Wednesday, 23 May 2012
Our experiences
Baby language acquisition in the age of 8months to2 years is an interesting part in the life of a child. He starts with cooing and babbling where he cannot speak the words clearly. Meanwhile he explores colours, music and pictures in this stage. In this stage he says ma...pa...slowly. Then he establishes one word, two words and tries to connect alphabets in his language. This is the stage where the child pronounces mama-papa. Later on the child is able to complete sentences properly in the age of 2-3.
Baby language documentary was a remarkable experience with my group fellows. The first day at Apples school was a bit of an experiment playing with cute children of age 8 months to age 2. Children were engaged in different school activities wearing colourful clothes. We tried to talk to them but they weren’t familiar with our faces, so they usually ran away from us. Soon we made friends. We also visited the day care at Apples. One of the students that I remember was Zoya, age 1 year. She could hardly speak but I found her really pretty. Children of this age amused us by doing several astonishing acts. The next day, children got to know our names and they were comfortable with a number of cameras in our hands. They finally spoke and sang us different poems. Later on we visited Nust Day Care, interviewed Mam Sehrish and met a number of students. We even sang songs with them. There is met Muhammad Azam Khan who amused me with his acts.
This documentary made us learn about camera handling, software’s such as windows media player , and block spot .More over I learnt coordination in a group work.
Documentary Report
There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly. ~Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Language is great gift that God has bestowed upon us as it helps us to communicate our needs, desires, ideas, etc. A few months after we are born, we start acquiring this gift and by the time we are toddlers, we are able to speak many sentences by using words from our ever increasing reservoir of vocabulary. In a child, this ability to string full sentences together is acquired after undergoing stages of language development starting from babyhood. The stages include cooing and babbling, one word stage, two word stage, developing morphology, developing syntax etc. And these are not undergone automatically but “the language a child learns from and attends to is the speech of significant persons in his world, addressed to each other and to him” so in other words a child acquires language with the help of his caretakers ( mother, father, teachers) etc.
As the child gradually participates in the social interaction he learns “communicative competence, i.e. the unconscious, tacit knowledge that underlies speech behavior--knowledge of both the language and the social world”. Every child has communicative competence but also “has to learn how to use linguistic structures appropriately”. For this purpose, caretakers especially mothers play a big role because they tend to use “caregiver speech” which is a “simplified speech style adopted by someone who spends a lot of time interacting with a young child” and it is observed that “several characteristics of caregiver speech (e.g. utterance length, use of pronouns) significantly predicted later child speech”
Apart from the role of caregivers, various external mediums such as television, children books and nursery rhymes help children to learn their words and acquire language. It has been shown that “there is a strong relation between children's phonological skills and the progress that they make in reading”. But there is some uncertainty whether this is a specific connection or whether it is just a by-product of variations in general language ability. Also awareness of rhyme makes a distinctive contribution by helping children to form spelling categories during their speech development stages. When it comes to sentence formation, researchers argue that the concept of a sentence is innately available to children and is the "main guiding principle in a child's attempt to organize and interpret the linguistic evidence that fluent speakers make available to him."
The documentary we produced basically provides a visual representation of the stages discussed above, the use of caregiver and baby talk, the impact of television on children’s linguistic behavior and the use of rhyming and reading as a tool to help children grasp the language effectively.
We started off by seeking appointments from two institutions catering children, one was a daycare at our university and the other was a school cum daycare facility called the Apples Grooming School in G-11.
Our first day was spent by interacting with the children in the playgroup and nursery and the teachers at Apples. We interviewed the language teachers whose names are Sehrish Mirza, Amber Javed and Lamia Rahani and they explained the methods that they adopt to teach children to speak words and sentences. They spoke about the use of images and rhymes as tools in helping children acquire language also discussed the transition of their syllabus from phonetic alphabets to the learning of three letter words. We also documented some children who were singing rhymes in their music class and interacting with their teachers and caregivers.
The second day was “car wash day” for the playgroup at Apples; we visited all the classes from kindergarten to grade three and photographed and documented children and their teachers interacting in various fun filled sessions. Every child seemed to think that singing the ABC is equivalent of singing a poem which made us contemplate the impact of rhyming on children’s language development, Due to time shortage we could not study the impact of television of children’s linguistic abilities so we decided to shift our focus to the importance of rhyming on children’s speech. We also interviewed the headmistress of Apples, Mrs. Nuzhat Sohail who explained the step by step evolution of a child’s word forming abilities.
