lenguage acquisition

how children acquire language

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with speech or manual as in sign. Language acquisition usually refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, rather than second language acquisition, which deals with acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.

The capacity to acquire and use language is a key aspect that distinguishes humans from other organisms. While many forms of animal communication exist, they have a limited range of nonsyntactically structured vocabulary tokens that lack cross cultural variation between groups.^[1]

A major concern in understanding language acquisition is how these capacities are picked up by infants from what appears to be very little input. A range of theories of language acquisition has been created in order to explain this apparent problem including innatism in which a child is born prepared in some manner with these capacities, as opposed to the other theories in which language is simply learned.

Speech repetition

Speech repetition is the saying by one individual of the spoken vocalizations made by another individual. This requires the ability in the person making the copy to map the sensory input they hear from the other person's vocal pronunciation into a similar motor output with their own vocal tract.

Such speech input output imitation often occurs independently of speech comprehension such as in speech shadowing when a person automatically says words heard in earphones, and the pathological condition of echolalia in which people reflexively repeat overheard words. This links to speech repetition of words being separate in the brain to speech perception. Speech repetition occurs in the dorsal speech processing stream while speech perception occurs in the ventral speech processing stream. Repetitions are often incorporated unawares by this route into spontaneous novel sentences immediately or after delay following storage in phonological memory.

In humans, the ability to map heard input vocalizations into motor output is highly developed due to this copying ability playing a critical role in a child's rapid expansion of their spoken vocabulary. In older children and adults it still remains important as it enables the continued learning of novel words and names and additional languages. Such repetition is also necessary for the propagation of language from generation to generation. It has also been suggested that the phonetic units out of which speech is made have been selected upon by the process of vocabulary expansion and vocabulary transmissions due to children preferentially copying words in terms of more easily imitated elementary units.

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Although most children acquire proficient spoken language almost automatically, a significant number develop unexplained difficulties in producing and understanding language.

Vocabulary acquisition

The capacity to acquire the ability to incorporate the pronunciation of new words depends upon the capacity to engage in speech repetition.^{[24][25][26][27]} Children with reduced abilities to repeat nonwords (a marker of speech repetition abilities) show a slower rate of vocabulary expansion than children for whom this is easy.^[28][29] Several computational models of vocabulary acquisition have been proposed so far It has been proposed that the elementary units of speech has been selected to enhance the ease with which sound and visual input can be mapped into motor vocalization.

Brain-Based Research

According to several linguistic experts, Brain-Based Research has confirmed many standards of language learning, such as: "learning engages the entire person (cognitive, affective, and psychomotor dominas), the human brain seeks patterns in its searching for meaning, emotions affect all aspects of learning, retention and recall, past experience always affects new learning, the brain's working memory has a limited capacity, lecture usually results in the lowest degree of retention, rehearsal is essential for retention, practice [alone] does not make perfect, and each brain is unique" (Sousa, 2006, p. 274). Experts also stress "the importance of language learners having a low level of anxiety and a high level of motivation in order to be successful in acquiring a language. Regardless of age at which language study is begun, a critical variable is time on task" (Glisan and Schrum, 2010, p. 77). Several foreign language studies have found that "it takes hundreds of hours of contact time to achieve a survival level of proficiency in languages such as French and Spanish and two to three times longer for languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean" (Liskin-Gasparrro, 1932). A considerable aspect in brain-based research is that "practice does not make perfect, but rather permanent, allowing the learner to use a learned skill in a new situation" (Sousa, 2006). Therefore, "practice alone doesn't make perfect unless the learner understands what needs to be done to improve and is motivated to do so" (^[38], p. 78). In terms of genetics, the gene ROBO1 has been associated with phonological buffer integrity or length ^[