Among human beings, four-week-old babies can recognize the difference between some 40 consonants that are used in human languages, as shown by how their sucking and heartbeats change when different consonant sounds are presented by audiotape. That ability seems to be innate, since babies respond to many more consonants that are used in their parents’ language—English, for example, has only 24 consonant sounds, yet babies of English-speaking parents react to the consonants present in Japanese. Babies lose that ability as they grow up. By the age of six, when children enter school, their ability to hear the difference between sounds to which they have not been exposed in their own language is severely reduced. Feature detectors responsible for recognizing about a dozen consonant sounds have so far been inferred to exist in the human brain. They need to be triggered by the environment, however: if not, they appear to atrophy.
A celebrated case, documented in Francois Truffaut’s film The Wild Child, is that of Victor, “the wild boy of Aveyron,” who was found in 1798. Victor was first sighted wandering in the woods near Saint Sernin sur Rance, in southern France, at the end of the 18th century. He was captured but subsequently escaped, and wasn't retaken until January 1800 when he emerged from the woods. Aged about 12, he couldn't speak and bore a number of scars, suggesting he'd been in the wild for some time. Victor was given his name after the leading character in the play , the oddly prescient melodramatic play — indeed, the first fully developed melodrama — by René Guilbert de Pixérécourt, written in 1797/8, first produced in 1798 and published in 1803, and itself based on . It seems that was eventually able to respond to some spoken commands, although to what extent he genuinely understood the language.
Although the critical period hypothesis was hotly debated for some years, there is now compelling evidence — including the evidence from feral, confined and isolated children — that, unless they are exposed to language in the early years of life, humans lose much of their innate ability to learn a language, and especially its grammatical system. Even if they've missed out on the critical period for language acquisition (such as ), feral children can be taught a few words, and very simple grammatical constructions. However, feral children don't provide the best evidence in support of the critical period hypothesis (which is, any case, now generally accepted), partly because they may have been abandoned because of sub normality () or suffered emotional and physical trauma () that would affect their learning capacity. The evidence from the oft – cited feral children such as Victor and Genie is incomplete in crucial respects both regarding language exposure and in relation to experiences which would have significant effects on their overall development. Lenneberg’s that the only safe conclusion to be drawn from the cases like Genie’s and Victor’s ‘is that life in dark closets, wolves’ dens, or sadistic parents’ backyards is not conductive to good health and normal development. (Lenneberg, 1967) The ability of feral children to learn language on their return to human society is very varied. For most feral children from history, we don't have enough information to judge exactly how much language, if any, they might have been able to learn, were they taught properly? For some children, the historical records don't even mention whether or not they could talk when they were found, presumably because the assumption is that they clearly wouldn't have been able to.
Clearly, Genie’s language development went further than Victor’s ever did, in a very much richer sense than in Victor’s case. She can actually understand and produce speech where as Victor clearly could not. Would it be plausible to attribute Genie’s linguistic problems to trauma resulting from her isolation and confinement?
The input to language acquisition consists of sounds and situations; the output is a grammar specifying, for that language, the order and arrangement of abstract entities like nouns, verbs, subjects, phrase structures, control. Innate knowledge of grammar itself is not sufficient. It does no good for the child to have written down in his brain "There exist nouns"; children need some way of finding them in parents' speech, so that they can determine, among other things, whether the nouns come before the verb, as in English, or after, as in Irish. Once the child finds nouns and verbs, any innate knowledge would immediately be helpful, because the child could then deduce all kinds of implications about how they can be used. But finding them is the crucial first step, and it is not an easy one.
The topic of language acquisition implicate the most profound questions about our understanding of the human mind, and its subject matter, the speech of children, is endlessly fascinating. But the attempt to understand it scientifically is guaranteed to bring on a certain degree of frustration. Children, too, were not designed for the benefit of psychologists: their cognitive, social, perceptual, and motor skills are all developing at the same time as their linguistic systems are maturing and their knowledge of a particular language is increasing, and none of their behaviour reflects one of these components acting in isolation.
Given these problems, it may be surprising that we have learned anything about language acquisition at all, but we have. When we have, I believe, it is only because a diverse set of conceptual and methodological tools has been used to trap the elusive answers to our questions: neurobiology, ethology, linguistic theory, naturalistic and experimental child psychology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of induction, theoretical and applied computer science. Language acquisition, then, is one of the best examples of the indispensability of the multidisciplinary approach called cognitive science. As we know Case studies have indicated that a child who is not exposed to language by the time they reach their early teens, will not be able to fully learn it. There have been cases of children discovered in the wild that could never learn to communicate linguistically, or were able to learn vocabulary and context, but never grammar and syntax.
Learning is a highly complex aspect of human activity and is not even fully understood now. For centuries, philosophers and physiologists have worked to analyse learning. There are many theories; an American behaviourist Skinner (1957) was one of the pioneers. His theory is based on the mechanism of operant conditioning. This involves the baby being conditioned by the parent. The baby reacts and operates in the environment around it. The parent has to wait for the baby to make a sound, which to their ears vaguely resembles a word in her language. An example of this could be that the child maybe near a ball and makes a sound “baw”. The parent immediately rewards this response strongly with praise. As a result the child is more likely to reproduce the sound again. When a particular stimulus response pattern is reinforced (rewarded), the individual is conditioned to respond. In Skinners theory Stimulus response is key. An example of a reinforcer is something that strengthens a desired response. Skinner believed that behaviour that is positively reinforced will reoccur; rather than continuous reinforcement, intermittent reinforcement would prove more effective. The most influential theorist was indeed Piaget; he suggested that people learn through an interaction between thinking and experience, and through sequential development of more complex structures. His ultimate goal was to generate an understanding for children. In Piaget’s account, when children encounter a new experience, they both accommodate their existing thinking to it and assimilate aspects of the experience. Piaget proposed that there are characteristic stages in the successive development of these mental structures, which are distinctive because of the cognitive process with which children process their experience these are sensori- motor, pre – operational, concrete and formal. Pollard, A (2005)
When a child begins to listen to his or her parents, it will unconsciously recognise which kind of language it is dealing with – and it will set its grammar to the correct one – this is known as “setting the parameters”. Children need the communication in order to acquire language. If children don’t or can’t learn the rules of grammar from the language around them, in their environment, this will explain some of the problems that feral children have experienced.
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References:
Fromkin, V & Rodman, R: (1974) ‘An Introduction to language’. Harcourt Brace & Company.
Lenneberg, E. (1967): ‘Biological Foundations of Language’. New York: Wiley.
Pinker, S. (1984). ‘Language learnability and language development’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Skinner, B.F. (1957) Verbal Behaviour, Appleton Century Crofts, New York, NY.
Pollard, A. (2005) Reflective Teaching, Continuum, London.
Webliography
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