On the third day, we visited NUST daycare where we interviewed the teacher of junior Montessori and the in charge of the daycare. We were informed that the place caters for children as young as four weeks and as old as four years. We toured the place and took photographs then met a teacher called Ms Sehrish who explained the transitions that she observed in the children’s speech from the pre babbling stage till the time they were able to answer “what” and “who” questions completely. She also talked of the significance of caregiver speech and stressed that the caregiver must make clear and complete sounds in order to be understood by the child.
Along with our visits to the above mentioned places, we also met Dr. Uzma Mansoor who is a speech therapist at Allama Iqbal Open University and she gave a detailed overview of the stages involved in speech development of children. She first spoke of the cooing stage and described it as an initial way through which a child communicates with the mother. Then she described the babbling stage that starts when the child is six months old. The significance of this stage is that the child starts “playing with sounds” and produces a string of babbles such as bababa and gagaga etc. She further explained the formation of one words and two words in the child’s speech and the gradual increase of meaningful words in the child’s vocabulary by the time he/she reaches the age of two and a half.
Apart from footage of the places we documented, we also included videos of Afiya Awais and her son Mustafa in which she spiritedly describes the stages of communication her son has gone through.
On the whole our effort was to provide a lively documentary that would visually depict the topics of the chapter “First language acquisition” that we studied in our textbook “the Study of Language” by George Yule. And we hope that we have succeeded in the effort.
Language is great gift that God has bestowed upon us as it helps us to communicate our needs, desires, ideas, etc. A few months after we are born, we start acquiring this gift and by the time we are toddlers, we are able to speak many sentences by using words from our ever increasing reservoir of vocabulary. In a child, this ability to string full sentences together is acquired after undergoing stages of language development starting from babyhood. The stages include cooing and babbling, one word stage, two word stage, developing morphology, developing syntax etc. And these are not undergone automatically but “the language a child learns from and attends to is the speech of significant persons in his world, addressed to each other and to him” so in other words a child acquires language with the help of his caretakers ( mother, father, teachers) etc.
As the child gradually participates in the social interaction he learns “communicative competence, i.e. the unconscious, tacit knowledge that underlies speech behavior--knowledge of both the language and the social world”. Every child has communicative competence but also “has to learn how to use linguistic structures appropriately”. For this purpose, caretakers especially mothers play a big role because they tend to use “caregiver speech” which is a “simplified speech style adopted by someone who spends a lot of time interacting with a young child” and it is observed that “several characteristics of caregiver speech (e.g. utterance length, use of pronouns) significantly predicted later child speech”
Apart from the role of caregivers, various external mediums such as television, children books and nursery rhymes help children to learn their words and acquire language. It has been shown that “there is a strong relation between children's phonological skills and the progress that they make in reading”. But there is some uncertainty whether this is a specific connection or whether it is just a by-product of variations in general language ability. Also awareness of rhyme makes a distinctive contribution by helping children to form spelling categories during their speech development stages. When it comes to sentence formation, researchers argue that the concept of a sentence is innately available to children and is the "main guiding principle in a child's attempt to organize and interpret the linguistic evidence that fluent speakers make available to him."
The documentary we produced basically provides a visual representation of the stages discussed above, the use of caregiver and baby talk, the impact of television on children’s linguistic behavior and the use of rhyming and reading as a tool to help children grasp the language effectively.
We started off by seeking appointments from two institutions catering children, one was a daycare at our university and the other was a school cum daycare facility called the Apples Grooming School in G-11.
Our first day was spent by interacting with the children in the playgroup and nursery and the teachers at Apples. We interviewed the language teachers whose names are Sehrish Mirza, Amber Javed and Lamia Rahani and they explained the methods that they adopt to teach children to speak words and sentences. They spoke about the use of images and rhymes as tools in helping children acquire language also discussed the transition of their syllabus from phonetic alphabets to the learning of three letter words. We also documented some children who were singing rhymes in their music class and interacting with their teachers and caregivers.
