Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
(in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use
word
A word is a basic element of language that carries an semantics, objective or pragmatics, practical semantics, meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of w ...
s 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
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
,
morphology
Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to:
Disciplines
* Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts
* Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...
,
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...
,
semantics
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy
Philosophy (f ...
, and an extensive
vocabulary
A vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary, usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the la ...
. Language can be vocalized as in speech, or manual as in
sign
A sign is an object, quality, event, or entity whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else. A natural sign bears a causal relation to its object—for instance, thunder is a sign of storm, or me ...
.
Human language 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
Recursion (adjective: ''recursive'') occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics ...
. 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 main guiding principles in first-language acquisition:
speech perception
Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by wh ...
always precedes
speech production
Speech production is the process by which thoughts are translated into speech. This includes the selection of words, the organization of relevant grammatical forms, and then the articulation of the resulting sounds by the motor system using the vo ...
, 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
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
s.
Linguists who are interested in child language acquisition have for many years questioned how language is acquired. Lidz et al. state "The question of how these structures 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 abstract linguistic rules and representations."
Language acquisition usually refers to first-language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their
native language
A first language, native tongue, native language, mother tongue or L1 is the first language or dialect that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. In some countries, the term ''native language'' or ''mother tongu ...
, whether that be spoken language or signed language,
though it can also refer to
bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA), which refers to an infant's simultaneous acquisition of two native languages. This is distinguished from ''
second-language acquisition
Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific dis ...
'', which deals with the acquisition (in both
children
A child ( : children) is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty, or between the developmental period of infancy and puberty. The legal definition of ''child'' generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger ...
and adults) of additional languages. In addition to speech, reading and writing a language with an entirely different script compounds the complexities of true foreign language
literacy
Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, huma ...
. Language acquisition is one of the quintessential human traits.
History
Some early observation-based ideas about language acquisition were proposed by
Plato
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
, who felt that word-meaning mapping in some form was innate. Additionally,
Sanskrit grammarians
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
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 established conventions: a child learning the word for ''cow'' by listening to trusted speakers talking about cows.
Philosophers in ancient societies were interested in how humans acquired the ability to understand and produce language well before
empirical methods
Empirical research is research using empirical evidence. It is also a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct and indirect observation or experience. Empiricism values some research more than other kinds. Empirical evidence (the record of o ...
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 learn concepts.
Empiricists, like
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5/15 April 1588 – 4/14 December 1679) was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influent ...
and
John Locke
John Locke (; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism ...
, argued that knowledge (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
Rudolf Carnap (; ; 18 May 1891 – 14 September 1970) was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism. He ...
's Aufbau, an attempt to learn all knowledge from sense datum, using the notion of "remembered as similar" to bind them into clusters, which would eventually map into language.
Proponents of
behaviorism
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent (behavioral psychology), antecedent stimuli in the environment, o ...
argued that language may be learned through a form of
operant conditioning
Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning, is a learning process where behaviors are modified through the association of stimuli with reinforcement or punishment. In it, operants—behaviors that affect one's environment—are c ...
. In
B. F. Skinner
Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.
...
's ''
Verbal Behavior
''Verbal Behavior'' is a 1957 book by psychologist B. F. Skinner, in which he describes what he calls verbal behavior, or what was traditionally called linguistics. Skinner's work describes the controlling elements of verbal behavior with termino ...
'' (1957), he suggested that the successful use of a sign, such as a word or
lexical unit
In lexicography, a lexical item is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words ( catena) that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon (≈ vocabulary). Examples are ''cat'', ''traffic light'', ''take care of'', ''by the way ...
, given a certain stimulus,
reinforces its "momentary" or contextual probability. Since operant conditioning is contingent on reinforcement by rewards, a child would learn that a specific combination of sounds stands for a specific thing through repeated successful associations made between the two. A "successful" use of a sign would 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 understanding of the meaning of that word and making it more likely that they will use that word in a similar situation in the future. Some
empiricist
In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological theory that holds that knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It is one of several views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empir ...
theories of language acquisition include the
statistical learning theory
Statistical learning theory is a framework for machine learning drawing from the fields of statistics and functional analysis. Statistical learning theory deals with the statistical inference problem of finding a predictive function based on dat ...
. Charles F. Hockett of language acquisition,
relational frame theory
Relational frame theory (RFT) is a psychological theory of human language, cognition, and behaviour. It was developed originally by Steven C. Hayes of University of Nevada, Reno and has been extended in research, notably by Dermot Barnes-Holmes ...
,
functionalist linguistics
Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic fun ...
,
social interactionist theory Social interactionist theory (SIT) is an explanation of language development emphasizing the role of social interaction between the developing child and linguistically knowledgeable adults. It is based largely on the socio-cultural theories of Sovie ...
, and usage-based language acquisition.
Skinner's behaviorist idea was strongly attacked by
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
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 often ignore language corrections from adults. Instead, children typically follow a pattern 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 correct word, "gave". Chomsky claimed the pattern is difficult to attribute 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 not 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 study of
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...
.
As a typically human phenomenon
The capacity to acquire and use language is a key aspect that distinguishes
humans
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...
from other beings. Although it is difficult to pin down what aspects of language are uniquely human, there are a few design features that can be found in all known forms of human language, but that are missing from forms of
animal communication
Animal communication is the transfer of information from one or a group of animals (sender or senders) to one or more other animals (receiver or receivers) that affects the current or future behavior of the receivers. Information may be sent int ...
. For example, many animals are able to communicate with each other by signaling to the things around them, but this kind of communication lacks the arbitrariness of human vernaculars (in that there is nothing about the sound of the word "dog" that would hint at its meaning). Other forms of animal communication may utilize arbitrary sounds, but are unable to combine those sounds in different ways to create completely novel messages that can then be automatically understood by another.
Hockett called this design feature of human language "productivity". It is crucial to the understanding of human language acquisition that humans are not limited to a finite set of words, but, rather, must be able to understand and utilize a complex system that allows for an infinite number of possible messages. So, while many forms of animal communication exist, they differ from human language in that they have a limited range of vocabulary tokens, and the vocabulary items are not combined syntactically to create phrases.
Herbert S. Terrace conducted a study on a chimpanzee known as
Nim Chimpsky
Neam "Nim" Chimpsky (November 19, 1973 – March 10, 2000) was a chimpanzee and the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University. The project was led by Herbert S. Terrace with the linguistic analysis head ...
in an attempt to teach him
American Sign Language
American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canadians, Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual lang ...
