A report on Language acquisition

Victor of Aveyron
The phases of language acquisition in children

Process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language , as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.

- Language acquisition
Victor of Aveyron

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Chomsky in 2017

Noam Chomsky

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American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historical essayist, social critic, and political activist.

American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historical essayist, social critic, and political activist.

Chomsky in 2017
Carol Schatz, whom Chomsky married in 1949
The Great Dome at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Chomsky began working in 1955
Chomsky, photographed in 1977
Chomsky speaking in support of the Occupy movement in 2011
Set inclusions described by the Chomsky hierarchy
Chomsky at the 2003 World Social Forum, a convention for counter-hegemonic globalization, in Porto Alegre
Chomsky (far right) and his wife Valeria (second from right) with David and Carolee Krieger of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, 2014
Chomsky receiving an award from the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, David Krieger (2014)

He bases his argument on observations about human language acquisition and describes a "poverty of the stimulus": an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic competence they attain.

A conversation in American Sign Language

Language

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Structured system of communication.

Structured system of communication.

A conversation in American Sign Language
William Jones discovered the family relation between Latin and Sanskrit, laying the ground for the discipline of historical linguistics.
Ferdinand de Saussure developed the structuralist approach to studying language.
Noam Chomsky is one of the most important linguistic theorists of the 20th century.
Language Areas of the brain. The Angular Gyrus is represented in orange, Supramarginal Gyrus is represented in yellow, Broca's area is represented in blue, Wernicke's area is represented in green, and the Primary Auditory Cortex is represented in pink.
Ancient Tamil inscription at Thanjavur
In addition to word classes, a sentence can be analyzed in terms of grammatical functions: "The cat" is the subject of the phrase, "on the mat" is a locative phrase, and "sat" is the core of the predicate.
Wall of Love on Montmartre in Paris: "I love you" in 250 languages, by calligraphist Fédéric Baron and artist Claire Kito (2000)
A lesson at Kituwah Academy, a school where English and the Cherokee language are mediums of instruction
Arnold Lakhovsky, The Conversation (c. 1935)
An inscription of Swampy Cree using Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, an abugida developed by Christian missionaries for Indigenous Canadian languages
The first page of the poem Beowulf, written in Old English in the early medieval period (800–1100 AD). Although Old English is the direct ancestor of modern English, it is unintelligible to contemporary English speakers.
Multi-lingual sign outside the mayor's office in Novi Sad, written in the four official languages of the city: Serbian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Pannonian Rusyn
Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world.
Together, the eight countries in red contain more than 50% of the world's languages. The areas in blue are the most linguistically diverse in the world, and the locations of most of the world's endangered languages.

Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently by approximately three years old.

A spectrogram of a male speaker saying the phrase "nineteenth century." There is no clear demarcation where one word ends and the next begins.

Statistical learning in language acquisition

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Ability for humans and other animals to extract statistical regularities from the world around them to learn about the environment.

Ability for humans and other animals to extract statistical regularities from the world around them to learn about the environment.

A spectrogram of a male speaker saying the phrase "nineteenth century." There is no clear demarcation where one word ends and the next begins.

Although statistical learning is now thought to be a generalized learning mechanism, the phenomenon was first identified in human infant language acquisition.

Noam Chomsky is usually associated with the term universal grammar in the 20th and 21st centuries

Universal grammar

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Theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky.

Theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky.

Noam Chomsky is usually associated with the term universal grammar in the 20th and 21st centuries

When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG.

Competition model

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The Competition Model is a psycholinguistic theory of language acquisition and sentence processing, developed by Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney (1982).

Language acquisition device

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The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a claim from language acquisition research proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s.

Second-language acquisition

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Process by which people learn a second language.

Process by which people learn a second language.

Adults who learn a second language differ from children learning their first language in at least three ways: children are still developing their brains whereas adults have mature minds, and adults have at least a first language that orients their thinking and speaking.

Language acquisition by deaf children

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Language acquisition is a natural process in which infants and children develop proficiency in the first language or languages that they are exposed to.

A generative parse tree: the sentence is divided into a noun phrase (subject), and a verb phrase which includes the object. This is in contrast to structural and functional grammar which consider the subject and object as equal constituents.

Grammar

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Its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words.

Its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words.

A generative parse tree: the sentence is divided into a noun phrase (subject), and a verb phrase which includes the object. This is in contrast to structural and functional grammar which consider the subject and object as equal constituents.

Fluent speakers of a language variety or lect have effectively internalized these constraints, the vast majority of which – at least in the case of one's native language(s) – are acquired not by conscious study or instruction but by hearing other speakers.

Nim Chimpsky pictured washing dishes.

Nim Chimpsky

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Nim Chimpsky pictured washing dishes.

Neam "Nim" Chimpsky (November 19, 1973 – March 10, 2000) was a chimpanzee and the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University.