LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

• Language learning is the greatest intellectual feat any one of us is ever required to perform.
• Language acquisition seems much like something that happens to a child, not that a child does.
• Sufficient exposure to PDP (Parallel Distributed Processing) is necessary for understanding the theory.
• PDP (Parallel Distributed Processing) is a theory of cognition developed by David Eagleman and others.
• The environment plainly matters in language acquisition, but the general course of development and the basic features of what emerges are predetermined by the initial state, a common human possession.
• Crying is a stage in language acquisition from birth to 4 months.
• Cooing is a stage in language acquisition from 6 months to 1 year, where infants use phonemes from every language.
• Babbling is a stage in language acquisition from 9 months to 1 year, where infants selectively use phonemes from their native language.
• One-word utterances are a stage in language acquisition from 12 months to 1 year, where infants start using single words.
• Telegraphic speech is a stage in language acquisition from 2 years to 3 years, where children use multi-word utterances that lack in function.
• Normal speech is a stage in language acquisition from 5 years to 6 years, where children have almost normal developed speech.
• Babies are not born talking, they learn language, starting immediately from birth.
• Behaviorism was the primary paradigm in psychology between 1920 to 1950.
• Ivan Pavlov published the results of an experiment on conditioning after originally studying digestion in dogs.
• John Watson launched the behavioral school of psychology (classical conditioning), publishing an article, "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It".
• Edward Thorndike formalized the "Law of Effect".
• B.F. Skinner wrote "The Behavior of Organisms" and introduced the concepts of operant conditioning and shaping.
• Noam Chomsky wrote a review of B.F. Skinner's book "Verbal Behavior" in 1959, leading to the decline of behaviorism.
• Eric Lenneberg's Critical Period Hypothesis 1967 with Biological Foundations of Language.
• Grammar and complex language usage seem also to be a 'uniquely human capability' as no other species on the planet seems to possess such proficiency as humans.
• Language use is stimulus independent: virtually any words can be spoken in response to any environmental stimulus, depending on one's state of mind.
• Chomsky's Arguments against Skinner.
• Chomsky's Transformational Grammar and then Generative Grammar led to a change in the way language is viewed.
• The stages of language development occur at about the same ages in most children, even though different children experience very different environments.
• Language use is also historically unbound: what we say is not determined by our history of reinforcement, as is clear from the fact that we can and do say things that we have not been trained to say.
• Learning cannot account for the rapid rate at which children acquire language.
• Chomsky's Innateness Hypothesis.
• The primary linguistic data (pld) which is the data children are exposed to while they are learning their native language will not be sufficient to cover all aspects of how sentences could be constructed, and that humans therefore have some other form of aid in their process of acquiring their native language.
• CDS--> bootstrapping
• LAD: an innate mechanism or process that allows children to develop language skills
• Children generally acquire language skills quickly and effortlessly.
• LASS (Language Acquisition Socialization System)
• Critically important building block of conceptual development.
• Modified by on-going experiences.
• Stages of Development
• These new languages resemble each other in sentence structure, even when they are created in different cultures.
• Connectionist Models: McClelland & Rumelhart.
• Cognitive TheoryJean Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called"genetic epistemology" which is the study of the origins (genesis) of knowledge.
• Schemas are :
• All languages of the world share similar characteristics of using nouns, verbs, pronouns, though not necessarily in a similar order