. This study was an attempt to further research done with a chimpanzee named
Washoe, who was reportedly able to acquire American Sign Language. However, upon further inspection, Terrace concluded that both experiments were failures. While Nim was able to acquire signs, he never acquired a knowledge of grammar, and was unable to combine signs in a meaningful way. Researchers noticed that "signs that seemed spontaneous were, in fact, cued by teachers", and not actually productive. When Terrace reviewed Project Washoe, he found similar results. He postulated that there is a fundamental difference between animals and humans in their motivation to learn language; animals, such as in Nim's case, are motivated only by physical reward, while humans learn language in order to "create a new type of communication".
In another language acquisition study,
Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard attempted to teach
Victor of Aveyron
Victor of Aveyron (; c. 1788 – 1828) was a French feral child who was found at the age of around 9. Not only is he considered the most famous feral child, but his case is also the most documented case of a feral child. Upon his discovery, he wa ...
, a feral child, how to speak. Victor was able to learn a few words, but ultimately never fully acquired language. Slightly more successful was a study done on
Genie
Jinn ( ar, , ') – also romanized as djinn or anglicized as genies (with the broader meaning of spirit or demon, depending on sources)
– are invisible creatures in early pre-Islamic Arabian religious systems and later in Islamic mytho ...
, another child never introduced to society. She had been entirely isolated for the first thirteen years of her life by her father. Caretakers and researchers attempted to measure her ability to learn a language. She was able to acquire a large vocabulary, but never acquired grammatical knowledge. Researchers concluded that the theory of a
critical period
In developmental psychology and developmental biology, a critical period is a maturational stage in the lifespan of an organism during which the nervous system is especially sensitive to certain environmental stimuli. If, for some reason, the org ...
was true; Genie was too old to learn how to speak productively, although she was still able to comprehend language.
General approaches
A major debate in understanding language acquisition is how these capacities are picked up by infants from the linguistic input.
Input in the linguistic
context
Context may refer to:
* Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation, and discourse summary
Computing
* Context (computing), the virtual environment required to su ...
is defined as "All words, contexts, and other forms of language to which a learner is exposed, relative to acquired proficiency in first or second languages".
Nativists
Nativism is the political policy of promoting or protecting the interests of native or indigenous inhabitants over those of immigrants, including the support of immigration-restriction measures.
In scholarly studies, ''nativism'' is a standard ...
such as Chomsky have focused on the hugely complex nature of human grammars, the finiteness and
ambiguity
Ambiguity is the type of meaning in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement ...
of the input that children receive, and the relatively limited
cognitive abilities
Cognitive skills, also called cognitive functions, cognitive abilities or cognitive capacities, are brain-based skills which are needed in acquisition of knowledge, manipulation of information and reasoning. They have more to do with the mechanisms ...
of an infant. From these characteristics, they conclude that the process of language acquisition in infants must be tightly constrained and guided by the biologically given characteristics of the human brain. Otherwise, they argue, it is extremely difficult to explain how children, within the first five years of life, routinely master the complex, largely tacit
grammatical rules of their native language.
Additionally, the evidence of such rules in their native language is all indirect— adult speech to children cannot encompass all of what children know by the time they've acquired their native language.
Other scholars, however, have resisted the possibility that infants' routine success at acquiring the grammar of their native language requires anything more than the forms of learning seen with other cognitive skills, including such mundane motor skills as learning to ride a bike. In particular, there has been resistance to the possibility that human biology includes any form of specialization for language. This conflict is often referred to as the "
nature and nurture
Nature versus nurture is a long-standing debate in biology and society about the balance between two competing factors which determine fate: genetics (nature) and environment (nurture). The alliterative expression "nature and nurture" in English h ...
" debate. Of course, most scholars acknowledge that certain aspects of language acquisition must result from the specific ways in which the human brain is "wired" (a "nature" component, which accounts for the failure of non-human species to acquire human languages) and that certain others are shaped by the particular language environment in which a person is raised (a "nurture" component, which accounts for the fact that humans raised in different societies acquire different languages). The as-yet unresolved question is the extent to which the specific cognitive capacities in the "nature" component are also used outside of language.
Emergentism
Emergentist theories, such as Brian MacWhinney's
competition model
The Competition Model is a psycholinguistic theory of language acquisition and sentence processing, developed by Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney (1982). The claim in MacWhinney, Bates, and Kliegl (1984) is that "the forms of natural languag ...
, posit that language acquisition is a
cognitive process
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...
that emerges from the interaction of biological pressures and the environment. According to these theories, neither nature nor nurture alone is sufficient to trigger language learning; both of these influences must work together in order to allow children to acquire a language. The proponents of these theories argue that general cognitive processes subserve language acquisition and that the result of these processes is language-specific phenomena, such as
word learning
Vocabulary development is a process by which people acquire words. Babbling shifts towards meaningful speech as infants grow and produce their first words around the age of one year. In early word learning, infants build their vocabulary slowly. ...
and
grammar acquisition. The findings of many empirical studies support the predictions of these theories, suggesting that language acquisition is a more complex process than many have proposed.
Empiricism
Although Chomsky's theory of a
generative grammar
Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...
has been enormously influential in the field of linguistics since the 1950s, many criticisms of the basic assumptions of generative theory have been put forth by cognitive-functional linguists, who argue that language structure is created through language use. These linguists argue that the concept of a
language acquisition device
The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a claim from language acquisition research proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. The LAD concept is a purported instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is ...
(LAD) is unsupported by evolutionary anthropology, which tends to show a gradual adaptation of the human brain and vocal cords to the use of language, rather than a sudden appearance of a complete set of binary parameters delineating the whole spectrum of possible grammars ever to have existed and ever to exist.
On the other hand, cognitive-functional theorists use this anthropological data to show how human beings have evolved the capacity for grammar and syntax to meet our demand for linguistic symbols. (Binary parameters are common to digital computers, but may not be applicable to neurological systems such as the human brain.)
Further, the generative theory has several constructs (such as movement, empty categories, complex underlying structures, and strict binary branching) that cannot possibly be acquired from any amount of linguistic input. It is unclear that human language is actually ''anything like'' the generative conception of it. Since language, as imagined by nativists, is unlearnably complex, subscribers to this theory argue that it must, therefore, be innate. Nativists hypothesize that some features of syntactic categories exist even before a child is exposed to any experience - categories on which children map words of their language as they learn their native language. A different
theory of language
Theory of language is a topic from Philosophy of language#Nature of language, philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. It has the goal of answering the questions "What is language?"; "Why do languages have the properties they have?"; or ...
