Language Acquisition, Learning, and Linguistics



Language Acquisition, Learning, and Linguistics

Question 1

Language is a set of signs, both oral and written; through its meaning and their relationship it allows the expression of human communication. Language is possible because of different and complex functions performed by the brain. These functions are associated with intelligence and memory known as linguistics. The complexity of language is one of the major differences that separate man from animals, because although the latter also communicate with each other, they do so through instinctive media related to different conditions that have little to do with some kind of intelligence as the human (Brown, 2007).

Another feature of language is that it begins to develop and cemented from pregnancy, and is set according to the individual's relationship with the world around him. Thus, learning, listening and understanding certain sounds and not others, planning what is to communicate in a way quite particular (Cohen, 2000).

Because language learning occurs so quickly, and with such apparent ease, researchers such as Chomsky and Fodor have proposed that language learning is fundamentally different from other cognitive processes and involves an innate, language-specific component. Much of this claim revolves around the mastery of the grammar. Theorists from this camp claim that the linguistic input that a child receives does not contain enough information to allow a child to correctly induce the grammatical structure of the language. Thus, some innate contribution is necessary to overcome this poverty of the stimulus. One particularly influential innate language-specific theory is parameter setting, which proposes that an infant is born with a set of switches, or parameters, that code all possible linguistic variation. These parameters begin with a default setting. Linguistic input then triggers these parameters to be set to the value appropriate for that language. Setting the parameter then grants mastery of particular syntactic structures of that language. This mastery may encompass other structures than that represented in the trigger input. Thus, through the combination of the innate parameters and triggers from the linguistic input, grammatical mastery is achieved (CRULP, 2012).

In contrast to the above viewpoint, other researchers believe that children bring general learning processes to language, and apply these to the input, which contains enough information for the child to figure out the grammar. Indeed, there is ample accumulating evidence that the linguistic input that children receive is not nearly as impoverished as innatists portray. For example, there are differences in phonetic and acoustic properties between content words and grammatical function words that may allow infants to distinguish between them. There is also a high, although imperfect, correlation between prosodic and syntactic units in speech, and during the first year of life, infants become sensitive to relevant prosodic cues (Learn, 2010).

Question 2

Inadequacies of Behaviorist Theories

Behaviorist views proved inadequate on a number of grounds, some empirical, some theoretical. Empirically, it was shown that in most known cultures, parents do not approve and disapprove on the basis of how well-formed sentences are. A child's sentence like 'her curl my hair', though ...