language acquisition

[laurenfuentes]

This is kind of a different exploratory for me, more of a stream of consciousness as I argued back and forth with myself about the meaning and implications of these articles. Enjoy!
Lauren

I thought that reading the Saffran and Kirkham articles was an interesting way to begin our discussion on infant language acquisition. Beginning with the earliest Saffran article, it struck me as interesting that we were reading a line of research that was not focused on wholly experience-independent mechanisms of language acquisition, as has been the focus of language development for me in past classes. (I’m thinking Chompsky, etc.) It was interesting too that the theory that the research is playing with here is not one that is completely experientially driven as well, flying in the face of those who might espouse a “tabula rosa” sort of idea of language development. In effect, what we have here is really similar to what we have seen in other areas of development so far, for example the imitating reflex used to begin the development of theory of mind, representation, etc. While the mechanism is not yet clear, infants are predisposed to break down strings of auditory information through statistical means in such a way that allows the conceptualization of language. The most basic way I can think of understanding this process is that an infant finds what sounds go together the most often. If certain combinations of sounds are happening a lot then, well, they must be important, and as these sounds only stick out as important when they are in particular combinations with each other, then it is really just these groupings of sound that are important. In a child’s pursuit to communicate, it will be these groupings of sounds that he or she will use as they have already been identified as important language components.
While this is an interesting idea, and the studies have shown without much doubt that both children and adults are able to determine or “learn” words based on syllabic frequency, I am finding it a little hard to believe that this theory can account for the acquisition of any sort of a vocabulary or understanding of words, which of course children need in order to effectively communicate. This reminds me of when I’ll hear friends who were brought up in bi-lingual homes say that they cannot speak in a language other than English, but that they can understand the other language they were brought up with. The mere exposure children have with another language growing up may result in the type of learning we see happening in these studies, though I believe that a child would need prolonged exposure to this other language in order to develop the ability to attach these sound groupings to concepts. Essentially, this theory is limited in the extent to which it impacts the development of language, though by no means am I discounting its role as an early communicative mechanism. As I noted earlier, this ability to use statistics may be akin to a reflex. It gets infants thinking about language, sort of priming them by ingraining grammatical rules, what works linguistically and what does not. This is something like a jumpstart, giving the children molds for language and grammar before giving children actual words with meaning. At the same time too, this ability we have to use statistics this way plays a key role even before children can take in words to learn and associate with concepts. Children have to know what are words. When there is just a long stream of sounds, how are children going to know what to do with sounds when it comes time to associate the sounds with an object for example. It is important then for a child to have some idea of the makeup of a word in order to proceed and understand what that word might mean.