Language Development Essay (Essay Sample)

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
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Language development precedes the normal processes of studying where the young people get to know the types, how words are used and the pronunciation from the study of grammar. In his Nativist Theory Noam Chomsky says that children learn their mother tongue in a hard way due to many reasons. They include that children are in a subtle way exposed to the correct language, since when the adults talk, they interrupt themselves, change their minds and even pronounce words incorrectly. He also argued that children derive the rules of the language they hear around them where they can put the sentences into words. The empiricist theory suggests that the infants have arguably enough information on their mother languages. Empiricists believe that the brain itself is enough for an infant to acquire languages. CITATION Lau10 \l 1033 (Laura, 2010) They say during development the child should be exposed to their environment actively. For a child to learn the language of his parents, he should acquire a certain method of properly communicating with the parents and the caretaker. Other researchers argue that infants also acquire language by interacting with the outside world. Most of the theories more than likely suggest that the child gains his language skills and communication prowess from the people they mostly stay with by listening to them. Therefore, signs of language use to communicate begin when the young one knows that by crying he will get food, comfort and company. Infants then also learn important sounds in their boundaries, such as that of their mother or their nanny. Children also are different in their mastering of speech and language skills. Females have a slight advantage over the males though. CITATION Joh11 \l 1033 (Oates, 2011) The environment of an infant greatly affects language development since it is the surroundings that provide arguably helps the development of language by the infants as they are attentive to the person doing it hence maintaining their attention. When small children communicate with their elders, the baby talk gives the children time to learn and digest the language they are communicating in and also to practice talking that language. Infants who are vigorously introduced to deep vocabulary develop language in a very fast way and have a greater accurate syntax than the infants raised in surroundings where there is poor grammar use CITATION Wil12 \l 1033 (Fowler, 2012). Other methods used to make the children understand their language include:
1: Recasting: It is putting phrases together on what the infant has said like to form a complete sentence.
2: Restating: It is putting what the child has uttered into a grammatical form.
3: Referencing: It is labeling names of gadgets, objects and anything the child observes so that they remember them.
The behaviorist theory of B.F.Skinner provides information that a language develops in children due to them copying what they hear and through reinforcement.
There are five stages in the language development of a child:
1 Babbling: It is the earliest stage which lasts for two to eight months. Here the baby starts to make vowel sounds such as ma-ma and baba. They always babble adding consonants to the vowels and end up forming words.
2 Holophase stage: It precedes babbling and lasts for around nine to twelve months. It is when the babies pronounce their first real words
3 Two words: It begins when the children are around eighteen months to twenty months old. Here the children can utter words made of verbs and nouns only.
4 Multi-word sentences: it occurs when a child is around two years old whereby they pronounce short but wordy sentences CITATION Nao13 \l 1033 (Naomi, 2013). It marks a milestone in their development.
Some of the infants experience language disorders that hinder language development. They include:
1: Belated Language: These are infants who gain words and grammar later than others. This disorder is linked to loss of hearing. The infants who cannot hear properly will always have difficulties in getting to know and understand what the adults are saying. It may be caused by problems in using the tongue and lips to speak. Delayed language begins in those parts of the brain that are important during language development.
2: Articulation problems: Articulation is the ability to speak coherently. For articulation to take place the teeth, lips and tongue must all be in a position to move together. But for the children who have this disorder they cannot make words and syllables in a correct way, therefore, the audience cannot understand the meaning. Articulation difficulties differ from accent problems hence should be differentiated easily. Articu...