The different stages of development in a child's language learning are important to remember:
9 months - this is normally the beginning of the process where babbling starts to turn into phonemes like "ca", "ba and "ta".
18 months - this I known as the first word stage as child begin to let language move their mouth more to create the words like "mummy" and "daddy".
2 years - the 2 word stage is where the child can begin to express language a bit more as they begin to gain higher semantically awareness but still need to word on structure. They seem to understand a lot more than what they can produce.
Up to the age of 3 - there is an increase in more linguistical language development and from then on language become easier and easier to acquire but it's still so complicated. Like what Skinner says about turn taking and how we seem to automatically know how to structure a conversation about who speaks forts and then second, keeping or flouting Grice's Maxims, even from a young age:
So, how do we learn language and what's different between language and communication?
We know that animals can communicate but humans have become a sophisticated species to turn communication into language. Michael Thomas Eller, an evolutionary linguist, has manage to shows that animals are tied to their emotions to create noises like monkeys with little flexibility needed. However, better vocal appertaus like human is need to properly talk. Because of this, many different psychologist have tried to get apes and chimps to talk through the use of sign language, like Nim Chimpsky. This experiment showed us that they could never grasp the concept of using grammar in sentences but could sign simple nouns and verbs. They didn't have any linguistic creativity. Humans somehow had an revolutionary step, maybe the Fox-P-2 gene had something to do with it, but it is believed that we made this step in order to make it easer to collaborate to collect food and also something in the female DNA that need something like speech, to keep the tribes together to create a social cohesion for the children of the tribe. It was important to succeed so the children could grow up, keep pro-creating amd helping to pass knowledge across the generations. The main question being, did language changed us?
Language has now become and intellectual part of human nature and know 50-80% of the brain in involved in language. It all goes back to the nature vs nurture debate and how the forbidden experiment need some luck like the wild child called Victor to add evidence of the critical acquisition period. It shows that if we don't learn languge by the early puberty stage they we won't be able to use language at all. We might be able to pick up some nouns like Victor but won't be able to grammar to structure them. It tells us both nature and nurture is important as we are born the the DNA to speak but it needs to be stimulate by our environment to let it archive it's full potential. This can be linked back to Deborys research, showing how him and his wife as parents helped to develop their sons languge by stimulating him with positive responses so giving us a clue in how a child quickly develops their language.
An important peice of research to look at is from Professor Stephen Pinker. He looks how words in languge need to develop from the same linguistical environment. Context has become a significant part of how a child is going to learn from need certain words and how to associate them to the context e.g water, food, play, bed. It is also important to be creative with language for example with stories. From kinethtic to more narrative ones using rhyming couplets as a memory device as children aerial more like to remember the phonetics of the sentence rather than the words to begin with. Stories are also important as they are part of the bedtime routine that inspire children to have their own idea for stories and role play too.
Another piece of important research tomorrow was done in 1958 by Jean Berko-Gleeson. It was called The Wug Test. In this test, the researcher would ask the child a question, "If this is a wug, what are they?", using visual aids to help and the determiner "they' to change the grammatical language. The child responded with "Wugs". Straight away, the child, even though it was a nonsense word, knew to add "s" to plauralise the word. The same with adding "ed" to make in a verb and "er" for past tense. The whole experiment supports Chomskys L.A.D, showing language is part of us from the very beginning and we know how to use it. This peice of research also shows the amount of language parents provide their children before they start school, around the age of 5, is crucial. Contextual factors around the home can affect this as you need active responses to develop communication. As shown by Labove, as he showed a change on context to pupils like teacher sitting eye to eye with them, made they engage in convertsaion more that if the teacher was standing over them. Showing that it looks like the couldn't access language but actually it was more to do with that they didn't want to. There is no eveidnce to show that actively coaching your child to speak can improve your child's ability to language anymore than if you don't.
So back to children in contextual settings, it maybe that children that go to nursery are more likely to learn possessive nouns more than if they don't because they are surrounded by lots of other children their own age and have to learn to share therefore picking up collaborative language also quicker. Also the role of genders is important to look at to as the role of the father has changed a lot. Once upon a time, they could have afforded not much contact with their child and mothers became the child's way of learning languge but now that is changing. Another little idea to think about is how a father tried to each his son to speak am different language to begin with but as soon as the son got more enfolded with his surrounding environment and realised other people didn't speak the language he was speaking, he dropped it. It stopped being the fun little game him and his father played and this was at the age of 3.
Sign language is also an interesting part if language to look at and it can be question is it actually a languge? However, people who sign maybe can't hear but they can communicate. It is a visual language and from a child's point of view, access to language through sight, face to face communication, is very important in the early stages of learning languge as it is visual before phonology. When talking about CLA, never dismiss visual importance on communication said the child to repetition to signify meaning for the representation of characterisation on words, people and places.
So overall in this episode by Fry, language never stays still. Change is definite and language is an important part that defines who we are!
To find out more about this documentary, follow this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015h1xb
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