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Theories of The Early Stages of Language
Theories of The Early Stages of Language
language acquisition
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What is language?
Language is the primary method of human communication, but there are also
other ways to communicate without the use of language. When asked to
define language we tend to think of a verbal and written system in which
certain sounds and symbols come together in a specific way to convey
meaning. Language in its most complex form is unique to humans, although
some animals have been found to have basic communication patterns.
Languages often have verbal and written components, but how we classify
something like American Sign Language? Animals manage to communicate
— do they have language? How did language evolve? How do we learn
enough language ourselves to begin to answer this question?
Not only are children able to absorb the complicated rules of grammar
without formal teaching, they do so from a limited vocabulary. Regardless of
how much a child is spoken to, they will not hear every possible word and
sentence by the time they begin speaking. Yet when they do start to talk,
children begin to follow grammatical rules and apply them to form new,
innovative phrases. This level of information processing is incredibly
impressive in anyone, much less someone still figuring out counting and
skipping!
What do we know?
As is often the case in psychology and sociology, it’s hard to get what we
normally think of as data about language acquisition. It’s not a chemical we
can test for or a distance we can measure (imagine asking a 2 year old how
many words they know — not a particularly useful or productive task,
right? ). However, there are some facts that are generally agreed upon by the
scientific community. The first couple years of life are the critical period for
language learning, which becomes a much harder task as people age.
Children usually say their first words around 10-18 months of age, and
graduate to phrases sometime before they are two years old. In fact, studies
have shown that 18 month olds can tell the difference between correctly
formed verb pairs (is jumping) and incorrect ones (will jumping). Somewhere
between four and seven years old children begin to be able to tell stories that
more or less make sense.
We also know that learning a language is not like walking up the steady
increase of a ramp, but more like walking the hills and valleys of a country
road. Usually when we learn a new skill, the more we practice the better we
get. However, this isn’t always true in the early stages of language
development. When children are first learning to talk, the verbs they use are
usually the most common such as go, eat, talk, give, run, etc. These are often
irregular in the past tense. Although at first they use the past tense properly
(“I ran”, “he went”, etc), kids typically regress for a while. They often over-
follow rules, saying phrases like “I runned” instead of “I ran”. As their
vocabularies expand rapidly (known as vocabulary burst), some researchers
believe children notice patterns in language, and that leads to over-correction
as described in the example above. Eventually, children begin to understand
where the rules apply and where they don’t, and then properly form the past
tense once more. This is known as a U shaped learning curve, because the
language mastery started high, dropped for a period of time, and then
improved again. Thus, there appears to be a mimicking (copying) phase first
and then a time of broad generalizations before children settle into language.
It’s important to keep in mind that theories of language acquisition are just
ideas created by researchers to explain their observations. How accurate these
theories are to the real world is debatable. Language acquisition is a
complicated process influenced by the genetics of an individual as well as the
environment they live in.
New brain imaging technology, such as MRIs and fMRIs have also allowed
scientists to look at the brains of children and patients with language-
acquisition disorders to understand this complicated event. An fMRI can
track where and when our brains use energy. If a certain part of your brain
lights up while you’re learning a language, that part of your brain is using
energy, and in this context might be related to language-acquisition. Of
course we learn over time and not all at once, so there is a limit to what we
can learn via imaging which represents the brain in a single moment.
https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/processing-the-environment/language/a/theories-of-
the-early-stages-of-language-acquisition