Second language acquisition

2013

Children do not reproduce their parents' language exactly. The way that children acquire their first language so quickly and easily has interested people for thousands of years. Considering the richness and complexity of this system, it seems improbable that children could ever learn its structure (Saffran, 2003).The main question in all modern studies of child language acquisition involves finding out what types of mechanisms underlie the acquisition of human language system. This case study was a developmental descriptive one that addressed three infants acquiring their first language in Iran (Kerman). The three infants were followed for a period of 12 monthsto see if they all followed a systematic pattern in language development. It seems that in the process of language acquisition, we can accept the possibility that first language learners come to the learning situation with an innate knowledge about language. Normal 0 false false false RU X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions ...

Debating on Second Language Acquisition is not merely in terms of concept but also the real phenomena which postulate each research result. It needs more investigation on SLA due to the various realities on how children and adults acquire and learn any language. This research aims to describe how children and adults acquire and learn their first and second language. Participants consisted of children and adults whose ages determined by the researcher based on the purposive sampling technique. They were all six persons and chosen based on the certain characteristics. Content analysis technique was applied in order to analyze all data gained. The result showed that since human alive inside mother’s womb especially at up to the age of three months, a fetus has tried to acquire sounds subconsciously. Language proficiency is really determined by three factors of Phased Process Approach namely Subconscious Acquisition, Conscious Acquisition and Learning. The ideal time for learning something is begun from the age of 2 or 3 years old, by the fact that children have had the ability to bear a meaning on any input that they catch. The learning process has been begun within the process of acquisition. Based on the findings, it is clear that the children acquire the language step by step based on the development of the brain. Children acquire language is just the same as adult in acquiring the language although there will be some constraints faced by adult concern with the first language because adult has had the strong basic of first language just than children.

Rethinking Linguistics (H.Davis and T.J. Taylor, eds.), 2003

One way of thinking about the study of language acquisition is to see it as concerned with questions that are divisible into two major kinds. On the one hand, there are questions concerning what the child acquires. And then, there are questions about how the child acquires it. We will refer to these two types of question about language development as the WHAT question and the HOW question. Given this way of dividing the territory, any rethinking of the topic of language acquisition should begin with the WHAT question, because it lays the groundwork for the HOW question and, so, for the ways that we might approach the latter. At the same time, we should resist the commonsense view that the WHAT question is really very simple and that it is the HOW question that poses all the difficulties. Q: "What does the child learn?" A: "Why, the language of her community, of course." Q: "How does she learn this language?" A: "Well, different theorists have different ideas about that.....". However, on reflection, we can see that there is in fact a wide variety of ways that the WHAT question might be answered. What does the child learn? Well, she learns English, or Swahili, or Pitjantjatjara, or Mohawk, etc. Or, another answer might be: She learns the phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon of the English language. (For the purposes of this general, meta-methodological discussion, we will make all our references to the acquisition of English, although with the presupposition that the major points in the discussion could be addressed to the acquisition of any language.) Or, she acquires the ability to speak and understand English. Or, she learns how to make statements and commands, to ask questions, to make requests, to express her desires, etc., in English. Or, she learns what English words and grammatical constructions mean and how to use them with those meanings. Or, she learns the recursive processes of English sentence formation which enable her to produce and understand new sentences. Or, she learns to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical combinations of English words. Or, she learns which positions to set the parameters of Universal Grammar to conform with the computational system of English. And so on.

From the moment we are born, we have language in our lives. It is a unique ability that defines us as humans. Speech and language differ us from all the other species. Evidence suggests that our capacity for language is directed by our genes. The most interesting phase of speaking is the language acquisition phase. Thus, we will concentrate on children's ability to learn language.

European Review, 2008

The study of language acquisition during the first year of life is reviewed. We identified three areas that have contributed to our understanding of how the infant copes with linguistic signals to attain the most basic properties of its native language. Distributional properties present in the incoming utterances may allow infants to extract word candidates in the speech stream as shown in the impoverished conditions of artificial grammar studies. This procedure is important because it would work well for most natural languages. We also highlight another important mechanism that allows infants to induce structure from very scarce data. In fact, humans tend to project structural conjectures after being presented with only a few utterances. Finally, we illustrate constraints on processing that derive from perceptual and memory functions that arose much earlier during the evolutionary history of the species. We conclude that all of these machanisms are important for the infants to gain access to its native language.

Definition Language acquisition is a process which starts three months before birth (Elman et al 1996; Karmiloff & Karmiloff-Smith 2001) and gradually leads to the child's mastery of his/her native language/s, at around adolescence. Language learning, language acquisition and language development can be understood as synonymous. However, this lexical differentiation carries interesting theoretical nuances.

In this paper are synthesised some of the most recent theories on language acquisition. Some traditional points of view have been considered taking in mind that, in some extent, the research trend is now cast towards biology and the study of genome structure. This bias tends to explain all human faculties as the result of a specific, well-formed architecture. In this paper we have tried to answer to the question what could be considered growing up in language acquisition by visiting the different theories on this matter. They all appear realistic and convincing. The aim here would be to show how the main indications of different approaches could be considered good to be adapted in a modelled system.