I.

Read and Understand

Researchers have spent many years arguing about how to characterize the differences
between human and animal communication. However, all agree that human language is more
complex, more sophisticated and more powerful than any other animal communication system

The question posted on the skills and abilities of a child to acquire a certain language. To be
able to understand further, a child must possess the following skills and abilities in acquisition:

1. First children have to learn to distinguish speech sounds from other noises so that they
know which sounds to pay attention to.
2. So they need to distinguish, for example, between human speech and birdsong and
between human speech and other human sounds such as whistling or humming.
3. Then, once they have learnt to recognise these speech sounds, they have to learn to
produce them by manipulating the passage of air through their vocal tract and mouth
using precise sequences of lips, tongue and vocal cord movements.
4. Children then have to learn how to combine speech sounds into meaningful words.
5. Once children have discovered the meaning of words, they need to work out how words
fit together into sentences. They have to learn that changes in meaning may be signalled
by sequencing words in different ways: man bites dog is newsworthy, dog bites man is
not
6. Finally, children have to learn to string their thoughts together in a coherent way in order
to hold a conversation and to respond appropriately to the sentences of others.

When a child hears her mother cry, “look, rabbit!”, how does the child know what her
mother is referring to? She may be referring to the animal she just saw scurrying by,
but the word could equally as easily mean animal, mammal, grass, beautiful sunset
or even dinner. So matching words to referents is not an easy matter and takes
children quite a while.

a. What makes a language?

Charles Hockett in 1960 defined the Characteristics of language. He argued that “there
is solid empirical justification for the belief that all the languages of the world share every
one of them. Although some of these design features are shared by other animal
communication systems, only human languages are said to have all the following
features
FEATURE: Explanation:
Vocal-auditory channel Communicator speaks; receiving individual hears.
Message goes out in all directions;
Broadcast transmission;
receiver can tell what direction message comes from.
directional reception
(Sign language uses line-of-sight transmission instead.)
Rapid fading Message is transitory and does not persist.
Transmitters can become receivers, and vice versa;
Interchangeability
we can each repeat any message.
Total feedback We hear all that we say.
We communicate just for the purpose of communicating
Specialization (not incidentally to some other primary function).
Direct energy consequences are unimportant.
Symbols used (phonemes, morphemes) have particular
Semanticity
meanings.
Symbols are arbitrary: the work "loud" can be spoken softly;
Arbitrariness "whale" is a smaller word than "microorganism";
"dog", "perro", "chien", "hund", "canis" all mean the same.
Symbols are made by combining smaller symbols
Discreteness
that differ discontinuously (e.g., "bin", "pin").
The smaller symbols ("p", "t") have no meaning of their own,
Duality of patterning
and can be combined in various ways ("pit", "tip").
Hockett originally thought that the remaining features were exclusively human.
You can talk about something not immediately present
Displacement
(at a distance, or in the past).
Prevarication We can say things that are false or hypothetical.
Productivity Novel utterances can be made and understood.
Traditional transmission Languages are socially learned (not genetic),
(culturally) and are passed down through generations.
Learnability We can learn new languages (easier in childhood).
We can use language to talk about language
Reflexiveness (e.g., "noun", "adjective", "sentence")
b. Can we teach animals?
c. What is required in order for children to acquire a language?

The question is central to the nature- nurture. It means that both nature and nurture
contribute to language acquisition.

d. The language centers of the brain

The first thing required to acquire a language is a human brain. There is no doubt that
human language would not be possible if the human brain was wired up in a different way.
Interestingly, there is robust evidence that the brain processes language in a very similar way no
matter what the language is. We now have evidence from a range of European and Asian
languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Finnish, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.
In all of these languages, the same ‘language areas’ of the brain seem to respond in similar ways
to language tasks (Cabeza & Nyberg, 00_ChildLanguage.indb 13 26/07/2013 07:24 14
Understanding Child Language Acquisition 2000; Chee et al., 2000; Crozier et al., 1999;
Friederici, Ruschemeyer, Hahner & Fiebach, 2003; Homae, Hashimoto, Nakajima, Miyashita &
Sakai, 2002; Indefrey, Hagoort, Herzog, Seitz & Brown, 2001; Laine, Rinne, Krause, Tereas &
Sipilea, 1999; Moro et al., 2001).
First, it is clear that the brain tends to be lateralised for language. This means that the
left hemisphere does most of the work processing language. Thus, damage to certain areas in
the left hemisphere often results in the patient being diagnosed with aphasia (a language
disorder resulting from brain damage). Damage to the corresponding areas in the right
hemisphere is less likely to result in aphasic symptoms.

