Here is my final paper for my University 200 research writing class. I was allowed to research and/or argue about any topic. Check it out if you wish! There will probably be some formatting issues putting it up on this blog.
Language Acquisition and Children:
Motivation for Speech, Speech Recognition, and the Effects of Social Interaction
“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, actions run as causes and return to us as results.” —Herman Melville
Herman Melville, the classic American novelist of the mid-1800s most famous for his book Moby Dick was a thinker ahead of his time. It’s almost as if Melville prophesized what society would one day become: a web of people that, most recently in the past thirty years or so, rely on impersonal, rather than authentic connections to communicate. As modern technology evolves that enables instant feedback and immediate connections from person-to-person, our human species is evolving too. It seems that our expectations for productivity and responsiveness from others have increased. Although we must embrace the changing technology and use it to enhance our interpersonal connections rather than diminish them, we must also remember the value of direct person-to-person contact. This critical skill of communication that is key to socially mature adults must be developed beginning in infancy (or even during prenatal development). To understand communication between adults, one has to begin where communication begins: childhood.
Scientists often turn to children to try to understand the functioning of the brain prior to socialization and the effects of social imprinting. My primary concern in this field is in children’s motivation to communicate, to develop meanings in conjunction with sounds and symbols. It is by means of this evolutionary incentive of language learning that the nature of humans is so clearly brought to light. My interest in language acquisition comes more from an anthropological standpoint than a technical interest in linguistics. Beginning with the question of what motivates us to speak, and then discussing speech recognition, the importance of social interaction for children’s development, and finally peeking at theories of evolution in relation to linguistics, I hope to synthesize my research of language acquisition in a cohesive way; in a collection of research neither strictly focused on technical nor social observations.
To begin, Lorraine McCune, Director of the Infant/Early Childhood Specialist Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Rutgers Graduate School of Education discusses why children, just before they begin to speak, want to learn to speak in her book How Children Learn to Learn Language. She questions what their motivation is and why most children begin to speak around the same time in their lives. She then goes into what specific kinds of words children use when beginning to speak. Lastly, she addresses the modern scientific idea of learning and, in relation to language acquisition, how the brain stores information and meaning (McCune).
McCune starts by noting that a child’s relationship with their caregiver is integral for the desire to learn language to exist. Because language is a system of symbolic communication, a child will only communicate verbally when he/she has begun to recognize their individuality. Essentially, if a child doesn’t realize that she is separate from others (especially her caregiver), there is no need to communicate. Therefore, having people other than the caregiver hold the child and interact with the child is of utmost importance for healthy verbal and social development (McCune).
The gradual understanding of separateness from the mother figure remains a challenge through the early years so parents must encourage interaction as much as possible. The sense of separation is so gradual, in fact, that at 3-4 months of age, an infant can hold their heads up to look into their mom’s eyes. At six months, an infant can shift its gaze to and from the mother. At around nine months it can crawl away from its mother and turn to look back at her; it takes nearly a year for an infant to initiate physical separateness from its mother (McCune).
After establishing why children begin to speak, she analyzes how they begin to speak. The beginning of language production happens between ages 1-2, generally. There is a several month period however, when only a few “context-limited” words are used. For example, any object of interest might be “pretty,” an animal barking outside labeled “dog,” or a pretend event “tea.” McCune breaks down the various categories of words and demonstrates which first words appear most commonly in a child’s vocabulary (McCune).
Lastly, McCune discusses the foundations of mainstream cognitive science in relation to learning and language. Everything we experience (each entity termed “representations”) goes into depositories. The representations are then subject to computational processes leading to “behavioral as well as internal analytic outcomes” (73-74). She makes the point that the development of sounds such as grunts (and eventually formal words) are a product of the desire to develop meanings in conjunction with learning to produce the sound sequences that represent them. She claims that a supported learning environment feeds the mental capacity for representational consciousness, whereas perceptual consciousness is available from birth. This representational consciousness is the basis of language acquisition (McCune).
The concept of children being aware, and even able to perceive language from birth has been widely studied. For instance, William Grady claims in How Children Learn Language that speech can be heard in the womb and later recognized. In one study, mothers-to-be read aloud a story every day during the last six weeks of pregnancy. Two days after birth, their infants were tested to see whether they found the story more soothing than an unfamiliar story. Not only did the infants find the familiar story soothing, they responded to it even when the story was read by someone other than their mother. Studies like these are evidence that children are sensitive to the sound pattern of language even before they are born (Grady).
