Topic > Factors That Govern Language Acquisition

Many parents, prospective parents, and even students studying linguistics think about how children acquire human language. When a child grows up soon after birth, he or she is filled with great determination and enthusiasm to learn different sounds, words and phrases to fully learn and understand human language. According to the research in this article, there are three factors that govern language acquisition: the discovery of linguistic units, the packaging of words into meaningful units, and the acquisition of language as creation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In discovering linguistic units, children have an important role to play. Before a child begins to connect words to objects, he must establish which sequences of sounds are words, this is possible through his native language from continuous sounds where there are pauses. Even though there are different forms of language, this shows that a child must go through a critical period for language acquisition, this is called first language acquisition. Despite these factors, infants can successfully divide words into fluent speech starting around 7 months of age. However, according to research on theorist Noam Chomsky, he argued that “language is an innate faculty and we are born with a set of linguistic rules in our minds, which he called 'universal grammar'”. He believed that a child does not copy the language he hears around him, but deduces rules from it, which he can then use to produce sentences he has never heard before. (Tahiriri, 2012). Children package words into meaningful units. Although distributional analyzes allow children to understand the words and sentences of a language, many higher language functions cannot be captured with statistics alone. Children must discover the rules that generate an infinite set, with only a finite sample. They evidently possess additional language learning abilities that allow them to organize their language without explicit guidance, because Chomsky believed that children at birth are born with a "language acquisition device" that allows them to formulate linguistic rules based on input received. ”. (Tahiriri, 2012). These abilities decline with age and may be biologically based. It can be argued that according to Piaget “the unit is the word and the child learns what the words refer to and how to combine them. In the behaviorist vision, "there is no complex system of internalized rules, given innately or acquired through development, but a system of strengths of habits" (Tahriri, 2012). Every child goes through a period of acquiring language. During this time, children discover combinations in the sounds of their language and learn how they are organized into combinations, and associate these combinations with meaning. These processes occur together, requiring children to combine their skills as they learn, to decipher the communication code around them. Despite layers of complexity, each currently beyond the reach of modern computers, young children readily solve the linguistic puzzles they face, even surpassing their input when it lacks expected structure. Natural experiments in which children face minimal language exposure can reveal the extent of innate language learning abilities and their effect on language creation and change. However, it can be argued that, “even if a child goes through the period of first language acquisition through.