Language Acquisition

Bukatko and Daehler note that the human infant from birth has a special sensitivity to the sounds made by other human beings, show a preference for human voices over other sounds, and show a preference for the voice of their mother over those of a stranger. More than this, infants respond in specific ways to small variations in the sounds human's make, especially those changes in sound that signify how one word or part of a word is distinguished from another. The smallest contrastive unit in the sound system is the phoneme, and it is contrastive for meaning with predictable phonetic variants, or allophones. The morpheme is the minimal unit of meaning, though some phonemes may be morphemes. As early as two days of age, infants show that they are responsive to phonemes from many of the world's languages and show a clear preference for speech from their own language rather than another. By the age of two months, children show the ability to discriminate vowels and can detect phonemes and vowel sounds from a variety of languages. By six and nine months of age, though, they begin to less ability to disting

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network of associations the processes which will account for the sound-meaning relation that we all know we have mastered intuitively when we learn English. For one thing, language has a creative aspect in which ambiguities are balanced in ways that convey meaning in spite of the ambiguities: "Whatever a habit-structure is, it's clear that you can't innovate by habit, and the characteristic use of language, both by a speaker and a hearer, is innovation" (Chomsky 103). Chomsky's formulation has certain good points: 1) it makes a strong link between the environment of the speaker and the acquisition of language; 2) it provides for relationships between different languages that show a similar mode of thought on the part of speakers everywhere and that thus would explain the acquisition of language in different societies and at different time periods; and 3) it helps explain the acquisition and use of language as an ongoing process and as one in which the speaker participates as innovator. The theory also has certain bad aspects: 1) it points to the sources of language acquisition and the mechanisms of language acquisition without really explaining the process that takes place; 2) it presumes underlying modes of thought in languag
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Approximate Word count = 2704
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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