Analysis of Language Acquisition - Coursework Example

? Linguistics Exercise Question Exercise 6 Mean Length Utterance of the child = total number of morphemes/total number of utterances = 41/28 = 1.4643 According to Brown, the child is in stage 1 of his language development. Question 2 Exercise 6.2 The parents’ responses are short and simple, and are made up of few words. The responses are also corrective, for example, the mother says ‘rice’ after the child says “an wice’. They also use questions to test the child’s ability to identify objects, and colors. Their interactional strategy can be described as one that goes down to the level of the child in establishing a communicative function. It is a form of child language. It is useful in child language acquisition as it enables the child to produce from what the linguistic input he is getting from the environment. Question 3 Data for child language acquisition has been collected using various methods that include parental diaries, observational studies, and experimental studies. In parental diaries, parents in studying their children’s speech write descriptions of the development of their language/speech in their diaries. Leopold made notes about his daughter Hildegarde’s language development, beginning week eight of her life up to when she was two years. From the notes, he came up with theories and hypothetical descriptions on her language development. Under observational studies, audio recording and transcription of children speech was used to gain an understanding on how they could understand and generate English sentences. One such researcher who got involved in this was Roger Brown. His study focused on three children in studying their language development in terms of grammar and morphology. Children are audio/video taped while interacting on specific contexts at certain time periods then the recording is analyzed. Grammatical formulations are then studied to see how they develop over time and noting language patterns, for example, tense. Thirdly, experimental studies make use of research questions and data collection methods such as high amplitude sucking paradigm. Data in experimental studies are collected through carefully designed techniques and has a great number of participants from each of whom data are collected. This makes the data highly representative of the study population. Of these three, I found experimental studies to be the most interesting. The high amplitude sucking paradigm shows how an infant’s sucking rate is measured and noticed to increase when they perceive different but almost similar sounding words. When presented with novel stimuli, their sucking rate increases. This shows how children can differentiate two words from each other. Question 4 Overgeneralization is a process in early acquisition phases in which children tend to apply grammatical rules to nouns and verbs that are considered irregular. In regular nouns and verbs there are the affixes that are attached to mark plural and tense. However, a child may tend to use these affixes on irregular nouns and verbs in trying to bring out their intended meanings, forming a new word that is not acceptable in English. Such include the addition of past tense suffix {-ed} to irregular verbs such as cut, put, to form ‘cutted’ and ‘putted’ respectively; or the plural marker {-s} to nouns such as sheep and wool to form ‘sheeps’ and ‘wools’ respectively. Overgeneralization also occurs when children acquire related lexical items selectively. Here, they use certain words to refer to elements that are not the referent of the words that they have used. For example, the child may use the word dog to refer to any animal that walks or moves around on four limbs, such as a goat, and a sheep. Under-generalization, though difficult to observe in a child, is where a child uses a certain term to refer to a certain object or item which has specific attributes that are known to the child. Such attributes that may make the child to under-generalize include size, shape and color. For example, a child could be exposed to the home environment in which he is used to seeing black dogs, and hence to him, a dog is a black animal. However, upon being exposed to a dog that is brown, or a white dog, the child will not recognize the animal as a dog, yet it is indeed a dog. Here, the child will be said to have under-generalized. The child has a limited criterion of identifying objects (Fasold & Connor-Linton, 2006). Question 5 Code-mixing in bilingualism refers to the process of indiscriminately using two languages within an expression to express an idea. This happens mostly when one has the competence in both languages, or a person may know the name of certain items using one language. Code-switching in bilingualism refers to the process of deliberately using two languages for communicative, symbolic, strategic or symbolic purposes. Question 6 Adults are in a position to learn a language, but not as perfectly as a child can. This is because a language is learnt from a very tender age. Here, there is a stage where a child is fed with a language, goes through the silent period where there is the comprehension of a language and its rules, followed by the production of the same. Language learning takes place in the first 12 years of a child’s life. After this, language development is said to have fossilized, that is, after these 12 years, one can learn a language, but not the way it is learnt by a child (Fasold & Connor-Linton, 2006). Chapter 12 Question 1 Types of writing systems and their importance Logographic system It is a type of writing system in which a grapheme (written symbol) is representative of particular words, or, particular morphemes. Phonetic elements are what are representative of sounds of a language. Hence a logogram represents a language’s morpheme (Fasold & Connor-Linton, 2006). An example of a language that makes use of logographic system of writing is Chinese. It has an inventory of over 50,000 diverse logograms referred to as hanzi. Most of them, however, are representative of words used in Chinese newspaper reading. The characters in Chinese words consist of two parts: a radical (that gives meaning of a character) and a phonetic determination (which gives a lead to a character pronunciation). Logographic system is significant to the ones who use it, particularly the Chinese. For them, it is a perfect synthesis of form and function. Since time immemorial, Chinese territories had various languages spoken, but with the rise in logographic system, different speech communities who pronounced words differently had the same reading for the same word symbol. This writing style was hence a unifying factor. It led to Chinese becoming a lingua franca. Syllabic