Final Project

English 36: Psychology of Language

DELL@XU_Sem2_Q4_AY20/21

Name Rio Jee P. Alivio Date May 16, 2021

Direction. As I told you, your critical essay which you submitted for your Semi-final Exam

will ALSO serve as your Final Project. But you need to “revise and improve” it in terms of its

content. Kindly copy paste inside the box (below) the modified version of your semi-final

essay.

Psycholinguistics and Child Language Acquisition

A child learns to communicate at a young age. A child's first word is normally a

babbling sound. Infants learn their native language quickly and easily, and regardless

of culture, they adopt the same developmental course. Making sense of the speech

that they hear is an early and important challenge for infants. Each language has its

own collection of approximately 40 phonemes, which infants must learn to divide into

these phonemic categories. Young babies are sensitive to slight variations in all

phonetic units, whereas older children lose sensitivity to distinctions not used in their

native language. The reduction of foreign-language distinction discrimination is

accompanied by a rise in sensitivity to native-language phonetic units.

Speech learning is influenced by social interaction in a way that is similar to

communicative learning in songbirds. The brain's dedication to early-life statistical and

prosodic patterns can help to explain the long-standing mystery of why infants are

better language learners than adults. Infants' effective learning, as well as the

restrictions on that learning, are altering theories of learning. The mechanism by

which children acquire fluency in their native tongue is referred to as language

acquisition. Theoretical concerns have focused on how we should account for the

phenomenon of language acquisition in children in the first place. By the age of five or

six, most children have learned most of their language's structures. The earlier

behaviorist assumptions were that language learning could be explained primarily by

imitation and reinforcement.

As a result, psycholinguists claim that imitation is insufficient; children do not learn

language solely by mechanical repetition. They can also get it from normal exposure.

The learning of language in children is influenced by both nature and nurture. Both

schools of thought have made important contributions, but neither is without flaws.

Language learning is a combination of analogy and application, as well as design and

nurture. Innateness and experience. While there is imitation, the child develops his

own set of laws. Children learn structures first, not objects. In other words, it is

claimed that some inherent features in a child's brain "pre-structure" it in the direction

of learning. The child must be introduced to human language, it must be stimulated

properly to respond but the foundation for these innate features to grow into adult

competence.

Nature Theory: Chomsky believes we have innate structures in our brain to help us

learn language. The behavior of language is a very complicated phenomenon.

Different social and psychological factors influence language activity. Nurture Theory:

‘Children learn language first and foremost through learning how others use

language,' according to Tomasello. His theory proposes that we master a language by

practicing it and seeing how others do so. We do not have an intuitive understanding
of language, so we depend on our general cognition skills to help us figure it out.

Psycholinguistics has discovered that there is a crucial time in the learning of a first

language. If a child is not exposed to language within the first thirteen years of his life,

he misses out on the crucial time and will never be able to learn a language, except

his native tongue. If he is introduced to language as a kid, he will go through various

stages in learning his mother tongue. A child's language learning begins with

babbling; simply saying /b/, /p/, and /m/, for example, before progressing to word

level. Between the ages of 12 months and 18 months, infants can develop one-word

utterances.

Example, the child will say something like dada to mean I see daddy or daddy is

coming, or juice to mean give me juice, and so on. In the two-word stage, terms like

baby chair (meaning the baby is sitting in the chair) and baby's chair (meaning the

baby is sitting in the chair) are used. I hit the doggy, etc., as I say I hit the doggie.

Children in the Telegraphic Stage begin to create longer and more complex

sentences, such as chair broken, car making noise, I'm a good guy, man riding bus

today, and so on. From the age of two, language learning is gradual and rapid. The

telegraphic stage is a crucial time in which strong grammatical devices arise.

Therefore, psycholinguistics is concerned with the relationship between language and

the mind, with a particular emphasis on how language is learned, processed, and lost.

The roles of the mind and language are acquisition and performance, and the two are

intertwined. Language learning, according to empiricists, is the product of conditioned

actions.
References:

Chomsky, N., (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Eimas, P. D., Siqueland, E. R., Jusczyk, P. & Vigorito, J. Speech perception in

infants. Science 171, 303–306 (1971).

Kuhl, P. K. Early linguistic experience and phonetic perception: implications for

theories of developmental speech perception. J. Phonetics 21, 125–139 (1993).

Ladefoged, P. Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Language

2nd edn (Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 2004).

Tomasello, M., (2003). Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of

Language Acquisition. USA: Harvard University Press.