, however, may yield different conclusions. While all theories of language acquisition posit some degree of innateness, they vary in how much value they place on this innate capacity to acquire language. Empiricism places less value on the innate knowledge, arguing instead that the input, combined with both general and language-specific learning capacities, is sufficient for acquisition.
Since 1980, linguists studying children, such as
Melissa Bowerman
Melissa Bowerman (April 3, 1942 – October 31, 2011) was a leading researcher in the area of language acquisition. From 1982-2007, she was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Education and career
In 1971 ...
and
Asifa Majid
Asifa Majid is a psychologist, linguistics, linguist and cognitive science, cognitive scientist who is professor of language, communication and cultural cognition at the University of Oxford, UK.
Biography
Majid's academic career began at the Univ ...
,
and psychologists following
Jean Piaget
Jean William Fritz Piaget (, , ; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called " genetic epistemolog ...
, like Elizabeth Bates
and Jean Mandler, came to suspect that there may indeed be many learning processes involved in the acquisition process, and that ignoring the role of learning may have been a mistake.
In recent years, the debate surrounding the nativist position has centered on whether the inborn capabilities are language-specific or domain-general, such as those that enable the infant to visually make sense of the world in terms of objects and actions. The anti-nativist view has many strands, but a frequent theme is that language emerges from usage in social contexts, using learning mechanisms that are a part of an innate general cognitive learning apparatus. This position has been championed by
David M. W. Powers
David (; , "beloved one") (traditional spelling), , ''Dāwūd''; grc-koi, Δαυΐδ, Dauíd; la, Davidus, David; gez , ዳዊት, ''Dawit''; xcl, Դաւիթ, ''Dawitʿ''; cu, Давíдъ, ''Davidŭ''; possibly meaning "beloved one". w ...
,
Elizabeth Bates
Elizabeth Ann Bates (July 26, 1947 – December 13, 2003) was a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. She was an internationally renowned expert and leading researcher in child language acquisition, psyc ...
,
Catherine Snow,
Anat Ninio
Anat Ninio ( he, ענת ניניו; born August 10, 1944) is a professor emeritus of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She specializes in the interactive context of language acquisition, the communicative functions of spe ...
,
Brian MacWhinney
Brian James MacWhinney (born August 22, 1945) is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He specializes in first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and the neurological bases of language, an ...
,
Michael Tomasello
Michael Tomasello (born January 18, 1950) is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.
Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is c ...
,
Michael Ramscar, William O'Grady, and others. Philosophers, such as Fiona Cowie
[Cowie, F. (1999)]
What's Within? Nativism Reconsidered
(Oxford University Press, New York). and
Barbara Scholz
Barbara Caroline Scholz (August 29, 1947 – May 14, 2011) was an American philosopher of science, with a particular focus on the philosophy of cognitive science and linguistics. She taught at the University of Toledo, at the University of Califo ...
with
Geoffrey Pullum
Geoffrey Keith Pullum (; born 8 March 1945) is a British and American linguist specialising in the study of English. He is Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
Pullum is a co-author of ''The Cambridge Gram ...
have also argued against certain nativist claims in support of empiricism.
The new field of
cognitive linguistics
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are con ...
has emerged as a specific counter to Chomsky's Generative Grammar and to Nativism.
Statistical learning
Some language acquisition researchers, such as
Elissa Newport, Richard Aslin, and
Jenny Saffran
Jenny Saffran is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She specializes in language acquisition and early cognitive development, and she also conducts research on music cognition. Saffran views language acquisition as ...
, emphasize the possible roles of general
learning
Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, value (personal and cultural), values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals, and some machine learning, machines ...
mechanisms, especially statistical learning, in language acquisition. The development of
connectionist
Connectionism refers to both an approach in the field of cognitive science that hopes to explain mind, mental phenomena using artificial neural networks (ANN) and to a wide range of techniques and algorithms using ANNs in the context of artificial ...
models that when implemented are able to successfully learn words and syntactical conventions supports the predictions of statistical learning theories of language acquisition, as do empirical studies of children's detection of word boundaries. In a series of connectionist model simulations, Franklin Chang has demonstrated that such a domain general statistical learning mechanism could explain a wide range of language structure acquisition phenomena.
Statistical learning theory
Statistical learning theory is a framework for machine learning drawing from the fields of statistics and functional analysis. Statistical learning theory deals with the statistical inference problem of finding a predictive function based on dat ...
suggests that, when learning language, a learner would use the natural statistical properties of language to deduce its structure, including sound patterns, words, and the beginnings of grammar.
That is, language learners are sensitive to how often
syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...
combinations or words occur in relation to other syllables.
Infants between 21 and 23 months old are also able to use statistical learning to develop "lexical categories", such as an animal category, which infants might later map to newly learned words in the same category. These findings suggest that early experience listening to language is critical to vocabulary acquisition.
The statistical abilities are effective, but also limited by what qualifies as input, what is done with that input, and by the structure of the resulting output.
One should also note that statistical learning (and more broadly, distributional learning) can be accepted as a component of language acquisition by researchers on either side of the "nature and nurture" debate. From the perspective of that debate, an important question is whether statistical learning can, by itself, serve as an alternative to nativist explanations for the grammatical constraints of human language.
Chunking
The central idea of these theories is that language development occurs through the incremental acquisition of meaningful
chunks of elementary
constituents, which can be words, phonemes, or syllables. Recently, this approach has been highly successful in simulating several phenomena in the acquisition of
syntactic categories A syntactic category is a syntactic unit that theories of syntax assume. Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech (e.g. noun, verb, preposition, etc.), are syntactic categories. In phrase structure grammars, the ''phrasal c ...
and the acquisition of phonological knowledge.
Chunking theories of language acquisition constitute a group of theories related to statistical learning theories, in that they assume that the input from the environment plays an essential role; however, they postulate different learning mechanisms.
Researchers at the
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (german: Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie, shortened to MPI EVA) is a research institute based in Leipzig, Germany, that was founded in 1997. It is part of the Max Plan ...
have developed a computer model analyzing early toddler conversations to predict the structure of later conversations. They showed that toddlers develop their own individual rules for speaking, with 'slots' into which they put certain kinds of words. A significant outcome of this research is that rules inferred from toddler speech were better predictors of subsequent speech than traditional grammars.
