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  • Essay / Factors That Govern Language Acquisition

    Many parents, expectant parents, and even linguistics students think about how infants acquire human language. As a child grows up right after birth, he or she is filled with great determination and enthusiasm to learn the different sounds, words and phrases in order to fully learn and understand human language. According to the research conducted in this article, three factors govern language acquisition: the discovery of language units, the packaging of words into meaningful units, and the acquisition of language as creation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay In the discovery of language units, infants have a big role to play. Before an infant begins to relate words to objects, he must establish which sound sequences are words, this is possible thanks to his native language from continuous sounds with pauses. Even though there are different forms of language, this shows that an infant must go through a critical period of language acquisition, this is called first language acquisition. Despite these factors, infants can successfully distinguish words in fluent speech from around 7 months of age. However, according to research on theorist Noam Chomsky, he argued that "language is an innate faculty and that we are born with a set of rules regarding language in our minds, which he called 'universal grammar'". He believed that an infant does not copy the language it hears around it, but rather infers rules from it, which it can then use to produce sentences it has never heard before. (Tahiriri, 2012). Children group words into meaningful units. Although distributional analyzes allow children to understand the words and expressions of a language, many higher language functions cannot be learned with statistics alone. Children must discover the rules that generate an infinite set, with only a finite sample. They obviously possess additional language learning abilities that allow them to organize their language without explicit guidance, because Chomsky believed that children at birth are born with a "language acquisition device" that allows them to formulate rules of language based on the information they receive. ". (Tahiriri, 2012). These abilities decrease with age and may be of biological origin. We can say that according to Piaget “the unit is the word and the child learns what the words refer to and how to combine them. According to the behaviorist, “there is no complex system of internalized rules, given innately or acquired during development, but a system of habit forces” (Tahriri, 2012). Every child goes through a period where they acquire language. During this time, children discover the combinations of sounds in their language, learn how they are arranged in combinations, and map these combinations into meaning. These processes happen together, requiring children to merge their abilities as they learn, to decipher the communication code around them. Despite levels of complexity, each currently beyond the reach of modern computers, young children easily solve the linguistic puzzles they face, even outperforming their input when it lacks the expected structure. Natural experiments in which children face minimal exposure to language can reveal the extent of innate language learning abilities and.