The second day was “car wash day” for the playgroup at Apples; we visited all the classes from kindergarten to grade three and photographed and documented children and their teachers interacting in various fun filled sessions. Every child seemed to think that singing the ABC is equivalent of singing a poem which made us contemplate the impact of rhyming on children’s language development, Due to time shortage we could not study the impact of television of children’s linguistic abilities so we decided to shift our focus to the importance of rhyming on children’s speech. We also interviewed the headmistress of Apples, Mrs. Nuzhat Sohail who explained the step by step evolution of a child’s word forming abilities.
On the third day, we visited NUST daycare where we interviewed the teacher of junior Montessori and the in charge of the daycare. We were informed that the place caters for children as young as four weeks and as old as four years. We toured the place and took photographs then met a teacher called Ms Sehrish who explained the transitions that she observed in the children’s speech from the pre babbling stage till the time they were able to answer “what” and “who” questions completely. She also talked of the significance of caregiver speech and stressed that the caregiver must make clear and complete sounds in order to be understood by the child.
Along with our visits to the above mentioned places, we also met Dr. Uzma Mansoor who is a speech therapist at Allama Iqbal Open University and she gave a detailed overview of the stages involved in speech development of children. She first spoke of the cooing stage and described it as an initial way through which a child communicates with the mother. Then she described the babbling stage that starts when the child is six months old. The significance of this stage is that the child starts “playing with sounds” and produces a string of babbles such as bababa and gagaga etc. She further explained the formation of one words and two words in the child’s speech and the gradual increase of meaningful words in the child’s vocabulary by the time he/she reaches the age of two and a half.
Apart from footage of the places we documented, we also included videos of Afiya Awais and her son Mustafa in which she spiritedly describes the stages of communication her son has gone through.
On the whole our effort was to provide a lively documentary that would visually depict the topics of the chapter “First language acquisition” that we studied in our textbook “the Study of Language” by George Yule. And we hope that we have succeeded in the effort.
Identfiying stages
Discovering the words of a language, and what they mean in the world, is only the first step for the language learner. Children must also discover how the distribution of these elements, including grammatical endings (-s, -ed, -ing) and function words (of, to, the) convey the further combinatorial meaning of an utterance. That is, children must implicitly discover and use the grammar of their language to determine who-did-what-to-whom in each sentence. (Saffran, 2001)
In the formation of questions, use of negatives, there appear to be three identifiable stages. The general pattern is that stage 1 occurs between 18 and 26 months, stage 2 between 22 and 30 months, and stage 3 between 24 and 40 months. (Yule, 2006) By observing the changes in questions, negatives and morphological developments, I have divided the children X, Y and Z into the three stages.
CHILD Z:
• No picture in there.
• Where momma boot?
• Have some?
Child Z is at the earliest stage which may be between age two and two and a half years. At this stage, children form negative statements by putting no or not at the beginning which is why when claiming that there is no picture, the child says “No picture in there”. Secondly, while formulating questions the child’s first stage has two methods. Simply add a Wh-form (where, who) to the beginning of the expression like when inquiring his mother about the boot, the child says “Where momma boot?” Another way of asking a question is to simply utter an expression with a rise in intonation towards the end. The statement “have some” has been converted into a request type question “have some?” by the stage one child speaker. In terms of morphology, a few grammatical inflections appear and simple prepositions like in, on connect the lexical morphemes together e.g. “No picture in there”.
CHILD X:
• You want eat?
• I can’t see my book.
• Why you waking me up?
Child X is in the second stage of development because now the questions are more complex expressions but the intonation strategy is still being used as in “You want eat?” More Wh are also introduced by the child like the Why in “Why you waking me up?” In the second stage, the negative forms don’t and can’t appear and the no and not are used in front of the verb now, rather than at the beginning. This is shown in the sentence “I can’t see my book”. In terms of morphological development, inflectional morphemes indicating the grammatical function of nouns and verbs start appearing in the child’s language and usually the –ing expression appears as depicted in the third expression uttered by child X. (Yule, 2006)
CHILD Y:
• Where those dogs goed?
• You didn’t eat supper.
• Does lions walk?
This child seems to be in the third stage of development because the questions uttered are quite close to the adult model. In the declaration “You didn’t eat supper” the child is conveying a negative message by using auxiliary verb form “did not”. The typical negative forms of stage one have disappeared. Also, a couple of morphological developments can be noticed such as marking of regular plurals with the –s form, as in lions and dogs. The word “go-ed” proves that regular part tense forms that typically precede the appearance of the –ed inflection have also appeared but the child is over generalizing that version by saying go-ed. In the question “Does lions walk?” the child is using the –s marker on third-person-singular present-tense verb and this is apparent in the auxiliary usage of “Does”.