Noam Chomsky, the “father of modern linguistics,” has developed a theory about how and why children have this innate sensitivity to language. Margaret Harris dissects Chomsky’s theory in her book Language Experience and Early Language Development: From Input to Uptake. Chomsky claims that acquiring a language involves the acquisition of a body of knowledge, and that this body of knowledge is best described as a set of rules, parameters, and principles. The rules are so abstract, he claims, that even if a child were subject only to examples of correct speech, it would still be impossible for the child to extract such rules solely from experience. His main assertion is that the attainment of such knowledge is only possible because the child possesses an innate, language-specific mechanism—a language acquisition device (Harris).
Chomsky correlates the operation of the language acquisition device (LAD) with the child’s physical growth.
“Language seems to me to grow in the mind rather as familiar physical systems of the body grow. We begin our interchange with the world with our minds in a particular genetically determined state. Through interaction with experience with everything around us—this state changes until it reaches a mature state we call a state of knowledge of language…this series of changes seems to me analogous to the growth of organs (Chomsky, 1979)” (Harris). If Chomsky’s theory that the development of language is analogous to the physical growth of the body, one could conclude that at a certain point “language” stops growing. Although I agree there is a certain point at which you can confidently say that someone knows a language, I am not convinced that your brain’s ability to develop language ever ceases. Note for example how the brain has the capacity to learn new words throughout its life or even learn an entirely new language. Perhaps Chomsky did not mean for his analogy to be dissected and understood so literally though; maybe he was just trying to convey that the brain’s process of learning to use language as a tool (the type of learning that begins in infancy) is a gradual growth that can be likened to the growth of the body.
In Chomsky’s own book Language and Mind, 3rd edition, he concentrates on how “the study of language can clarify and in part substantiate certain conclusions about human knowledge that relate directly to classical issues in the philosophy of mind” (172). This philosophy of mind is our ‘human essence,’ or the distinctive qualities of mind that are unique to man, namely the capacity for language development and use (Chomsky).
The previously discussed innate desire for learning language was analyzed in a different way, however, in Miguel Perez-Pereira’s book Language Development and Social Interaction in Blind Children. The author agrees that young infants come to our interactive world with an interest in the behaviors of other humans. He notes that they use their sense of sight primarily as the tool for distinguishing themselves from others, observing behavior, and learning from social interactions (Perez-Pereira).
The blind and their parents develop alternative forms of social interaction, which become the development of the social, communicative being. Young infants without visual deficits use vision as the primary sense modality to learn about themselves and the environment. “We emphasize the crucial compensatory role that language plays in blind children’s development and we argue that through learning and use of linguistic symbols blind infants begin to understand persons as intentional agents” (37). He delves into the difference in learning and growth between visually impaired children and non-visually impaired children. Children rely heavily on their sense of sight to perform these social capabilities like learning to know separateness from a parent or learning behaviors from them. Without sight there is a significant delay in these abilities. Most importantly, he notes “knowledge of the self develops most easily in early social interaction” (38).
The importance of early social interaction is stressed in much of the scholarly discussion of this topic. Perri Klass writes about how in today’s age, parents are highly encouraged to expose their children to other languages at an early age when their psychology and physical development positions them to be natural learners. Learning another language as a baby serves as one form of social interaction. One study showed that the learning of language and the effects on the brain of the language we hear may begin even earlier than six months of age. It demonstrated that bilingual children’s brains develop at a different pace than monolingual children and that bilingual children are generally more open to and flexible with language than monolingual children. Bilingual children were also more observant, in a way, because they had to be in order to understand their parents. Listening and paying attention to the speaker was more critical for bilingually raised children. “This special mapping that babies seem to do with language happens in a social setting. They need to be face to face, interacting with other people. The brain is turned on in a unique way” (Klass).
In a related study, Roberta Golinkoff reports on a related series of studies involving the effectiveness of children’s educational programs for language learning. The study tested ninety-six children aged thirty through forty-two months old. The object was to test their ability to learn verbs from video. The first study asked if children could learn verbs from video when supported by live social interaction. The second asked whether they could learn from a video when not supported by live social interaction. The third study clarified whether benefits of social interaction remained when the experimenter was shown on a video screen instead of in person (instead of live social interaction to support the video’s teachings) (Klass).
The results showed that younger children could learn from the video with live social interaction and that older children could learn without the live social interaction–with just the video alone. Outside of this experiment though, the journal also mentions (in reference to another experiment) that the vocabulary sizes of eight through sixteen month olds were directly related to how many hours of television they watched per day. Infants who spent more time with screen media had smaller vocabulary sizes than same-aged peers who watched less television. However, there was no association between the two found between ages seventeen through twenty-four months. “The preponderance of research in the language literature suggests that live social interaction is the most fertile ground for language development” (1373).