This approach has several features that make it unique: the models are implemented as computer programs, which enables clear-cut and quantitative predictions to be made; they learn from naturalistic input—actual child-directed utterances; and attempt to create their own utterances, the model was tested in languages including English, Spanish, and German. Chunking for this model was shown to be most effective in learning a first language but was able to create utterances learning a second language.
Relational frame theory
The
relational frame theory
Relational frame theory (RFT) is a psychological theory of human language, cognition, and behaviour. It was developed originally by Steven C. Hayes of University of Nevada, Reno and has been extended in research, notably by Dermot Barnes-Holmes ...
(RFT) (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, Roche, 2001), provides a wholly selectionist/learning account of the origin and development of language competence and complexity. Based upon the principles of Skinnerian behaviorism, RFT posits that children acquire language purely through interacting with the environment. RFT theorists introduced the concept of
functional contextualism Functional contextualism is a modern philosophy of science rooted in philosophical pragmatism and contextualism. It is most actively developed in behavioral science in general and the field of behavior analysis and contextual behavioral science ...
in language learning, which emphasizes the importance of predicting and influencing psychological events, such as thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, by focusing on manipulable variables in their own context. RFT distinguishes itself from Skinner's work by identifying and defining a particular type of operant conditioning known as derived relational responding, a learning process that, to date, appears to occur only in humans possessing a capacity for language. Empirical studies supporting the predictions of RFT suggest that children learn language through a system of inherent reinforcements, challenging the view that language acquisition is based upon innate, language-specific cognitive capacities.
Social interactionism
Social interactionist theory is an explanation of
language development
Language development in humans is a process starting early in life. Infants start without knowing a language, yet by 10 months, babies can distinguish speech sounds and engage in babbling. Some research has shown that the earliest learning begin ...
emphasizing the role of social interaction between the developing child and linguistically knowledgeable adults. It is based largely on the socio-cultural theories of Soviet psychologist
Lev Vygotsky
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (russian: Лев Семёнович Выго́тский, p=vɨˈɡotskʲɪj; be, Леў Сямёнавіч Выго́цкі, p=vɨˈɡotskʲɪj; – June 11, 1934) was a Soviet psychologist, known for his work on ps ...
, and was made prominent in the Western world by
Jerome Bruner
Jerome Seymour Bruner (October 1, 1915 – June 5, 2016) was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow ...
.
Unlike other approaches, it emphasizes the role of feedback and reinforcement in language acquisition. Specifically, it asserts that much of a child's linguistic growth stems from modeling of and interaction with parents and other adults, who very frequently provide instructive correction. It is thus somewhat similar to behaviorist accounts of language learning. It differs substantially, though, in that it posits the existence of a social-cognitive model and other mental structures within children (a sharp contrast to the "black box" approach of classical behaviorism).
Another key idea within the theory of social interactionism is that of the
zone of proximal development
The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a concept in educational psychology. It represents the distance between what a learner is capable of doing unsupported, and what they can only do supported. It is the range where they are capable only with ...
. This is a theoretical construct denoting the set of tasks a child is capable of performing with guidance but not alone. As applied to language, it describes the set of linguistic tasks (for example, proper syntax, suitable vocabulary usage) that a child cannot carry out on its own at a given time, but can learn to carry out if assisted by an able adult.
Syntax, morphology, and generative grammar
As syntax began to be studied more closely in the early 20th century in relation to language learning, it became apparent to linguists, psychologists, and philosophers that knowing a language was not merely a matter of associating words with concepts, but that a critical aspect of language involves knowledge of how to put words together; sentences are usually needed in order to communicate successfully, not just isolated words.
A child will use short expressions such as ''Bye-bye Mummy'' or ''All-gone milk'', which actually are combinations of individual
noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...
s and an
operator, before they begin to produce gradually more complex sentences. In the 1990s, within the
principles and parameters
Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general ''principles'' (i.e. abstract rules or grammars) and specific ''parameters'' (i.e. markers, sw ...
framework, this hypothesis was extended into a maturation-based
structure building model of child language regarding the acquisition of functional categories. In this model, children are seen as gradually building up more and more complex structures, with lexical categories (like noun and verb) being acquired before functional-syntactic categories (like determiner and complementizer). It is also often found that in acquiring a language, the most frequently used verbs are
irregular verbs
A regular verb is any verb whose conjugation follows the typical pattern, or one of the typical patterns, of the language to which it belongs. A verb whose conjugation follows a different pattern is called an irregular verb. This is one instance ...
. In learning English, for example, young children first begin to learn the past tense of verbs individually. However, when they acquire a "rule", such as adding ''-ed'' to form the past tense, they begin to exhibit occasional overgeneralization errors (e.g. "runned", "hitted") alongside correct past tense forms. One influential proposal regarding the origin of this type of error suggests that the adult state of grammar stores each irregular verb form in memory and also includes a "block" on the use of the regular rule for forming that type of verb. In the developing child's mind, retrieval of that "block" may fail, causing the child to erroneously apply the regular rule instead of retrieving the irregular.
A Merge (linguistics)-based Theory
In Bare-Phrase structure (
Minimalist Program
In linguistics, the minimalist program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky.
Following Imre Lakatos's distinction, Chomsky presents minima ...
), since theory-internal considerations define the specifier position of an internal-merge projection (phases vP and CP) as the only type of host which could serve as potential landing-sites for move-based elements displaced from lower down within the base-generated VP structure – e.g., A-movement such as passives (
The apple was eaten by [John (ate the apple)"), or raising ["Some work does seem to remain [(There) does seem to remain (some work)")—as a consequence, any strong version of a Structure building model of child language which calls for an exclusive "external-merge/argument structure stage" prior to an "internal-merge/scope-discourse related stage" would claim that young children's stage-1 utterances lack the ability to generate and host elements derived via movement operations. In terms of a Merge-based theory of language acquisition, complements and specifiers are simply notations for first-merge (= "complement-of"
ead-complement, and later second-merge (= "specifier-of"
pecifier-head with merge always forming to a head. First-merge establishes only a set and is not an ordered pair—e.g., an -compound of 'boat-house' would allow the ambiguous readings of either 'a kind of house' and/or 'a kind of boat'. It is only with second-merge that order is derived out of a set which yields the recursive properties of syntax—e.g., a 'house-boat' now reads unambiguously only as a 'kind of boat'. It is this property of recursion that allows for projection and labeling of a phrase to take place; in this case, that the Noun 'boat' is the Head of the compound, and 'house' acting as a kind of specifier/modifier. External-merge (first-merge) establishes substantive 'base structure' inherent to the VP, yielding theta/argument structure, and may go beyond the lexical-category VP to involve the functional-category light verb vP. Internal-merge (second-merge) establishes more formal aspects related to edge-properties of scope and discourse-related material pegged to CP. In a Phase-based theory, this twin vP/CP distinction follows the "duality of semantics" discussed within the Minimalist Program, and is further developed into a dual distinction regarding a probe-goal relation. As a consequence, at the "external/first-merge-only" stage, young children would show an inability to interpret readings from a given ordered pair, since they would only have access to the mental parsing of a non-recursive set. (See Roeper for a full discussion of recursion in child language acquisition). In addition to word-order violations, other more ubiquitous results of a first-merge stage would show that children's initial utterances lack the recursive properties of inflectional morphology, yielding a strict Non-inflectional stage-1, consistent with an incremental Structure-building model of child language.
