Horizon - How do we speak??

So how do we speak? Horizon is a documentary program that aims to explore questions like this and its not specifically to do with children but the bases come from CLA - Child Language Acquisition. It discusses how we as humans are defined by are use of language to communicate and how speech and language defines us as a species. We are very sophisticated in our way on learning language as children can pick it up with minimal effort compared to adults and learn through a natural process and not being taught! However, this leads to the main debate in CLA. Do we learn it through nature or nurture? Are we born with the DNA coding to learn to speak or od it the environment around us that helps is to speak. How we learn to speak is even a mystery to the experts!

One expert in the field is Professor Deb Roy, a cognitive  scientist who wanted to see and hear how children learn to speak so his home became the lab, set up with camera and microphones as his son became the guinea pig. It became known as The Speech Home Project and up to the age of three, he filmed his son everyday learning to speak. The data saw his son go through the different stages of babbling, single word stage, two word stage and finally including more grammatical structure with the words. After going back through the data, he began to discover the way his wife and him were talking to their son affected how he learnt to talk. By positive responses and reinforcement, his son seemed to pick up language quicker. This is the same with all parents with kids. Simplifying their words and syntax and elongating words, which is known as convergence, shows they were doing it to be to be in the same level as the child. This is an example of parentese. Phonological awareness is how children begin to learn by listening to the tone, phonological features and intonation.  This lead onto longer sentences as the child developed and to the age of 5, a child will have learn over 5,000 words. Mainly verbs, nouns and determiners. All this research could lead us to see how words are born but at the moment, Deb Roys research is the clearest we have.

Human's are the only species that can convey complex meaning and thought through language, which makes us unique. Humans have tried to teach animals like the chimp Viki, however it didn't work as chimps have different vocal apparatus to us and there are certain brain processes that are stoping animals to speak. And also human can have this to shown in the case of Steve Speer. An accident cause him to have a stroke and has trouble recalling words. With the help of improved scanning, they managed to see what happened and how the damaged affected language response. More research looks into how babies only a day old could recognise its mothers voice showing we tune to the sound of speech and speech we recognise as soon as we are born. Another example that points to the fact we are born with the innate ability to speak is from a guy called Christopher, who is autistic and knows over 20 languages and has the ability to learn the languages quickly.

The Godfather of linguistics, Noam Chomsky theory is the basic of language is innate and easy though it looks complex for children to pick up. How the sentence structure, word order, meaning  and sound need to be learnt at an early age, which comes back to the nature/nurture debate.  The Forbidden experiment also come into this as they want to see if isolation of a child up to the age of 7 will make learning language difficult? Geni, wild child's and zebra finches experiment are the closet they have got to seeing if this affects learning of language and the zebra finch's showed that 3/4 generations after language could be learned again. However, due to the ethics this experiment with humans, it wouldn't be acceptable to do. Follow this link here to find out more about Geni: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hmdycJQi4QA

Chomsky's L.A.D is an important part of the nurture debate to why we can speak. He believes we are born with the blue print to have language that needs to be stimulated. This could be back up from the ground breaking recent research of the Fox-P-2 gene that was would to control out ability to speak in our DNA. This is evidence that we are born with ability to speak and support for L.A.D. However, Skinners Critical Acquisition Period can also use the gene ti show that you need both nurture and nature to develop language because even though you are born with this gene, it needs to be stimulated. There needs to be a connection between speech and cognitive learning. Origins and idea of language had been shown to develop unconsciously over time and there are many more factors that can effect language. When identified, all the components can show us how to be human.

To find this documentary, follow this link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&v=PZatrvNDOiE