CHILDREN AND ADULT IN ACQUIRING THE LANGUAGE

A.      What makes children acquire their first language easily and rapidly?

Typical children are constantly exposed to language in the form of adults and older children speaking and communicating around them. Children acquire language at a very rapid rate, and most children's speech is relatively grammatical by age three. Normal children are able to hear and understand reasonably complex syntax, including rules of inflection and pluralization, and remember irregular verbs and nouns without ever having a direct lesson in grammar or speech. In fact, some cultures such as the! Kung San do not speak directly to children who have not yet learned to speak back. How do children achieve the amazing mental feat of learning something they have never been taught?

1.    The Grammar Module and Mental Dictionary

According to Steven Pinker's model, presented in Words and Rules, all normal human brains come primed for language acquisition. They have an innate ability to memorize vocabulary, internalize rules regarding their native language's grammar and syntax, and remember irregular forms. Children are constantly hearing and processing speech, so their brains are able to analyze the grammatical structure of the sentences and parse it into basic rules about the language. As a result, children learn the basic vocabulary of their language, as well as grammatical details like add an 'ed' to put a verb in the past tense and irregular forms like went instead of goed.

Anyone who has spent time around young children knows that they do not always speak correctly, however. Children's error rates are often overestimated by adults whose trained ears pick up incorrect forms or usages easily, but ignore or take for granted the more common regular forms; in actuality, their mistakes are relatively rare considering the mental feat being attempted. Those mistakes that are made are often highly illuminating - they reveal information about how children learn their native language.

Of course, children's mental dictionaries expand rapidly as they acquire new vocabulary and learn new idioms and expressions. Likewise, their grammar modules quickly learn and apply the proper rules of the language. The errors adults notice arise when one of two situations occurs: either the grammar module fails to supply the proper rule, or the mental dictionary fails to supply the proper word. In the first case, the result is sentences like Her went to the store or They was leaving early. In both examples, proper English grammar is not being upheld; the grammar module has supplied an incorrect rule or has not supplied a rule at all.

In the second case, the mental dictionary fails to provide an irregular verb or pluralization or a complete idiom; the result is sentences such as We goed to the store, I saw three deers, or He's such a two-goody-shoes. In these cases, it is not regular English grammar that is violated; rather, it is irregular forms that cannot be predicted from grammatical rules (that is, that must be stored in the mental dictionary) that are misused. Of course, this error can go the opposite way as well, and children can irregularize regular words that are similar in sound to irregular ones. This leads to items such as hat as a past tense of hit (by analogy to sit-sat).

B.       Do children and adult and differences between them hold some keys to language acquisition…

When talking about children and adult we will think about their differences. As I said that one of their difference is ability in learning foreign language. The difference between child and adult in learning a foreign language has been researched by some experts and teachers. What factors are influencing ability in foreign language acquisition? How can a foreign language be acquired fast? And some similar questions about child versus adult language acquisition have been answered by experts in their researches about critical age language learning.

A number of years ago, language teachers and researchers believed in a critical period for language learning (Scovel, 1988). That period was said to end with brain lateralization (early theorists posited age five as the time of lateralization; the theory was later amended to suggest that this occurs during the teenage years).

Brain lateralization refers to the brain’s finalizing the location of the functions that will be accomplished in either the right or left hemisphere – or cross-laterally. Before lateralization, functions can be picked up by the other hemisphere, e.g. speech, which is generally a left-hemisphere function, can be taken over by the right hemisphere when the left is damaged in a young child. After lateralization, this cannot happen. Lateralization is also considered to be responsible for the finalization of the range of sounds that a person can hear or learn and an explanation for why children generally acquire foreign languages without an accent and most adults have a moderate to severe accent when they speak.

Children have also been said to have a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), or “black box,” in their heads (Chomsky, 1998). This LAD is envisioned as an unseen, uncharted part(s) of the brain (or perhaps just a manner of synaptic functioning) that allows children to acquire the structure and words of a language without conscious effort. After childhood, the LAD seems to cease functioning, although the authors have heard of some instances of adults reporting LAD-type activity and at least one of us has experienced it personally as an older adult.

The fact is that in childhood language acquisition, whether a native language or a foreign language, is closely associated with a developing mind (Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek, 2000), whereas adult acquisition of language is associated with a developed mind.

Contrary to these earlier suggestions, the role of age in language acquisition is a much disputed aspect of language learning theory. Some adults have been able to do everything a child does – pronounce words with a native accent, learn language in context, and the like (Birdsong, 1999; Leaver, 2003a). Moreover, a cognitive advantage has been found for adults – knowing one language and its lexico grammatical system can sometimes create impediments through its influence on a learner’s expectations of how another language will work, but a good grasp of the systems behind one’s native language can also provide the learner with basic linguistic categories that are useful in learning a second language. Often, too, the learning is faster because of this cognitive advantage (Schleppegrell, 1987)

Source; English Language (http://englishbox.co.cc)