Language Acquisition and Learning in Children
Language acquisition and learning in children is a process which begins in early childhood and is impacted by the social surroundings. The development and use of words in language in young children is a natural phenomenon and is a social process which occurs in the context in which children are placed. When children begin the process of using conventional language, the first words and utterances they make are based on their responses of the novel aspects of the surroundings in which they learn. For instance, when a child sees a dog, the mother excitedly utters the sentence, “Look, a dog!” pointing to the dog so that the child can see and understand the meaning of the word dog. Thus, the mother, through her knowledge and excitement, plays a vital role in conveying to the child, a new word ‘dog’ and its meaning through visual pointing.
Studies related to learning the meanings of new words by children have identified several mechanisms which enable children to deduce the meanings of the words. Some of these mechanisms which lead children to infer the meanings of novel words include lexical-specific constraints (Markman, 1989), syntactic form (Hall & Graham, 1999), conceptual knowledge (Soja et al., 1991), mechanisms of attention and memory (Smith et al., 1996) and intentionality of adults (Akhtar and Tomasello, 2000).
Thus it is apparent that the mechanisms involved in the process by which children acquire language through new words and meanings, is subject to immense investigation and researchers have conducted several experiments to understand the role and importance of others’ intentions in the process of the learning of meanings of new words among children (Akhtar, Carpenter & Tomasello, 1996).
It is essential to analyze whether children need a sophisticated understanding of others’ intentions (Akhtar et al., 1996) when they learn the meanings of new words or whether they use their own pragmatic cues in the process of understanding the meanings of new words (Samuelson and Smith, 1998).
The manner in which children infer the meanings of new words has been under much scrutiny and researchers assert that this process occurs in children due to their “understanding of people’s minds” (Diesendruck et al., 2004). Research in this field presents controversial results with researchers debating about the perceptions and communicative abilities of young speakers, as a result of being attuned to their listeners (Golinkoff, 1993). In the process of acquiring new meanings of words, children take their cues not only from their previous knowledge and memory and cognition, but also the context in which the meaning of words is presented to them. Baldwin (1993) notes that children between the ages eighteen and twenty four months, respond to “gaze direction” while Tomalsello, Strosberg & Akhtar, (1994) have noted that children respond to “affective expression” in order to gauge the “communicative intents” of the speaker (Diesendruck et al., 2004).
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