system In this writing system, a particular syllable in a spoken language is represented by a particular symbol. Though rare, most syllabic systems use diacritic, that is, additional markings on written symbols which show phonetic details such as voicing, consonant doubling, and the length of a vowel (Fasold & Connor-Linton, 2006). An example of a language that makes use of syllabic writing system is Japanese. Its writing system is an amalgamation of various syllabic systems and Chinese logograms. Japanese syllables are differentiated into two syllable scripts: Hiragana (for writing native words in Japanese) and Katakana (for writing loan words that are non-Chinese). These two were part of Chinese characters called Kanji logograms. Japanese writing system has a consonant-vowel (CV) system of a syllable. Syllabic system is meant for communicative purposes between its users. It was mainly for people to understand each other, it being a system that developed from Chinese logograms and Japanese syllabic system (Fasold & Connor-Linton, 2006). Consonantal alphabetic systems In this writing system, letters are used to represent consonants, while vowels are represented by changes on the diacritics placed on the consonants. Hence in such a writing system consonantal alphabets are the writing formats. Examples of languages that make use of this writing system include Arabic and Hebrew. Abjads is the word sometimes used to refer to their consonantal alphabets. 28 basic letters are found in Arabic consonant and vowels. This language is written from right to left, with cursive word connection of the letters in a word, hence making the shape of a letter to vary. This writing system was instrumental since apart from serving communicative purposes among its users, it was used in spreading the religion of Islam right from the middle Ages to date. The Quran was written in Arabic. Additional to that, Islamic armies that conquered Africa made many languages to sprout, such as Somali, Swahili, Farsi, Malay when they interacted with the natives of the places they conquered (Fasold & Connor-Linton, 2006). Question 2 Petroglyphs are paintings of pictures that were found in caves. They are pictograms- objects represented in pictorial form. It establishes a direct relationship between a symbol and the referent. A picture painting is representative of a certain phenomenon. It is a pictorial manifestation of words. They can be said to be a form of written communication. This is because in written communication, marks are scribbled, written or drawn on a surface to pass a thought or an idea. In this case, petroglyphs can be said to be a form of written communication. Question 3 Democratization of literacy developed mainly due to writing technologies that came up, more so the printing press invention in the year 1436 by Johannes Gutenberg. This marked the advent of the rise of paper mills which played a significant role in the reduction of cost in text reproduction. This influenced what could be produced (printed) and what could be consumed (read). As years went by, more printing shops sprouted, producing numerous copies of different text types. This made more information available to people, and world explorations arising from theories of the world were accessed widely (Fasold & Connor-Linton, 2006). Question 4 Writing plays an iconic role as a language standardization tool. Writing systems have basically evolved even though at some point they have met resistance, for example, in the establishment of the direct relationship between the symbols (graphemes) and the sounds. Communities mutually co-exist in the perspective of language: one borrows the other’s system of writing. The vernaculars in Europe rose as a result of the role played by writing. There were efforts to curb the deviance of Latin after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Latin was to be pronounced as was written. The rift between Latin and its vernaculars led to words in Latin language being transcribed to differentiate it from the rest. The other vernaculars were transcribed, and they are what we see as modern day Spanish, French, and Italian languages. Writing technologies helped shape English orthography. Upon setting his printing press in England in 1476, William Caxton had to come up with a way of spelling English words. Most of his spellings were adapted from his customers’ dialect who hailed from London. This orthography spread fast and became commonly used, but after the Great Vowel Shift, many English words became spelt as pronounced by the residents of London (Fasold & Connor-Linton, 2006). Question 18 Mood and mood distinctions Mood refers to a set of verb forms that express a particular attitude. There are five different types of mood distinctions: Imperative mood Mood displayed by a verb when it expresses a command, for example: Walk! (an imperative). In the imperative mood, the verb has the function of giving a command or an order. Indicative mood Mood displayed by verbs by verbs that indicate factual statements For example, I am running. Subjunctive mood Mood displayed by verbs which express wishes or possibilities. Centered mostly on modal auxiliaries such as could, might, would, etc. Example in a sentence: it might rain. Conditional mood This is achieved when the verb form (inflectional) used in a clause which is independent, refers to an uncertain situation that relies on some circumstances. In English conditionality is expressed by would, for example, If I passed well, I would have joined college. Jussive mood This mood displays authority, outcome, or a plea. Example, I request you to attend the Sunday service. Question 20 WH movement is a process in where a WH-word shifts from one position to another within a sentence. WH- words are: when, where, who, which and why. For example, in the sentence ‘He went to the shop when it was raining’. WH- word ‘when’ can move to word initial position as ‘When it was raining, he went to the shop’. Auxiliary movement is the process in which an auxiliary verb moves from one position to another in a sentence. In a declarative sentence, ‘He is sad’ the auxiliary verb ‘is’ moves to the initial position of the sentence to form a question ‘Is he sad?’ Question 22 The proponent of Binding Theory is Noam Chomsky. Binding theory shows the relationship between elements within a sentence which are co-referenced. These elements however, must be noun phrases. Example: Austin took himself to the hospital. In this example the two noun phrases are Austin and Himself. Himself is the anaphor that refers to the antecedent Austin. References Fasold, R. W., & Connor-Linton, J. (2006). An Introduction to Language And Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Read More