The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition Essay

The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition - experiment Example(Cook, 1988)Language acquisition begins very early in the human lifespan, and begins, logically enough, with the acquisition of a speechs sound patterns. The main linguistic accomplishments during the inaugural year of life are control of the muscles that produce pitch and sensitivity and the acquisition of native ph unmatchabletic distinctions used in the parents language. Interestingly, babies achieve these feats out front they produce or understand words, so their hireing cannot depend on correlating sound with meaning. They must be sorting the sounds directly, somehow tuning their speech analysis module to deliver the ph wholenessmes used in their language (Kuhl, et al., 1992).Shortly before their first birthday, babies begin to understand words, and around that birthday, they start to produce them (see Clark, 1993 Ingram, 1989). Despite the vast differences in language, childrens first words are similar all o ver the planet. About half the words are for objects food, rest home items, and people. There are words for actions, motions, and routines. Finally, there are routines used in social interaction, like yes, no, want, hi. more than or less 18 months, language changes in two ways. ... Once more, childrens two-word combinations are highly similar across cultures. These sequences already reflect the language being acquired in 95% of them, the words are properly ordered harmonize to his/her particular well-formed rules. (Pinker, 1984 Ingram, 1989).Between the late twos and mid-threes, childrens language blossoms so rapidly that it overwhelms the researchers who study it, and no one has worked out the exact sequence. Sentence length increases steadily, and because grammar is a combinatorial system, the number of syntactic types increases exponentially, doubling either month, reaching the thousands before the third birthday (Ingram, 1989, p. 235 Pinker, 1984). Though m whatever of the y oung 3-year-olds sentences are ungrammatical for one reason or another, it is because there are many things that can go wrong in any single sentence. When researchers focus on a single grammatical rule and count how often a child obeys it and how often he or she ignores it, the results are very impressive for just about all(prenominal) rule that has been looked at, three-year olds obey it a majority of the time (Pinker, 1984, 1989 Crain, 1992). Though our ears perk up when we hear errors, more than 90% of the time, the child is on target. Children do not seem to favor any particular grade of language (indeed, it would be puzzling how any kind of language could survive if children did not easily learn it). They swiftly acquire free word order, SOV and VSO orders, systems of case and agreement, and whatever else their language throws at them. Even grammatical gender, which many adults learning a second language find challenging, presents no problem children acquiring language like F rench, German, and Hebrew acquire