AP PSYCH 5.11 Components of Language and Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition

• William James, the first American psychologist, was a proponent of functionalism
  • He believed that everything the mind did had a function and was interested in finding out what those functions were
• That purpose of language is not only to communicate, but also a structure or scaffolding for thoughts to grow around
• Babies have thoughts before they understand speech, but learning language may be what allows them to have more complex ones

Primary Language Acquisition

• An unconscious process
• Infants are not consciously aware of learning how to speak or how to apply grammar rules
  • It just happens through an unimpaginably complex neural process

The Argument for Nature

• Noam Chomsky proposed that humans will learn language no matter what, even if they have to develop their own
  • Infants are neurologically wired to learn language
  • Deaf babies babble sound they’ve never heard
• He calls this ability or process the language acquisition device
  • He was considered a nativist, as related to the nature/nurture debate

The Argument for Nurture

• Edward Sapir theorized that the language we are born into shapes or determines what kinds of thought we think in an unalterable way
• Think of a situation where something does not translate well
  • Like a single word in another language having to be converted into a long phrase in english
• This idea is called linguistic determinism
• Linguistic relativism suggests that thoughts can be altered if a person not only learns to speak a new language but if they can think in that new language
• These two theories are called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Secondary Language Acquisition

• Learning a second language, especially after childhood, is very hard to do
• It is purposeful, conscious activity to try and encode rules, conventions, and patterns of another language

Stages of Language Acquisition

• Eye contact is a type of communication that can show intent or connectedness
• Babbling, usually consonants paired with a vowel
  • Ma, Da, Pa, etc.
• Holophrase, a single word with a complete thought behind it
  • “Juice,” is probably a request or identification
• Telegraphic speech is two-word phrases
  • In english, this implies the beginning of an understanding of grammar
• Fast mapping is when toddlers being to use context and what they’ve heard from others to lean the meaning of new words
• Overgeneralization is misapplying grammar words after having identified a pattern
  • “I runned really fast"
• Critical Period is when a child must learn something, after which plasticity is severely limited
  • This is the point at which language pathways close off, and learning a new language is much harder from this point on
• Sensitive Period is when the brain is best able to do something
  • Language is best learned when young, before the language-learning pathways have closed

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