Language acquisition |
| Every day we apply thousands
of sound combinations to shape words and we put these words into a certain
order to form sentences. We speak. Language processing has become a natural
part of our lives. We are mostly unaware of the complexity of this process,
which is a combination of utterance, comprehension, and interaction. However,
everybody has to go through certain stages of language growth in order
to acquire the different competencies of communication including syntax,
morphology, phonology, lexicon, as well as prosodic and pragmatic use of
the language.
The process of language acquisition starts at birth. Newborns are capable of perceiving speech already in their first days. As Crystal states, they for example can distinguish between their mother’s and a different persons’ voice on their first day of birth. Before they are one month old they also recognize the “difference between several pairs of consonants or vowels” (430). Newborns develop basic features of speech as early as in their first weeks. Different cry patterns indicate their different needs. The ability to control the airflow and rhythmic utterance lay the foundation for language production. At the age of 6 to 8 weeks the baby produces first consonant-like sounds, followed by vowel-like ones, which is known as “cooing”. A variation of sounds is used and first features of melody and rhythm can be noticed. Early stages of comprehension can be observed when babies respond to adult utterances at the age of two to four months. In their third and fourth month they learn to produce repetitious sounds in a more controlled manner. Crystal refers to that phenomenon as “time of vocal practice or experimentation” (431). Between their sixth and ninth month babies learn about the connection of utterance and situation. Common games like peek-a-boo and the combination of action and language reinforce this development. From their sixth month on infants are capable of producing repeated syllables, also referred to as babbling. In their next stage of language acquisition, which starts at about nine months, patterns of speech are more stable. Babies start to vary vowels and consonants, give up continuous repetitions and start using prosodic features like change in pitch and intonation. Before the infant has produced his first word he has learned to comprehend about 20 of them already. Looking at this from an adult perspective, this should not be surprising: The corpus of our receptive vocabulary is much larger than the one of our productive one. As the toddler has produced the first meaningful word grammatical development starts to play a role in the process of language acquisition. During the first stage, also called holophrastic stage”, meaning is wrapped up in one single word. If the child for example says “Mommy” it can mean various things depending on context and situation. The utterance could be interpreted as for example “Where is Mommy?” or as “Mommy, come here!” or as “You are my Mommy.” etc. Children learn about syntactic features as they begin to use word combinations between the 18th month and the 2nd year. Soon they start to improve the complexity of their speech by adding more elements to it. The conjunction “and” is used to link thoughts that go together. Nevertheless it takes a child up to about the 3rd year until it is able to use other conjunctions in an appropriate context, to form questions, and to apply prepositions correctly. By the age of four children are more aware of their language and try to adjust their grammatical skills to the ones of their language models (like parents, older siblings, etc.). It is important to know that children develop their own hypotheses about language use according to what they perceive. They do not simply imitate what they hear; instead they add new input to their schemata of language processing. Children come up with their own “rules” about proper language use. Overgeneralization is the most common feature of this phase. A preschooler might for example say “ I goed to the store” or “I saw twenty sheeps”. These errors reveal the child’s ability to apply grammatical rules such as the forming of simple past (-ed ending) or plurals (plural -s). They also show that the child is proceeding in its learning about the conventions of adult language. Learning of and about grammar, for example the usage of active and passive continues until the children are in their early teens. This certainly has a great impact on teaching of foreign languages, since second language learning follows about the same principles: Input is processed and adjusted to existing schemata and situational and contextual learning reinforces this behavior. The learner finds individual rules for the application of the second language (which are supported by given ones). Thus, if for example a German student learning English says: “We sleeped for three hours and suddenly two mouses woke us up.” the student applies the same principles as the child mentioned above. It is important for teachers to know that this phenomenon actually indicates the understanding of main grammatical principles and not, as it was believed for a long time, the opposite. The way a teacher deals with such and similar mistakes can have a great impact on the student’s learning. For a long time second language learning was based on prescriptive grammar of which the students learned in a conscious way. Rules were given and were to be applied correctly. New approaches, however, (at least this is the case in Germany) try to teach foreign languages according to the findings about unconscious language acquisition of a mother tongue. Just like the mother of the child who says, “I goed to the store” would probably reply, “Oh, you went to the store?” an English teacher in Germany would respond, “I see. You slept for three hours and then two mice woke you up”. Rules for memory are in this case introduced AFTER the students have already unconsciously acquired the correct forms of language use. Likewise do English-speaking students learn about their language after they have learned how to create and decode meaning from utterances. Speech and other forms of sophisticated
communication are probably the most important characteristics that distinguish
human beings from animals. The question arises, what it is that enables
a person to acquire such a complex system in the earliest years of his
or her life. The innateness hypothesis says that humans have an inborn
system of grammatical schemes that enables them to acquire language. This
explains the fact that humans are the only animals who are able to acquire
the complex system of language. The high complexity of the structure again
indicates that some inborn device must exist, for all humans acquire language
in their earliest years. This would seem almost impossible if we were not
equipped with the entity of language patterns. Another factor that speaks
for the innateness hypothesis is that certain syntactic and morphological
patterns, so to speak universal grammar, can be found in all languages
existing. Humans are able to string words together to form countless sentences
even though they might have never heard them before. The unconscious knowledge
of language (not about language) indicates the existence of a given grammatical
pattern. The fact that certain elements are necessary for meaningful utterance
in any language gives evidence for the existence of a universal grammar.
The syntax of different languages, for example English and German, differ
in their quality. English usually follows the pattern of subject (S), verb
(V), object (O) (I have caught a ball) whereas in German the order of S
O V: Ich (S) habe (auxiliary) einen Ball (O) gefangen (V), O S V:
Einen Ball (O) habe (aux.) ich (S) gefangen (V) as well as S V O: Ich (S)
fing (V) einen Ball (O) is possible. Examining other languages of the world
considering the aspect of syntax could extend this experiment. What we
would find seems obvious: If a person wants to express the act of having
caught a ball he/she needs certain elements of the grammatical system to
do so. In addition to that I should like to mention that people speak about
past, present and future. The different dimensions of time can obviously
be expressed in various manners. However, they are expressed by the means
of human speech in all languages. These are only two examples out of many
characteristics of language that indicate the existence of universal principles.
We speak.
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