Looking for distinctive features, inflectional categories, syntactic rules, and all the dozens of other possible basic units in a child's linguistic system is a hazardous pastime; yet if we are to understand the processes of language development or language behavior in general, we must make the effort to do so, since it is manifestly impossible to deal with the child's language in one large undifferentiated mass. (Ferguson, 1975)
In the formation of questions, use of negatives, there appear to be three identifiable stages. The general pattern is that stage 1 occurs between 18 and 26 months, stage 2 between 22 and 30 months, and stage 3 between 24 and 40 months. (Yule, 2006) By observing the changes in questions, negatives and morphological developments, I have divided the children X, Y and Z into the three stages.
CHILD Z:
• No picture in there.
• Where momma boot?
• Have some?
Child Z is at the earliest stage which may be between age two and two and a half years. At this stage, children form negative statements by putting no or not at the beginning which is why when claiming that there is no picture, the child says “No picture in there”. Secondly, while formulating questions the child’s first stage has two methods. Simply add a Wh-form (where, who) to the beginning of the expression like when inquiring his mother about the boot, the child says “Where momma boot?” Another way of asking a question is to simply utter an expression with a rise in intonation towards the end. The statement “have some” has been converted into a request type question “have some?” by the stage one child speaker. In terms of morphology, a few grammatical inflections appear and simple prepositions like in, on connect the lexical morphemes together e.g. “No picture in there”.
CHILD X:
• You want eat?
• I can’t see my book.
• Why you waking me up?
Child X is in the second stage of development because now the questions are more complex expressions but the intonation strategy is still being used as in “You want eat?” More Wh are also introduced by the child like the Why in “Why you waking me up?” In the second stage, the negative forms don’t and can’t appear and the no and not are used in front of the verb now, rather than at the beginning. This is shown in the sentence “I can’t see my book”. In terms of morphological development, inflectional morphemes indicating the grammatical function of nouns and verbs start appearing in the child’s language and usually the –ing expression appears as depicted in the third expression uttered by child X. (Yule, 2006)
CHILD Y:
• Where those dogs goed?
• You didn’t eat supper.
• Does lions walk?
This child seems to be in the third stage of development because the questions uttered are quite close to the adult model. In the declaration “You didn’t eat supper” the child is conveying a negative message by using auxiliary verb form “did not”. The typical negative forms of stage one have disappeared. Also, a couple of morphological developments can be noticed such as marking of regular plurals with the –s form, as in lions and dogs. The word “go-ed” proves that regular part tense forms that typically precede the appearance of the –ed inflection have also appeared but the child is over generalizing that version by saying go-ed. In the question “Does lions walk?” the child is using the –s marker on third-person-singular present-tense verb and this is apparent in the auxiliary usage of “Does”.
Looking for distinctive features, inflectional categories, syntactic rules, and all the dozens of other possible basic units in a child's linguistic system is a hazardous pastime; yet if we are to understand the processes of language development or language behavior in general, we must make the effort to do so, since it is manifestly impossible to deal with the child's language in one large undifferentiated mass. (Ferguson, 1975)
Tuesday, 22 May 2012
Speaking the Heard Word
Speaking the Heard Word
To speak a word that is heard, information must first get to the primary auditory cortex. From the primary auditory cortex, information is transmitted to the posterior speech area, including Wernicke's area. From Wernicke's area, information travels to Broca's area, then to the Primary Motor Cortex.
The Brain's Cerebral Cortex (Neocortex)
Speaking the Written Word
To speak a word that is read, information must first get to the primary visual cortex. From the primary visual cortex, information is transmitted to the posterior speech area, including Wernicke's area. From Wernicke's area, information travels to Broca's area, then to the Primary Motor Cortex.
Noam Chomsky
Professional Life
Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia. He was raised in a Hebrew environment and was exposed to anarchist politics, Zionism and anti-Semitism from a young age. Chomsky attended the Oak Lane County Day School and graduated from the Central High School of Philadelphia. He enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania and focused his studies on linguistics and philosophy, earning his Bachelor’s and his Master’s from UPenn. In 1955, Chomsky earned his Ph.D. in linguistics, also from UPenn, and spent time at Harvard conducting research for his doctorate thesis. The four years he spent as a Harvard Junior Fellow produced not only a prominent thesis, but also led to the eventual publication of one of his most acclaimed books on linguistics, Syntactic Structures.
