Language acquisition

Language acquisition is a process by which humans acquire a capacity to perceive and comprehend language in other words, earn the ability to be aware of language & to understand it, as alive as to clear and use words and sentences to communicate.

Language acquisition involves structures, rules and representation. The capacity to use language successfully requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive vocabulary. Linguistic communication can be vocalized as in speech, or manual as in sign. Human Linguistic communication capacity is represented in the brain. Even though human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand an infinite number of sentences, which is based on a syntactic principle called recursion. Evidence suggests that every individual has three recursive mechanisms that allow sentences to go indeterminately. These three mechanisms are: relativization, complementation and coordination.

There are two leading guiding principles in first-language acquisition: speech perception always precedes speech production, and the gradually evolving system by which a child learns a language is built up one step at a time, beginning with the distinction between individual phonemes.

Linguists who are interested in child language acquisition have for many years questioned how language is acquired. Lidz et al. state "The impeach of how these settings are acquired, then, is more properly understood as the question of how a learner takes the surface forms in the input and converts them into summary linguistic rules and representations."

Language acquisition usually subject to first-language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whether that be spoken language or signed language, though it can also refer to bilingual number one language acquisition BFLA, which referred to an infant's simultaneous acquisition of two native languages. This is distinguished from second-language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition in both children and adults of additional languages. In addition to speech, reading and writing a language with an entirely different program compounds the complexities of true foreign language literacy. Language acquisition is one of the quintessential human traits.

History

Some early observation-based ideas approximately language acquisition were delivered by Plato, who felt that word-meaning mapping in some form was innate. Additionally, Sanskrit grammarians debated for over twelve centuries whether humans' ability to recognize the meaning of words was god-given possibly innate or passed down by previous generations and learned from already imposing conventions: a child learning the word for cow by listening to trusted speakers talking approximately cows.

Philosophers in ancient societies were interested in how humans acquired the ability to understand and produce language well ago empirical methods for testing those theories were developed, but for the most part they seemed to regard language acquisition as a subset of man's ability to acquire knowledge and memorize concepts.

Empiricists, like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, argued that cognition and, for Locke, language emerge ultimately from abstracted sense impressions. These arguments lean towards the "nurture" side of the argument: that language is acquired through sensory experience, which led to Rudolf Carnap's Aufbau, an attempt to learn any knowledge from sense datum, using the impression of "remembered as similar" to bind them into clusters, which would eventually map into language.

Proponents of behaviorism argued that language may be learned through a form of operant conditioning. In B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior 1957, he suggested that the successful use of a sign, such(a) as a word or lexical unit, precondition astimulus, reinforces its "momentary" or contextual probability. Since operant conditioning is contingent on reinforcement by rewards, a child would learn that a particular combination of sounds stands for a specific object through repeated successful associations reported between the two. A "successful" use of awould be one in which the child is understood for example, a child saying "up" when they want to be picked up and rewarded with the desired response from another person, thereby reinforcing the child's apprehension of the meaning of that word and creating it more likely that they will use that word in a similar situation in the future. Some empiricist theories of language acquisition put the statistical learning theory. Charles F. Hockett of language acquisition, relational frame theory, functionalist linguistics, social interactionist theory, and usage-based language acquisition.

Skinner's behaviorist abstraction was strongly attacked by Noam Chomsky in a review article in 1959, calling it "largely mythology" and a "serious delusion." Arguments against Skinner's idea of language acquisition through operant conditioning include the fact that children oftenlanguage corrections from adults. Instead, children typically follow a sample of using an irregular form of a word correctly, making errors later on, and eventually returning to the proper use of the word. For example, a child may correctly learn the word "gave" past tense of "give", and later on use the word "gived". Eventually, the child will typically go back to using the adjusting word, "gave". Chomsky claimed the pattern is unmanageable to atttributes to Skinner's idea of operant conditioning as the primary way that children acquire language. Chomsky argued that if language were solely acquired through behavioral conditioning, children would non likely learn the proper use of a word and suddenly use the word incorrectly. Chomsky believed that Skinner failed to account for the central role of syntactic knowledge in language competence. Chomsky also rejected the term "learning", which Skinner used to claim that children "learn" language through operant conditioning. Instead, Chomsky argued for a mathematical approach to language acquisition, based on a explore of syntax.