Generative grammar, associated especially with the work of Noam Chomsky, is currently one of the approaches to explaining children's acquisition of syntax. Its leading idea is that human biology imposes narrow constraints on the child's "hypothesis space" during language acquisition. In the principles and parameters framework, which has dominated generative syntax since Chomsky's (1980) ''
Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures'', the acquisition of syntax resembles ordering from a menu: the human brain comes equipped with a limited set of choices from which the child selects the correct options by imitating the parents' speech while making use of the context.
An important argument which favors the generative approach, is the
poverty of the stimulus
Poverty of the stimulus (POS) is the controversial argument from linguistics that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language. This is considered evidence contrary to ...
argument. The child's input (a finite number of sentences encountered by the child, together with information about the context in which they were uttered) is, in principle, compatible with an infinite number of conceivable grammars. Moreover, rarely can children rely on
corrective feedback
Corrective feedback is a frequent practice in the field of learning and achievement. It typically involves a learner receiving either formal or informal feedback on their understanding or performance on various tasks by an agent such as teacher, ...
from adults when they make a grammatical error; adults generally respond and provide feedback regardless of whether a child's utterance was grammatical or not, and children have no way of discerning if a feedback response was intended to be a correction. Additionally, when children do understand that they are being corrected, they don't always reproduce accurate restatements. Yet, barring situations of medical abnormality or extreme privation, all children in a given speech-community converge on very much the same grammar by the age of about five years. An especially dramatic example is provided by children who, for medical reasons, are unable to produce speech and, therefore, can never be corrected for a grammatical error but nonetheless, converge on the same grammar as their typically developing peers, according to comprehension-based tests of grammar.
Considerations such as those have led Chomsky,
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor (; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modu ...
,
Eric Lenneberg
Eric Heinz Lenneberg (19 September 1921 – 31 May 1975) was a linguistics, linguist and neurologist who pioneered ideas on language acquisition and cognitive psychology, particularly in terms of the concept of innateness.
Life and career
He was ...
and others to argue that the types of grammar the child needs to consider must be narrowly constrained by human biology (the nativist position).
These innate constraints are sometimes referred to as
universal grammar
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible hum ...
, the human "language faculty", or the "language instinct".
Representation in the brain
Recent advances in functional
neuroimaging technology have allowed for a better understanding of how language acquisition is manifested physically in the brain. Language acquisition almost always occurs in children during a period of rapid increase in brain volume. At this point in development, a child has many more neural connections than he or she will have as an adult, allowing for the child to be more able to learn new things than he or she would be as an adult.
Sensitive period
Language acquisition has been studied from the perspective of
developmental psychology
Developmental psychology is the science, scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult deve ...
and
neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, development ...
,
which looks at learning to use and understand language parallel to a child's brain development. It has been determined, through empirical research on developmentally normal children, as well as through some extreme cases of
language deprivation Language deprivation is associated with the lack of linguistic stimuli that are necessary for the language acquisition processes in an individual. Research has shown that early exposure to a first language will predict future language outcomes. Exp ...
, that there is a "
sensitive period
In developmental psychology and developmental biology, a critical period is a maturational stage in the lifespan of an organism during which the nervous system is especially sensitive to certain environmental stimuli. If, for some reason, the o ...
" of language acquisition in which human infants have the ability to learn any language. Several researchers have found that from birth until the age of six months, infants can discriminate the phonetic contrasts of all languages. Researchers believe that this gives infants the ability to acquire the language spoken around them. After this age, the child is able to perceive only the phonemes specific to the language being learned. The reduced phonemic sensitivity enables children to build phonemic categories and recognize stress patterns and sound combinations specific to the language they are acquiring. As Wilder Penfield noted, "Before the child begins to speak and to perceive, the uncommitted cortex is a blank slate on which nothing has been written. In the ensuing years much is written, and the writing is normally never erased. After the age of ten or twelve, the general functional connections have been established and fixed for the speech cortex." According to the sensitive or critical period models, the age at which a child acquires the ability to use language is a predictor of how well he or she is ultimately able to use language. However, there may be an age at which becoming a fluent and natural user of a language is no longer possible; Penfield and Roberts (1959) cap their sensitive period at nine years old. The human brain may be automatically wired to learn languages, but this ability does not last into adulthood in the same way that it exists during childhood. By around age 12, language acquisition has typically been solidified, and it becomes more difficult to learn a language in the same way a native speaker would. Just like children who speak, deaf children go through a critical period for learning language. Deaf children who acquire their first language later in life show lower performance in complex aspects of grammar. At that point, it is usually a second language that a person is trying to acquire and not a first.
Assuming that children are exposed to language during the critical period, acquiring language is almost never missed by cognitively normal children. Humans are so well-prepared to learn language that it becomes almost impossible not to. Researchers are unable to experimentally test the effects of the sensitive period of development on language acquisition, because it would be unethical to deprive children of language until this period is over. However, case studies on abused,
language-deprived children
A child ( : children) is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty, or between the developmental period of infancy and puberty. The legal definition of ''child'' generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger ...
show that they exhibit extreme limitations in language skills, even after instruction.
At a very young age, children can distinguish different sounds but cannot yet produce them. During infancy, children begin to babble. Deaf babies babble in the same patterns as hearing babies do, showing that
babbling
Babbling is a stage in child development and a state in language acquisition during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering articulate sounds, but does not yet produce any recognizable words. Babbling begins shortly after birth ...
is not a result of babies simply imitating certain sounds, but is actually a natural part of the process of language development. Deaf babies do, however, often babble less than hearing babies, and they begin to babble later on in infancy—at approximately 11 months as compared to approximately 6 months for hearing babies.
