Articles on How Children Learn Language - Paper Example

Fallows, Deborah. ""Papa, don't text: when parents are too distracted for baby talk, how do children learn language?"." Glendale College Library - Ezproxy Login, The Atlantic, 11 Sept. 2017, ic.galegroup.com.libwin2k.glendale.edu/ic/ovic/MagazinesDetailsPage/MagazinesDetailsWindow?disableHighlighting=false&displayGroupName=Magazines&currPage=&scanId=&query=&docIndex=&source=&prodId=OVIC&search_within_results=&p=OVIC&mode=view&catId=&u=glen76009&limiter=&display-query=&displayGroups=&contentModules=&action=e&sortBy=&documentId=GALE%7CA336671735&windowstate=normal&activityType=BasicSearch&failOverType=&commentary=. Accessed 22 Jan. 2018. In her article, Fallows critics the manner in which parents and adults in the modern-day spend their time with their children. While children are considered to learn language based on what they hear, the author argues that there is a possibility that the time spent by adults on their mobile devices has significant effects on how their children learn a language.

Fallow, references different studies conducted in the modern day today on how adults interactions with children help enhance the manner in which they learn languages. Based on the results of these studies, she points out that children who are exposed to more give and take conversations scored higher in language proficiency as compared to those who did not. Rather than a practical handbook on how children begin to learn language, Fallow's article points out on how exposure to sheer volume of words impacts the way children learn language. Thus, in a nutshell, the article summarizes that social interaction especially by parents and caregivers serve crucial purposes to the children's early language learning.

Ozcaliskan, Seyda, et al. "Gesturing with an injured brain: How gesture helps children with early brain injury learn linguistic constructions." Journal of Child Language, vol. 40, no. 01, Jan. 2013, pp. 69-105. This study is primarily centered on investigating how gesture helps children with early brain injury to learn and acquire linguistic constructions. More fundamentally, the primary focus of the study is on the pre/perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL). The authors, therefore, substantiate that children suffering for this condition show substantial plasticity for language. In this regard, unlike normal children, these children utilize intact brain regions for the acquisition of various language functions that would, in most cases, have involved the damaged regions of their brains and hence exhibiting only mild delays while learning language.

This study is considered essential since it effectively contributes to literature by pointing out how the children with pre- or perinatal unilateral brain injury learn or develop language with the use of different neural substances. This is unlike those children who acquire language with intact brains. This study also contributes to literature by examining the relationship between early speech in children and gesture. The authors conclude that gesture serves as an effective precursor to the learning of early sentence formation in children.

Patanakul, Severine S, et al. Bilingual Language Acquisition Among Preschool Children Raised in Bilingual Homes. 2013. This article focuses on the acquisition of language among bilingual preschool children who have been raised in Bilingual homes. According to the authors, the children who are raised in bilingual households have a higher chance of acquiring a vast range of possible linguistic outcomes regarding language acquisition. Besides, with reference to a lot of existing literature, this article substantiates that the parental language use in the home environment is the primary contributing factor on how the children learn the various languages and eventually becoming bilingual.

The information provided in this article address the existing literature gap between the acquisition of language among bilingual children and the influence of various other factors on the acquisition of language among these children. This is effectively addressed by the authors who study the extent to which parental language input, peer residence in the place of residence as well as the child's exposure through travel experiences influence the perceived child's oral or aural bilingual linguistic competence. The study, however, concludes that parental influence is not the only major aspect influencing how children learn various languages by being raised in bilingual homes.

Spratford, Meredith, et al. "Relationship of Grammatical Context on Childrens Recognition of s/z-Inflected Words." Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, vol. 28, no. 9, Oct. 2017, pp. 799-809. The authors of this article acknowledge that learning, especially speech information for children is attained behaviorally. Unlike grownups, babies and young children do not have the linguistic competence to take advantage of the grammatical and semantic cues that help in communication. Therefore, for children, the access to aided high-frequency speech information is usually gained behaviorally through the use of recognition of plural monosyllabic words.The information from this article can, therefore, be utilized in different research projects that are aimed at identifying how audibility and word-morpheme recognition effectively affect the nature in which young children language.

The Columbia Encyclopedia. "Language Acquisition." The Columbia Encyclopedia; Glendale College Library - Ezproxy Login, 11 Sept. 2017, search-credoreference-com.libwin2k.glendale.edu/content/entry/columency/language_acquisition/0. Accessed 23 Jan. 2018.

In this article, the authors particularly focus on the process of learning a native or a second language among children. They effectively substantiate this by addressing the existing literature gap on how children learn to speak. However, most observations in the study indicate that children learn language through copying what they hear and also through the influence that human beings are naturally equipped with the aptitude in which they can understand grammar. This article highlights that, despite the fact that children learn both sound and vocabularies in their native language through imitation, they seldom learn grammar explicitly. Instead, they rapidly acquire the ability to speak grammatically as supported in theories such as that advanced by Noam Chomsky.

This article is, therefore, useful since it provides quality information on the stages in the acquisition of a native language among children. It also highlights that these stages can be measured through the increasing complexity and originality of a child's utterances. The fact that children are vulnerable to over-generalization of grammatical rules and speak it in a form that they are unlikely to have heard is an indication that during language learning, children intuit or deduce complex grammatical rules.