Second, the brain tends to be localised for language. Within the left and right
hemispheres, some regions are much more active when people use language than others. One
very important area is in the left inferior frontal gyrus. This is commonly known as Broca’s area,
after Paul Pierre Broca, the nineteenth-century French anatomist who fi rst discovered its role
in language processing. Another important part is the superior temporal gyrus, particularly the
posterior part, which is known as Wernicke’s area, after Carl Wernicke, the nineteenth-century
German neurologist. Since Broca’s and Wernicke’s original publications, other areas have been
found to be involved in language processing as well. Interestingly, the same brain regions are
implicated in sign language as in spoken language. This is perhaps an unexpected finding
because visual and auditory information are usually processed in different regions of the brain.
Thus, we might expect sign language, which relies on processing visual information such as hand
shape and motion, to involve different brain regions from spoken language.
e. The right environment

The second pre-requisite we need to acquire language is an environment in which we are

exposed to a language. A very famous case that demonstrates the importance of exposure
is that of Genie (Curtiss, 1977). From about 20 months of age, Genie was maltreated by her
father. By day she was strapped to a potty and at night she was transferred into a restrictive
sleeping bag. She was kept in a bare room with very little to stimulate her senses and she
was raised in virtual silence. In fact her father would 00_ChildLanguage.indb 16 26/07/2013
07:24 Introduction to child language acquisition 17 beat her if she attempted to produce
sounds. When discovered at the age of 13 years, Genie understood only a very few words
(mother, walk, go, red, blue, green) and could produce only two phrases (stop it and no
more). Because she had not been exposed to human speech in childhood, she had not learnt
to talk. In fact, even children with loving parents will not acquire language unless they are
exposed to it.

Deaf children do not acquire a language unless they have intensive training or are
exposed to sign language from early on (in which case, they acquire it as easily as hearing
children acquire spoken languages; Woolfe, Herman, Roy & Woll, 2010). Although cases such
as Genie’s show that exposure to language is clearly necessary, there are debates about what
type of environment is necessary and about why the environment is necessary. It is
indisputable that the amount of speech that children hear can speed up or slow down the
language acquisition process. Parents who use more words and who use a greater variety of
different words tend to have children whose vocabulary develops more quickly (Hart &
Risley, 1995).

However, it is not clear whether the way in which we speak to children has an effect over
and above this. For example although many parents use a distinctive speech style when
talking with their children, we do not know whether this has an effect on how easily children
learn (see Snow & Ferguson, 1977). It is certainly not essential to adopt this speech style in
order to help children acquire language. For example, Ochs & Schieffelin (1984) reported
that the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea believe that children are helpless and have little or no
understanding of the world around them. As a result, they rarely engage young children in
conversations at all, yet Kaluli children acquire language perfectly well.

There are also debates about the precise role of the input. In some theories, the role of
the input is simply to trigger the innate knowledge that is encoded in the genes and to allow
the child to map this innate knowledge onto the language that she is hearing (e.g. Hyams,
1986). In others, the input is given a more substantial role. For example, in constructivist
theories of syntax development, the child’s task is to learn how different words behave in
 sentences, and to categorise together words that behave in similar ways (see e.g. Tomasello,
2003). Thus, the amount and type of input that the child hears has a crucial role to play in her
ability to build the syntax of her language.

Summary

What skills and knowledge do children have to master in order to acquire a language?

We discovered that language is multi-faceted, requiring the child to master a whole range of
different skills and many different types of knowledge. The kind of knowledge that children have
to learn also depends on which one of the thousands of the world’s languages the child is
exposed to. However, there are some common design features that must occur for a language
to be termed a language (e.g. semanticity, arbitrariness, productivity and displacement). Next
is the differences between human languages and other animal communication systems,
focusing on the key question: Are humans the only animals that can acquire a language?
Attempts to teach language to apes have been successful in some respects but apes’ abilities
never mirror those of human children, even after years of exposure. Animals’ own
communication systems show surprising sophistication, but none of them have the complexity
and sophistication of human languages. Animals also share some of our language learning
abilities, such as categorical perception, but these abilities rarely manifest themselves in exactly
the same way in animals and humans.

The nature–nurture debate in response to the key question: What is required in order for
children to acquire a language?

The human brain is clearly configured for language. Although language processing is not
localised in any particular part of an infant’s brain, both lateralisation and localisation occur as
the infant develops. However, we do not know what else needs to be built into the human brain:
representational constraints, architectural constraints or chronotopic constraints. We also know
that children must be exposed to a language in order to acquire it, but we do not know what
types of environment are optimal for language acquisition, nor do we know precisely what role
the input plays.