In 1955, Chomsky left Harvard to accept a position with MIT. A few short years later, he earned his full professorship. Chomsky held several different titles during his more than a half of century with MIT, including Institute Professor and Ferrari P. Ward Professorship. Chomsky was also very active in politics and his anti-war views, published in several of his writings, caused controversy and led to several death threats. An expert in linguistics, Chomsky still travels regularly and conducts seminars, workshops and speaking engagements.
Contribution to Psychology
Chomsky is best known for his influence on linguistics, specifically, the development of transformational grammar. Chomsky believed that formal grammar was directly responsible for a person’s ability to understand and interpret mere utterances. Although Chomsky did not believe that language was innate, he did theorize that animals and humans were both capable of similar types of comprehension when exposed to specific linguistic information, but only humans could continue to develop those abilities through a process he called “language acquisition device (LAD).” Chomsky thought that if the LAD for all human languages could be discovered, it could result in features that would be universal to all tongues, known as “universal grammar.”
Chomsky further developed his linguistic theories in a series of lectures which were published under the name of Lectures on Government and Binding. The lectures covered the Principles and Parameters (P&P) technique that Chomsky formed based on the assumption that every language had similar parameters that could be manipulated and modified. By doing so, learning a language would only require the acquisition of a core set of linguistic principles.
Chomsky also contributed to the field of phonology and influenced the works of other experts including Michael Tomasello and Elizabeth Bates. He explored language hierarchy, a method of classification that has impacted the computer science field dramatically. Chomsky’s linguistic discoveries have benefited the field of psychology in many ways as well. Linguistics itself is a discipline of cognitive psychology, and strives to understand how language is learned and used by children.
In addition to his impact on psychological approaches, Chomsky also contributed to the literary field with his more than 100 published books. He has been recognized for his work as an activist, philosopher, scientist, and professor with numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science and the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.
Language Acquisition Device
The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a postulated "organ" of the brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device in language acquisition. First proposed by Noam Chomsky, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is component of the nativist theory of language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the instinct or "innate facility" for acquiring language. Chomsky has gradually abandoned the LAD in favour of a parameter-setting model of language acquisition (principles and parameters). Chomsky motivated the LAD hypothesis by what he perceived as intractable complexity of language acquisition, citing the notion of "infinite use of finite means" proposed by Wilhelm von Humboldt. At the time it was conceived (1957–1965), the LAD concept was in strict contrast to B.F. Skinner's behavioral psychology which emphasized principles of learning theory such as classical and operant conditioning and imitation over biological predisposition. The interactionist theory of Jerome Bruner and Jean Piaget later emphasized the importance of the interaction between biological and social (nature and nurture) aspects of language acquisition. Differing from the behaviorists who emphasize the importance of social interactions in language acquisition, Chomsky (1965) set out an innate language schema which provides the basis for the child’s acquisition of a language. The acquisition process takes place in an infant's mind because of this mental organ which enables him/her to speak despite the limited nature of the Primary Linguistic Data (PLD, the input signals received) and the degenerate nature (frequent incorrect usage, utterances of partial sentences) of that data. Given this poverty of the stimulus, a language acquisition model requires a number of components. Firstly, the child must have a technique for representing input signals and, secondly, a way of representing structural information about them. Thirdly, there must be some initial delimitation of the class of possible language structure hypotheses. Fourthly, the child requires a method for determining what each of these hypotheses implies with respect to each sentence. Finally, an additional method is needed by which the child can select which hypothesis is compatible with the PLD. Equipped with this endowment, first language learning is explained as performed by a Language Acquisition Device progressing through the following stages: The device searches the class of language structure hypotheses and selects those compatible with input signals and structural information drawn from the PLD. The device then tests the compatibility using the knowledge of implications of each hypothesis for the sentences. One hypothesis or ‘grammar’ is selected as being compatible with the PLD. This grammar provides the device with a method of interpreting sentences (by virtue of its capacity for internally representing structural information and applying the grammar to sentences).
Source: Wikepedia
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