Language Acquisition :: essays research papers fc

CONTENTIntroduction ........ 3Main body1. Language acquisition .........42. The stages of spoken language acquisition ............ 52.1. The prelinguistic stage .....................72.2. Babbling ................... 72.3. One-word utterances .................92.4. Two-word utterances .................... 102.5. Telegraphic speech ...........132.6. Language learning during the pre-school period of time ..163. The critical period ....... 174. The summary of behaviours to expect of children with normally matureing speech and language 195. The language acquisition cannot be sped up .. 206. Tips to help develop speech communication in a child ...22Conclusion ... 24Bibliography .... 25INTRODUCTIONChildrens acquisition of language has long been considered whiz of the uniquely defining characteristics of human behaviour.Still today, it is the commonly held belief that children acquire their mother tongue through imitation of the p bents, caregivers or the people in their environment. L inguists alike had the same conviction until 1957, when a then relatively unknown man, A. Noam Chomsky, propounded his theory that the capacity to acquire language is in fact innate. This revolutionized the study of language acquisition, and afterwards a brief period of controversy upon the publication of his book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, in 1964, his theories are now generally accepted as largely true. As a consequence, he was responsible for the emergence of a new field during the 1960s, Developmental Psycholinguistics, which deals with childrens first language acquisition. He was not the first to question our up to now mute acceptance of a debatable concept long before, Plato wondered how children could possibly acquire so complex a skill as language with so little experience of life. Experiments have clearly identified an ability to discern syntactical nuances in very young infants, although they are still at the pre-linguistic stage. Children of three, however, are able to manipulate very complicated syntactical sentences, although they are unable to tie their own shoelaces, for example. Indeed, language is not a skill such as many others, like learning to drive or perform mathematical operations it cannot be taught as such in these early stages. Rather, it is the acquisition of language which fascinates linguists today, and how it is possible. Noam Chomsky turned the worlds eyes to this enigmatic question at a time when it was assumed to have a deceptively simple explanation. pull ahead in this term-paper I am going to describe the stages in child language acquistion starting from the very birth of an infant till the onset of puberty. verbiage ACQUISTIONThere are many facts that are intriguing about the language.