. That’s about 150 sounds in about 6500 languages! However, no language uses all 150 sounds. The sounds a language uses are called phonemes and English has about 44. Some languages use more and some use fewer. In this stage, babies learn which phonemes belong to the language they are learning and which don’t. The ability to recognize and produce those sounds is called “phonemic awareness,”. Language develops at different rates in different children, but most children follow this pattern:

Vocalization

While babies few month old do not speak, they do make a quite a variety of sounds. They cry, thy coo like pigeons, they gurgle such blow, spit and make a host of other virtually indescribable noises. However, while these are not speech sounds ,their production gives exercise in articulation and control. Importantly child gets practice in coordinating breathing and making sound

Babbling is a type of vocalization where the child uses speech sounds, mainly vowels and consonant-vowel- syllable, e.g. ‘a’ ,’u’, ‘ma’ ,’gi’ ,’pa’ The child’s repetitive uttering of these sound give them a speech-like quality, e.g. ‘mama’, ‘gigi’,  ‘papa’, especially when these sounds are involved with features of intonation pattern of their language

The word-one utterance

First words have been reported as appearing in normal children from as young as 4 months to as 18 months, even older.

Two and three –word utterances

At the age of 18 months or so , many children start to produce two and three utterances. The utterances here are use to show variety purposes and complexity ideas which they exhibit.at only a year and half children use the language to request, warn, refuse, brag, question, answer and inform. In order to gain these ends the utterances that they use express such ideas as quantity (more), possession (my) negation (no sleep) location (banana table) and attribute ( big, red, etc)

Look at these table below!

CHILD UTTERANCE	MATURE SPEAKERS’ EQUIVALENT	PURPOSE
Want cookie	I want a cookie	request
More milk	I want some more milk	request
Big boy	I am a big boy	bragging
Red car	The car is red	inform
No sleep	I don’t  want to go sleep	refusal
Banana table	The banana is on the table	Inform / answer
Where doll	Where is the doll	question

Function words and inflection

After acquired two-three words ,children acquired function of words like prepositions, article and auxiliaries and also inflections like the plural and tense markings.

Based on Roger Brown from the study of three children he focused on the acquisition of function words and inflections, hereafter referred grammatical morphemes.

A morpheme is a root word or part of word that carries a meaning example “ the words elephants” consists of elephant and plural (s)

Developing complex sentence

The children start to make negatives, question, relative clause and other complex structure.

According to Bellugi and Klima and others who later replicated their research, develops in three main periods:

Period 1

In this period , generally a negative marker of some sort “ No or Not “ is placed at the front of an affirmative utterance (U) -----Neg + U

      No money, Not teddy bear, No play that, No singing song etc

Period 2

 In the second period that the negative marker tend to appear internally within utterances. The Auxiliary do begins to appear although in combination with negative marker ( don’t). utterances are still of rather crude nature, though and negative imperatives.

I don’t want it, I don’t know his name

Period 3

The child has now a good idea of when “do” must be inserted  eg. you didn’t caught me, don’t touch the fish, and when “do” is not inserted : I am not a doctor, Donna won’t let go. The child still make errors but seems to grasp the basic nation that do is not added when there is modal.(can, will: This can stick adhere)

Bellugi and Klima found that three children in their study (same three who were in Brown morpheme acquisition study) all took about 6 months to pass three periods.

B.        Speech Understanding  and its  important

Speech understanding, the basis of speech production

The children learn the speech related to objects, events, and situation in the environment and experiences in their mind ,not to just speech sound. Even if the child hears thousand times eg.dog, there is no way for the child to discover the meaning of the word unless some environmental clue is provided- in this example , a dog  or picture of dog . Even abstract word s must be learn in some such way.

Sachs and Trustwell found that the children who could say only one words (kiss, smell, ball, truck etc) could understand speech structure composed of more than single word. The children provided appropriate responses when given commands consisting of vowel two-words syntactic combination such as kiss ball and smell truck.

     

             Learning abstract words

When acquiring the meaning of words , children soon understand and produce some that are quite abstract. The words expressing feelings (hunger, pain, joy ) and complex idea ( lie / untruth) honest. Guess) are just some of those learned. But how are they learned? It cannot be simple association such as the speech form of dog with the object because feeling and ideas are not in the physical environment for the child observe, in that he or she can observe a dog. Experiences in the mind are different nature. What the child must do in order to learn the meaning of abstract words is to observe speech, along with situations and events in the physical environment and then relate them to experiences and processes in the mind.

Example how might the words hungry and hurt be learned ? First child must take note of when words are spoken by others and situations in which they occur.

            Memory and language acquisition

Underlying all the remarkable accomplishment of the child in language acquisition is one crucial important  psychological factor , that  of memory . For, in the course of learning to identify the words of the language , devising rules for their use , and relating speech to the environment and mind , the child utilities a phenomenal memory capacity. The child must remember a multitude of particular  words, phrases, and sentences. along with context (physics and mental) in which they occur. For example , children did not remember many words , phrases and sentences that they heard, they would have little basis for discovering abstracts meaning and rules.

C.        Parentese  and  baby talk

            Parentese

Parentese is is term used to replace motherece is used to refer the sort of speech that children receive when they are young. The speech which parents and others use in talking to children has distinctive characteristics. For example. Parents generally talk to their children about what is happening in the immediate environment and not about abstract or remote objects and events. A sentence like  the dog want water rather than I might start reading psycholinguistics book tomorrow.

        

            Baby talk

Baby talk is different from parentese , While Parentese uses regular vocabulary and syntax, Baby talk involves the use of vocabulary  that is overly simplified and reduced. Curious though , from a psycholinguistics view, is the fact that most the features which the baby talk adopt are those which have the basis in the early speech of children.

Most Baby talk involves modifications in vocabulary. There are established words like bow-bow (dog), pee-pee (urine),  The main sound structure of such words s tends o dominated by a consonant + vowel syllable unit which repeated.

 D.       Imitation and correction

            Role of imitation

It was once widely believed by theorists that children acquire language entirely through imitation, i.e, by copying the speech that they hear. It is undoubtedly true that children do imitate a great deal of what they hear. They do learn to say such words and phrases as “dog, papa, run, happy, no, why not, bread and butter, Not now etc. They do imitate the intonation patterns and sound of their language they do tend to approximate the proper order of  words in a sentence.

On the other hand, while some language learning does involve imitation .this principle is inadequate to explain the fundamental s underlying the acquisition of language. Because imitation involves the reproduction of speech, it therefore cannot explain how speech is understood. The knowledge of which the basis of speech production

            Role of correction

Like imitation, role of correction in language acquisition has been widely misconceived . Correction is not so important factor in that process. While it used to be though  that correcting children speech is essential for improvement .research has shown that such is not the case. In actual fact , parents pay little attention to the grammatical correctness  of their children’s speech. Rather than correcting the child grammar, parents are more interested in responding to : the truth value of what is said , the social appropriateness of what is said ( child who says to a visiting aunt, Daddy no like you). Children naturally correct their own mistake overtime, without intervention of others.