Prelinguistic language abilities that are crucial for language acquisition have been seen even earlier than infancy. There have been many different studies examining different modes of language acquisition prior to birth. The study of language acquisition in fetuses began in the late 1980s when several researchers independently discovered that very young infants could discriminate their native language from other languages. In ''Mehler et al. (1988)'', infants underwent discrimination tests, and it was shown that infants as young as 4 days old could discriminate utterances in their native language from those in an unfamiliar language, but could not discriminate between two languages when neither was native to them. These results suggest that there are mechanisms for fetal auditory learning, and other researchers have found further behavioral evidence to support this notion. Fetus auditory learning through environmental habituation has been seen in a variety of different modes, such as fetus learning of familiar melodies (Hepper, 1988), story fragments (DeCasper & Spence, 1986), recognition of mother's voice (Kisilevsky, 2003), and other studies showing evidence of fetal adaptation to native linguistic environments (Moon, Cooper & Fifer, 1993).
Prosody is the property of speech that conveys an emotional state of the utterance, as well as the intended form of speech, for example, question, statement or command. Some researchers in the field of developmental neuroscience argue that fetal auditory learning mechanisms result solely from discrimination of prosodic elements. Although this would hold merit in an evolutionary psychology perspective (i.e. recognition of mother's voice/familiar group language from emotionally valent stimuli), some theorists argue that there is more than prosodic recognition in elements of fetal learning. Newer evidence shows that fetuses not only react to the native language differently from non-native languages, but that fetuses react differently and can accurately discriminate between native and non-native vowel sounds (Moon, Lagercrantz, & Kuhl, 2013). Furthermore, a 2016 study showed that newborn infants encode the edges of multisyllabic sequences better than the internal components of the sequence (Ferry et al., 2016). Together, these results suggest that newborn infants have learned important properties of syntactic processing in utero, as demonstrated by infant knowledge of native language vowels and the sequencing of heard multisyllabic phrases. This ability to sequence specific vowels gives newborn infants some of the fundamental mechanisms needed in order to learn the complex organization of a language.
From a neuroscientific perspective, neural correlates have been found that demonstrate human fetal learning of speech-like auditory stimuli that most other studies have been analyzing (Partanen et al., 2013).
In a study conducted by Partanen et al. (2013),
researchers presented fetuses with certain word variants and observed that these fetuses exhibited higher brain activity in response to certain word variants as compared to controls. In this same study, "a significant correlation existed between the amount of prenatal exposure and brain activity, with greater activity being associated with a higher amount of prenatal speech exposure," pointing to the important learning mechanisms present before birth that are fine-tuned to features in speech (Partanen et al., 2013).
Vocabulary acquisition
Learning a new word, that is, learning to speak this word and speak it on the appropriate occasions, depends upon many factors. First, the learner needs to be able to hear what they are attempting to pronounce. Also required is the capacity to engage in
speech repetition
250px, Children copy with their own mouths the words spoken by the mouths of those around them. That enables them to learn the pronunciation of words not already in their vocabulary.
Speech repetition occurs when individuals speech, speak the so ...
.
Children with reduced ability to repeat non-words (a marker of speech repetition abilities) show a slower rate of vocabulary expansion than children with normal ability.
Several computational models of vocabulary acquisition have been proposed.
Various studies have shown that the size of a child's vocabulary by the age of 24 months correlates with the child's future development and language skills. A lack of language richness by this age has detrimental and long-term effects on the child's cognitive development, which is why it is so important for parents to engage their infants in language. If a child knows fifty or fewer words by the age of 24 months, he or she is classified as a
late-talker, and future language development, like vocabulary expansion and the organization of grammar, is likely to be slower and stunted.
Two more crucial elements of vocabulary acquisition are word segmentation and statistical learning (described above). Word segmentation, or the ability to break down words into syllables from fluent speech can be accomplished by eight-month-old infants.
By the time infants are 17 months old, they are able to link meaning to segmented words.
Recent evidence also suggests that motor skills and experiences may influence vocabulary acquisition during infancy. Specifically, learning to sit independently between 3 and 5 months of age has been found to predict receptive vocabulary at both 10 and 14 months of age, and independent walking skills have been found to correlate with language skills at around 10 to 14 months of age. These findings show that language acquisition is an embodied process that is influenced by a child's overall motor abilities and development. Studies have also shown a correlation between socioeconomic status and vocabulary acquisition.
Meaning
Children learn, on average, ten to fifteen new word meanings each day, but only one of these can be accounted for by direct instruction.
The other nine to fourteen word meanings must have been acquired in some other way. It has been proposed that children acquire these meanings through processes modeled by
latent semantic analysis
Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the do ...
; that is, when they encounter an unfamiliar word, children use contextual information to guess its rough meaning correctly.
A child may expand the meaning and use of certain words that are already part of its
mental lexicon The mental lexicon is defined as a mental dictionary that contains information regarding a word, such as its meaning, pronunciation, and syntactic characteristics.
The mental lexicon is a construct used in linguistics and psycholinguistics to refer ...
in order to denominate anything that is somehow related but for which it does not know the specific word. For instance, a child may broaden the use of ''mummy'' and ''dada'' in order to indicate anything that belongs to its mother or father, or perhaps every person who resembles its own parents; another example might be to say ''rain'' while meaning ''I don't want to go out''.
There is also reason to believe that children use various
heuristic
A heuristic (; ), or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, ...
s to infer the meaning of words properly.
Markman and others have proposed that children assume words to refer to objects with similar properties ("cow" and "pig" might both be "animals") rather than to objects that are thematically related ("cow" and "milk" are probably not both "animals").
Children also seem to adhere to the "whole object assumption" and think that a novel label refers to an entire entity rather than to one of its parts.
This assumption along with other resources, such as grammar and morphological cues or lexical constraints, may help aid the child in acquiring word meaning, but conclusions based on such resources may sometimes conflict.
Genetic and neurocognitive research
According to several linguists, neurocognitive research has confirmed many standards of language learning, such as: "learning engages the entire person (cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains), the human brain seeks patterns in its searching for meaning, emotions affect all aspects of learning, retention and recall, past experience always affects new learning, the brain's working memory has a limited capacity, lecture usually results in the lowest degree of retention, rehearsal is essential for retention, practice
lone
Lone may refer to:
People
*Lone (given name), a given name (including a list of people with this name)
* Lone (musician), Matt Cutler, an electronic musician from Nottingham, United Kingdom
*Lone (surname), a surname (including a list of people w ...
does not make perfect, and each brain is unique" (Sousa, 2006, p. 274). In terms of genetics, the gene
ROBO1
Roundabout homolog 1 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the ''ROBO1'' gene.