That key phrase “language development” is precisely how Per Saugstad, author of A Theory of Language and Understanding would describe the process of how we learn to learn language and how we ended up with such a complex modern language system. Saugstad’s focus is on the biological function of language as a form of social interaction, behavior, and understanding. He argues that linguistic performance principally consists of using linguistic signs that refer to definite concepts. It is reasonable to believe that the use of linguistic signs evolved after a number of other forms of social interaction and that language would not have been possible without the preceding nonverbal forms of communication such as crying smiling, and making gestures. These signs, he claims, contributed and built up to the formation of language. He suspects that the use of linguistic signs had a survival value in the evolutionary development of humans. Lastly, he claims that language should be regarded as composite in nature, consisting of a capacity for vocalization and a capacity for perceiving and understanding. In short, humans have developed language skill through an evolution of linguistic signs (Saugstad).
Evolution implies a change over time in a being’s physical or mental capacity in adaptation to its changing environment. As human brains evolved to allow the processing of more complex thoughts, language evolved along with it. But why? What makes us want to learn and interchange more advanced structures of dialogue? What makes babies today try to accomplish saying a word over and over again until they have mastered it? Stan Kuczaj II argues in Crib Speech and Language Play that the reason why children want to learn language and why they feel the desire to practice it is because it gives the child a sense of control and power—especially in situations of self-repetition. Without another person to interact with or respond to, the child is in complete control of the outcomes of his/her practice. This all relates back to a child’s need for individualization and a consciousness of separateness from others—a necessary realization for growing up and learning in all manners (Kuczaj).
Ray Cattell would agree, as laid out in his book Children’s Language: Consensus and Controversy, that from the beginning, babies crave control. Crying is a form of control—a way to exert their influence on their environment. When they can’t move by themselves, crying is the way that infants affect those around them. Then at around two months of age, cooing begins. Cooing sounds are when the lips and tongue and other speech organs move in ways that are comparable with the movements they’ll make in actual speech. Next come chuckles and laughs—usually around four months old. At eight months they begin to babble. Babbling involves patterns of sounds- reduplication (i.e.: gagagagaagaagaga). The patterns become more complex and more varied as time goes on. Through this whole evolution, children seem to enjoy exploring the sounds they can create and challenging themselves to discover new sounds (Cattell).
Adults make it very clear when they are addressing babies by touching them, tickling them, looking them in the eyes, etc. so it’s no surprise that kids figure out that the noises coming from the adult’s mouth mean something. This is when they decide to try and relate the sounds they have been learning to make with meaning. They want to link symbols to meanings. The symbols in this case are words (Cattell).
Words are the vital pieces that compose our unique existence as humans. In fact, I would argue that words are the modern human’s survival tool that drives our evolution. As my research suggests, the importance to children of social interaction from a young age cannot be stressed enough. It is crucial in this time of changing forms of communication—such as social networking websites, texting, and other tools that eliminate the need for face-to-face communication—that we provide children with an example of how to communicate directly with others. With the advancement of technology and modern living systems that eliminate or at least reduce the need for survival mechanisms that other eras of humans found necessary, words are our defense. They are the basis of our understanding, our learning and guide for growth and discovery of knowledge. So perhaps our desire to learn language is not only because we have an innate language-learning device inside us or because we have the desire to be individuals. Perhaps the reason lies so simply in our natural evolution. Language is the modern stone, the modern bow and arrow, and the modern rifle—it is our protection and our progress.
Works Cited
Cattell, Ray. Children’s Language: Consensus and Controversy. London: Cassell, 2000. Print.
Chomsky, Noam. Language and Mind, 3rd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 88-172. Print.
Grady, William. How children learn language. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Harris, Margaret. Language experience and early language development : from input to uptake. Hove (UK) Hillsdale, USA: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993.
Klass, M.D., Perri. “Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language.” New York Times 10 Oct. 2011, n. pag. Web. 12 Oct. 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/health/views/11klass.html?_r=1>.
Kuczaj II, Stan A. Crib Speech and Language Play. New York City: Springer- Verlag, 1983. 1-19. Print.
McCune, Lorraine. How Children Learn to Learn Language. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Perez-Pereira, Miguel, and Gina Conti-Ramsden. Language Development and Social Interaction in Blind Children. East Sussex: Psychology Press Ltd., 1999. Print.
Roberta M. Golinkoff, et al. "Live Action: Can Young Children Learn Verbs From Video?." Child Development 80.5 (2009): 1360-1375. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 12 Oct. 2011.
Saugstad, Per. A Theory of Language and Understanding. City: Columbia University Press, 1980.
