Individual Variations in Second Language Acquisition (original) (raw)
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Language development and acquisition in early childhood
Journal of Education and Learning (EduLearn), 2020
The paper discussed in detail the process of language development and the process of language acquisition in early childhood. It also gave a brief overview of the theoretical frame of reference of language development. The paper included an in depth explanation of the importance and impact of overexposure for early second language acquisition and it answered the question of whether language learning could turn into a language acquisition after what Noam Chomsky referred to as the "critical period". The paper concluded that even after the Chomskian critical period learners who got overexposed to the target language can acquire the language and it can be equivalent to their first language. The paper discussed two major kinds of motivations at play in the process of second language acquisition: (1) Curiosity: A desire to better understand a group of people and their way of life , and (2) Empathy: Upon repeated exposure, one might come to the conclusion that this group of people has a more sensible handle on things, and thus identifies with them.
2005
The present level of understanding of the psycholinguistic processes and capacities underlying the child's acquisition of language is reviewed in this publication. In the first chapter, linguistic theories, biological characteristics of language learning, and the distinctions between language competence and language performance are discussed. The remaining two chapters are a detailed discussion of the empirical findings of psycholinguists and psychologists about language acquisition: chapter two focuses on the nature and acquisition of syntax while chapter three considers the nature of phonology in a grammar and the child's acquisition of phonology. A bibliography is included. (JM)
Child Language: Acquisition And Growth
2006
(paperback), 978-0-521-44922-9 (paperback). Reviewed by Paul Thomas SIL International Child Language: Acquisition and Growth is mostly a survey of the literature surrounding child language acquisition. Assuming little prior linguistic knowledge on the reader's part, Lust spends the first four chapters defining the problem of language acquisition and developing a theory to account for this acquisition. Her basic hypothesis is that children are born with a language facility (LF). That is, the brain is programmed at birth with all the structures necessary to do linguistic computation.
AN ANALYSIS OF FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN CHILDREN
The current study investigates the accessibility of a systematic pattern to children learning their first language, and also it is a try to show the effect of the quantity of input on first language acquisition. To these aims, two case studies were carried out on six children learning as their first language. The participants of the first study were three children acquiring their first language in Indramayu being followed for 12 months (24-36 months) to see if they all passed the same pattern in language development. The participants of the second study were three Children (who were exposed to less input) acquiring their first language in Indramayu being followed for 12 months (24-36 months) to see if the language development was affected considering the amount of input they were exposed to. In-depth interviews, observations, audio and video recordings, notes and reports were used to collect the data for this study. The data collected for each Children was analyzed separately, and the stages of development were reported for each children accordingly. The findings support the claim that the process of language acquisition depends on an innate language ability which holds that at least some linguistic knowledge exists in humans at birth, and also the input that learners receive plays a very important role in the language acquisition since the input activates this innate structure.
2006
The remarkable way in which young children acquire language has long fascinated linguists and developmental psychologists alike. Language is a skill that we have essentially mastered by the age of three, and with incredible ease and speed, despite the complexity of the task. This accessible textbook introduces the field of child language acquisition, exploring language development from birth. Setting out the key theoretical debates, it considers questions such as what characteristics of the human mind make it possible to acquire language; how far acquisition is biologically programmed and how far it is influenced by our environment; what makes second language learning (in adulthood) different from first language acquisition; and whether the specific stages in language development are universal across languages. Clear and comprehensive, it is set to become a key text for all courses in child language acquisition, within linguistics, developmental psychology and cognitive science.
The Language Acquisition of A Two-Year-Old Girl “Aline”
Proceedings of the International Conference on Community Development (ICCD 2020), 2020
One point of view from language acquisition is how children get their language for the first time. This stage has a unique process before having a complete language. It can be seen from the words produced, which are different from adults. A two-year-old little girl shows the uniqueness of acquiring language. The child lives with her parents and her extended families who are multilingual of Bahasa Indonesia, Gorontalo, Gorontalo dialect, and English. By these differences, the cultural and language impact cannot be avoided by them. The first language acquisition mastered by the little girl came from the parents and the environment. The data was collected by surveying the girl every day, communicating with her, and recording conversation took place. The sentences that she spoke were mixing some languages in daily communication as if the words come from one language. The sentences were adjusted to whom she was speaking. When talking to her mother, she spoke in English, but then she changed the language into Bahasa Indonesia when talking to her father; she once again changed the use of language when talking to her friends or other family members by mixing up all languages she knew. Aline learned language based on behaviorist reinforcement principles by associating words with meaning around her. She knew how the words work by changing the language to whom she spoke to. Aline spoke by stringing words from several languages, which seems to originate from only one language.
Different Paths: Changes in second-language acquisition between three and five years of age
These studies explore the effects of cognitive maturation on language development by examining the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted preschoolers. Parental reports (CDI) were collected from 48 preschoolers, within the first year after they were adopted from China or Eastern Europe. Children who were adopted at two or three years of age showed the same developmental patterns in language production as monolingual infants (matched for vocabulary size). Early on, their vocabularies were dominated by nouns and social words and the proportion of predicates and closed-class words increased with age. Thus shifts in lexical composition appear in older learners and are unlikely to reflect the development of new conceptual resources.