Function
Bilateral symmetric nervous systems have special midline structures that establish a partition between the two mirror image halves. Some axons project t ...
has been associated with phonological buffer integrity or length.
Genetic research has found two major factors predicting successful language acquisition and maintenance. These include inherited intelligence, and the lack of genetic anomalies that may cause speech pathologies, such as mutations in the FOXP2 gene which cause
verbal dyspraxia
Verbal may refer to:
People
*Verbal (rapper) (born 1975), Japanese rapper and music producer
* Verbal Kent (born 1978), alternative hip hop artist from Chicago
* Verbal Jint (born 1980), South Korean musician, rapper and record producer Language
...
. The role of inherited intelligence increases with age, accounting for 20% of IQ variation in infants, and for 60% in adults. It affects a vast variety of language-related abilities, from spatio-motor skills to writing fluency. There have been debates in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and genetics, with some scholars arguing that language is fully or mostly innate, but the research evidence points to genetic factors only working in interaction with environmental ones.
Although it is difficult to determine without invasive measures which exact parts of the brain become most active and important for language acquisition,
fMRI
Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area o ...
and
PET
A pet, or companion animal, is an animal kept primarily for a person's company or entertainment rather than as a working animal, livestock, or a laboratory animal. Popular pets are often considered to have attractive appearances, intelligence, ...
technology has allowed for some conclusions to be made about where language may be centered.
Kuniyoshi Sakai
is an associate professor at the University of Tokyo. He was born in Tokyo, Japan and is of Japanese nationality. Most of the research that Kuniyoshi conducts focuses on neurobiology.
History
Kuniyoshi has worked at many institutes. Following ...
has proposed, based on several neuroimaging studies, that there may be a "grammar center" in the brain, whereby language is primarily processed in the left lateral
premotor cortex
The premotor cortex is an area of the motor cortex lying within the frontal lobe of the brain just anterior to the primary motor cortex. It occupies part of Brodmann's area 6. It has been studied mainly in primates, including monkeys and humans. ...
(located near the pre central sulcus and the
inferior frontal sulcus
The inferior frontal sulcus is a sulcus between the middle frontal gyrus and the inferior frontal gyrus.
See also
* Superior frontal sulcus
Additional images
File:Inferior frontal sulcus animation small.gif, Animation. Inferior frontal sulcus ...
). Additionally, these studies have suggested that first language and second language acquisition may be represented differently in the
cortex
Cortex or cortical may refer to:
Biology
* Cortex (anatomy), the outermost layer of an organ
** Cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the vertebrate cerebrum, part of which is the ''forebrain''
*** Motor cortex, the regions of the cerebral cortex i ...
.
In a study conducted by Newman et al., the relationship between cognitive neuroscience and language acquisition was compared through a standardized procedure involving native speakers of English and native Spanish speakers who all had a similar length of exposure to the English language (averaging about 26 years). It was concluded that the brain does in fact process languages differently, but rather than being related to proficiency levels, language processing relates more to the function of the brain itself.
During early infancy, language processing seems to occur over many areas in the brain. However, over time, it gradually becomes concentrated into two areas –
Broca's area
Broca's area, or the Broca area (, also , ), is a region in the frontal lobe of the dominant Cerebral hemisphere, hemisphere, usually the left, of the Human brain, brain with functions linked to speech production.
Language processing in the brai ...
and
Wernicke's area
Wernicke's area (; ), also called Wernicke's speech area, is one of the two parts of the cerebral cortex that are linked to speech, the other being Broca's area. It is involved in the comprehension of written and spoken language, in contrast to B ...
. Broca's area is in the left
frontal cortex
The frontal lobe is the largest of the four major lobes of the brain in mammals, and is located at the front of each cerebral hemisphere (in front of the parietal lobe and the temporal lobe). It is parted from the parietal lobe by a groove betwe ...
and is primarily involved in the production of the patterns in vocal and sign language. Wernicke's area is in the left
temporal cortex
The temporal lobe is one of the four major lobes of the cerebral cortex in the brain of mammals. The temporal lobe is located beneath the lateral fissure on both cerebral hemispheres of the mammalian brain.
The temporal lobe is involved in proc ...
and is primarily involved in language comprehension. The specialization of these language centers is so extensive that damage to them can result in
aphasia
Aphasia is an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine but aphasia due to stroke is estimated to be 0.1–0.4% in th ...
.
Artificial intelligence
Some algorithms for language acquisition are based on
statistical machine translation
Statistical machine translation (SMT) is a machine translation paradigm where translations are generated on the basis of statistical models whose parameters are derived from the analysis of bilingual text corpora. The statistical approach contrast ...
. Language acquisition can be modeled as a
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
process, which may be based on learning
semantic parsers or
grammar induction
Grammar induction (or grammatical inference) is the process in machine learning of learning a formal grammar (usually as a collection of ''re-write rules'' or '' productions'' or alternatively as a finite state machine or automaton of some kind) fr ...
algorithms.
[Zuidema, Willem H.]
How the poverty of the stimulus solves the poverty of the stimulus
" Advances in neural information processing systems. 2003.
Prelingual deafness
Prelingual deafness is defined as hearing loss that occurred at birth or before an individual has learned to speak. In the United States, 2 to 3 out of every 1000 children are born deaf or hard of hearing. Even though it might be presumed that deaf children acquire language in different ways since they are not receiving the same auditory input as hearing children, many research findings indicate that deaf children acquire language in the same way that hearing children do and when given the proper language input, understand and express language just as well as their hearing peers. Babies who learn sign language produce signs or gestures that are more regular and more frequent than hearing babies acquiring spoken language. Just as hearing babies babble, deaf babies acquiring sign language will babble with their hands, otherwise known as
manual babbling Manual babbling is a linguistic phenomenon that has been observed in deaf children and hearing children born to deaf parents who have been exposed to sign language. Manual babbles are characterized by repetitive movements that are confined to a limi ...
. Therefore, as many studies have shown,
language acquisition by deaf children
Language acquisition is a natural process in which infants and children develop proficiency in the first language or languages that they are exposed to. The process of language acquisition is varied among deaf children. Deaf children born to deaf p ...
parallel the language acquisition of a spoken language by hearing children because humans are biologically equipped for language regardless of the
modality
Modality may refer to:
Humanities
* Modality (theology), the organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations
* Modality (music), in music, the subject concerning certain diatonic scales
* Modalitie ...
