Blog 5 - Language Acquisition, a Linguist's Pandora's Box

A couple people have already mentioned the concept of “Universal Capacity” and “Language Acquisition” (For instance, Janessa). It’s an intriguing idea and topic for research, because it addresses the appearance of the uniquely human trait of language. My math professor today, Professor Leon Simon, actually said in class today that we’re essentially the same as chimps; only, we have the power of language. So, to research how we acquire language is akin to delving into the core of our human-ness.

Most research seems to indicate that children’s minds are most fertile and ready to learn languages prior to and at around 18 months of age.* By 22 months, children seem to exhibit a comfort specific to verbal language that did not exist at 14 months of age. They treat it as the dominant mode of communication, which suggests that by this age, children have already formulated a certain understanding of language.** They therefore have completed the first (and most challenging) step in learning language: they have discovered that spoken sounds tend to have meanings attached to them. However, because they have conceived notions about language, they are not quite as open to new languages as they once were.

Before 18 months, children shape their understanding of phonetic variation, in other words the distinctions in sound that they need to pay attention to. I guess that this period in which we differentiate sounds explains something that I’ve wondered about for a while. I’ve always been slightly confused why English-speakers cannot for their lives pronounce Hindi words or even tell the difference between certain Hindi sounds. No English speaker that I have met has ever been able to correctly pronounce my name, and yet every Hindi speaker I have met can say it with ease. I think that almost everyone whose family speaks a different language has had these experiences, and here’s the reason for them: English speakers’ ears simply aren’t accustomed to hearing the differences between foreign languages’ sounds in the same way that I can hardly (if at all) tell the difference between, say, the clicks in various African languages.

Although all of the research on language acquisition answers a lot of questions, I think it raises as many questions as it answers. What switch gets turned off in the brain around 18 months? Why are we so open and malleable to learning language before this age, and why is it so much harder afterwards? Also, what in our brains gives us the fundamental capacity for language that, according to Professor Simon, chimps lack? Another pressing question, in my mind, is what are the impacts of growing up in a bilingual household? Although a lot of research has been done on this topic, which for instance demonstrates the importance of caretakers’ attitudes towards the languages within a household, a lot of questions still exist about this topic.*** So, we can certainly explain away a lot about how we acquire language skills, but there’s a lot more to do.



On a side note, I found this quote while rummaging through the articles: “A community that cannot be identified by its language and culture is almost non-existent.”**** I think that this quote effectively sums up what I was trying to get at in my last post, namely the central role that language plays in communities. This inextricable link between language and culture exists in societies around the world, including the society in which we live. How we speak shapes and reveals a great deal of who we are.


See you all tomorrow!

Pnans


*http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/short/104/41/16027?rss=1
**http://content.apa.org/journals/dev/43/5/1111
***http://www.ncela.gwu.edu/pubs/jeilms/vol14/pham.htm
****http://allafrica.com/stories/200710090043.html