.
Signed language acquisition
Deaf children's visual-manual language acquisition not only parallel spoken language acquisition but by the age of 30 months, most deaf children that were exposed to a visual language had a more advanced grasp with subject-pronoun copy rules than hearing children. Their vocabulary bank at the ages of 12–17 months exceed that of a hearing child's, though it does even out when they reach the two-word stage. The use of space for absent referents and the more complex handshapes in some signs prove to be difficult for children between 5 and 9 years of age because of motor development and the complexity of remembering the spatial use.
Cochlear implants
Other options besides sign language for kids with prelingual deafness include the use of hearing aids to strengthen remaining sensory cells or
cochlear implant
A cochlear implant (CI) is a surgically implanted neuroprosthesis that provides a person who has moderate-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss with sound perception. With the help of therapy, cochlear implants may allow for improved speech und ...
s to stimulate the hearing nerve directly. Cochlear Implants are hearing devices that are placed behind the ear and contain a receiver and electrodes which are placed under the skin and inside the cochlea. Despite these developments, there is still a risk that prelingually deaf children may not develop good speech and speech reception skills. Although cochlear implants produce sounds, they are unlike typical hearing and deaf and hard of hearing people must undergo intensive therapy in order to learn how to interpret these sounds. They must also learn how to speak given the range of hearing they may or may not have. However, deaf children of deaf parents tend to do better with language, even though they are isolated from sound and speech because their language uses a different mode of communication that is accessible to them: the visual modality of language.
Although cochlear implants were initially approved for adults, now there is pressure to implant children early in order to maximize auditory skills for mainstream learning which in turn has created controversy around the topic. Due to recent advances in technology, cochlear implants allow some deaf people to acquire some sense of hearing. There are interior and exposed exterior components that are surgically implanted. Those who receive cochlear implants earlier on in life show more improvement on speech comprehension and language. Spoken language development does vary widely for those with cochlear implants though due to a number of different factors including: age at implantation, frequency, quality and type of speech training. Some evidence suggests that speech processing occurs at a more rapid pace in some prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants than those with traditional hearing aids. However, cochlear implants may not always work.
Research shows that people develop better language with a cochlear implant when they have a solid first language to rely on to understand the second language they would be learning. In the case of prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants, a signed language, like
American Sign Language
American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canadians, Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual lang ...
would be an accessible language for them to learn to help support the use of the cochlear implant as they learn a spoken language as their L2. Without a solid, accessible first language, these children run the risk of language deprivation, especially in the case that a cochlear implant fails to work. They would have no access to sound, meaning no access to the spoken language they are supposed to be learning. If a signed language was not a strong language for them to use and neither was a spoken language, they now have no access to any language and run the risk of missing their
critical period
In developmental psychology and developmental biology, a critical period is a maturational stage in the lifespan of an organism during which the nervous system is especially sensitive to certain environmental stimuli. If, for some reason, the org ...
.
See also
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Chunking
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Creole language
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. ...
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Evolutionary linguistics
Evolutionary linguistics or Darwinian linguistics is a sociobiological approach to the study of language. Evolutionary linguists consider linguistics as a subfield of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The approach is also closely linked ...
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Evolutionary psychology of language
Evolutionary psychology of language is the study of the evolutionary history of language as a psychological faculty within the discipline of evolutionary psychology. It makes the assumption that language is the result of a Darwinian adaptation.
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Fis phenomenon
Fis phenomenon is a phenomenon during a child's language acquisition that demonstrates that perception of phonemes occurs earlier than a child's ability to produce the appropriate allophone. It is also illustrative of a larger theme in child langu ...
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FOXP2
Forkhead box protein P2 (FOXP2) is a protein that, in humans, is encoded by the ''FOXP2'' gene. FOXP2 is a member of the forkhead box family of transcription factors, proteins that regulate gene expression by binding to DNA. It is expressed in ...
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Gestures in language acquisition
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Glossary of language teaching terms and ideas
Language teaching, like other educational activities, may employ specialized vocabulary and syntax, word use. This list is a glossary for English language learning and teaching using the communicative language teaching, communicative approach.
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Identity and language learning
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KE family
The KE family is a medical name designated for a British family, about half of whom exhibit a severe speech disorder called developmental verbal dyspraxia. It is the first family with speech disorder to be investigated using genetic analyses, by w ...
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Language attrition
Language attrition is the process of losing a native or first language. This process is generally caused by both isolation from speakers of the first language ("L1") and the acquisition and use of a second language ("L2"), which interferes with ...
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Language transfer
Language transfer is the application of linguistic features from one language to another by a bilingual or multilingual speaker. Language transfer may occur across both languages in the acquisition of a simultaneous bilingual, from a mature sp ...
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List of children's speech corpora
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List of language acquisition researchers
Below are some notable researchers in language acquisition listed by intellectual orientation and research topic.
Nativists
* Eric Lenneberg
* Steven Pinker
* Stephen Crain
* Thomas Bever
* Susan Gelman
* Susan Carey
* Elizabeth Spelke
* Li ...
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Metalinguistic awareness
Metalinguistic awareness, also known as metalinguistic ability, refers to the ability to consciously reflect on the nature of language. The concept of metalinguistic awareness is helpful in explaining the execution and transfer of linguistic know ...
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Natural-language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...
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Non-native speech database
A non-native speech database is a Speech corpus, speech database of non-native pronunciations of English. Such databases are used in the development of: multilingual automatic speech recognition systems, Text-to-speech, text to speech systems, pron ...
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Origin of language
The origin of language (spoken and signed, as well as language-related technological systems such as writing), its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries. Scholars wishing to study th ...
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Passive speaker (language)
A passive speaker (also referred to as a receptive bilingual or passive bilingual) is a category of speaker who has had enough exposure to a language in childhood to have a native-like comprehension of it, but has little or no active command of ...
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Second-language attrition
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Spoken language
A spoken language is a language produced by articulate sounds or (depending on one's definition) manual gestures, as opposed to a written language. An oral language or vocal language is a language produced with the vocal tract in contrast with a si ...
References
Further reading
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*Kennison, S. (2013). ''Introduction to language development.'' Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
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External links
Language acquisition in American Sign LanguageRich, detailed documentation of language acquisition in ASL.
Innateness and Language, Encyclopedia Entry*Beth Skwarecki, "Babies Learn to Recognize Words in the Womb", ''
Science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...
'', 26 August 201
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Language acquisition,