Learning and expressing a language is an amazing capability that begins in the early stages of a person’s life. Several brain regions have been pinpointed as distinct language areas, such as Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, but additional brain regions contribute to language processes as well. In addition to understanding spoken language, humans have the ability to comprehend music and to learn sign language if needed.
Language acquisition starts early in life, especially the acquisition and learning of phonetics which is detailed in Kuhl’s review article. Numerous studies have been carried out on infants using a wide variety of neuroimaging techniques including EEG/ERP, MEG, fMRI and NIRS. These studies mostly focus on which brain mechanisms are responsible for understanding phonetic units of speech, or the consonants and vowels that create words. It is first important to note that language displays a critical period in which the ability to acquire a second language declines after age seven. Furthermore, a study that tested American infants and Japanese infants on their ability to discriminate between the English /ra-la/ phonetic contrast showed that before the critical period both groups of infants performed similarly, but after the critical period American infants performed much better than Japanese infants. This provides evidence that infants are able to detect which phonemes, which can alter the meaning of words, are meaningful for their own language. Infants also execute phonetic learning using statistical learning; they become sensitive to the distribution of frequencies of the sounds in their everyday language between the ages of six to twelve months. Social interaction is another mechanism that aids in language acquisitio...
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...igners result in aphasia just like they do in people who speak. Another finding is that sign language processing is different than gesture processing in general. One study showed greater activation in the left perisylvian regions and the left frontoparietal network for ASL signs than for transitive and grooming gestures. The left perisylvian regions are also involved in the processing of spoken language. A difference between the processing of sign language and spoken language is that sign language activates the superior and inferior parietal lobules. The superior parietal lobule is thought to be important for proprioceptive monitoring during signing and that the inferior parietal lobule is needed for phonological processing and is employed during the production and imitation of hand movements. Sign language and spoken language have both similarities and differences.
In American Sign Language a major part of the language entails being able to express emotions and types of questions through the use of non- manual signals such as when asking a yes-no question the eyebrows will go up but when asking a wh-question such as what the eyebrows go down. Another way to express something is through mouth morphemes this is the way your mouth is shaped to convey different meanings, such as size and grammar. Non-manual signals and mouth morphemes are just as important as any sign and enrich the language to make it possible to effectively communicate.
This experiment is similar to a correlational design, however, the subjects in this experiment were chosen specifically because of the language they had been predisposed to; their characteristics were extremely similar. Moon compared preexisting “treatments,” the languages they were exposed to before birth. This research design gives a real world sense in terms of how a baby would react if they were to hear a language they had not been exposed to prior. This is a major strength of the natural experiment design. Although, Moon still determined a relationship between the variables; the variables being the language babies were susceptible to before being born and how they reacted to the vowels in each. A limitation of the natural experiment is that the findings may be caused by things other than the language they were exposed to. Moon states that “Additional studies will be necessary to examine whether the results reported here can be generalized to other vowels and languages” (2013). The findings of this research article support the hypothesis that babies are familiar with the language they are predisposed to. Moon writes, “The effect of language experience was significant (F1,75 = 4.95, p = 0.029), with a greater number of sucks overall during the non-native (MNon-native = 7.1, SD = 2.9) than during the native language (MNative = 6.5, SD = 3.3). The results show that the native prototype and its variants received fewer sucking responses than the non-native prototype and its variants” (2013). This supports the idea that babies understand language. They have already started the process of learning language. The news article does report that it is important to keep in mind that the language we speak to a pregnant belly affects the language foundation of the baby. Mann’s article correctly presents the information of the research article. We must keep in mind that babies are aware of language they are
Pallier, C. (2003). Brain Imaging of Language Plasticity in Adopted Adults: Can a Second Language Replace the First? Cerebral Cortex, 13(2), 155-161. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/cercor/13.2.155
Language is arguably one if not the most complex functions produced by the human brain, and one that is all but transparent as to the underlying neurological structures and processes in that so much is going on at the same time that it is hard to tell what is what. What we do know is that there are different areas of representation for different aspects of language. An area in the left hemisphere above the perisylvian fissure in the frontal lobe anterior to the motor cortex roughly controls production and fluency of speech; another area, in the temporal lobe of the same hemisphere roughly controls comprehension and word retrieval. Other regions next to and between these areas carry related functions, and lesioning to them results in variations of the symptoms caused by lesioning one of the central regions described above(1)..
The 'Secondary' Language processing: functional -. organization and the neuroanatomical. Annual Review of Psychology. Annual 2003, p55(35). NewsRX.com - "The New York Times" a.
In the Unites States and Canada, an estimated range of 500,00 to 2 million people speak/use American Sign Language. According to the Census Bureau, ASL is the leading minority language after Spanish, Italian German and French. ASL is the focal point of Deaf Culture and nothing is dearer to the Deaf people’s hearts because it is a store of cultural knowledge and also a symbol of social identity, and social interactions. It is a fully complete, autonomous and natural language with complex grammar not derived and independent of English. ASL is visual manual, making visual manual words, moving the larger articulators od the limbs around in space. English uses audible words using small muscles
Wernicke's area is the region of the brain that is important for language development. It is basically the opposite of the temporal lobe it helps create speech rather than understand it. The Wernicke's area is located in the temporal lobe on the left side of the brain and is responsible for the comprehension of speech
Kuhl, P. (2007). Is speech learning 'gated' by the social brain?. Developmental Science, 10(1), 110-120.
A. Sue Yoshi & D. M. Hardison (2005). “The Role of Gestures and Facil Cues in Second Language Listening and Comprehension.” Language Learning, 55, 661
There are three main theories of child language acquisition; Cognitive Theory, Imitation and Positive Reinforcement, and Innateness of Certain Linguistic Features (Linguistics 201). All three theories offer a substantial amount of proof and experiments, but none of them have been proven entirely correct. The search for how children acquire their native language in such a short period of time has been studied for many centuries. In a changing world, it is difficult to pinpoint any definite specifics of language because of the diversity and modification throughout thousands of millions of years.
To continue with the key features, language is known to be special because of how children are able to learn in ways that are different from learning other things. (Willingham, 2007). Strong evidence shows how prepared the human brain is to learn language with very little stimulation. The results that show this point of view to be true is known to be the worldwide consistency of language learning.
Babies begin to develop language skills long before they embark on speaking. The foundation for learning language begins before birth by the baby listening and recognizing his/her mother’s heartbeat and voice in the womb. “In a study, researchers played a 2-minute recording of a popular Chinese poem to 60 pregnant women and their unborn babies while monitoring total heart rates. Heart rates rose while the babies listened to their own mother's voice, but they fell and stayed lower while the stranger recited. Obviously, the babies were paying close attention, leading the researchers to suspect they were not only recognizing morn, but beginning to learn the ins and outs of language” (Dawidowska and Harrar (2003))....
Wilder Penfield and Lamar Roberts first introduced the idea that there is a “critical period” for learning language in 1959. This critical period is a biologically determined period referring to a period of time when learning/acquiring a language is relatively easy and typically meets with a high degree of success. German linguist Eric Lenneberg further highlights Roberts and Penfield’s findings and postulated the Critical Period Hypothesis in 1967. According to the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH), certain biological events related to language development can only happen in the critical period. During this time, the brain possesses a degree of flexibility (ability and ease of learning a language) and becomes lateralized (assignment of language functions becomes concrete – either in the left or right hemisphere) (Marinova-Todd, S; Marshall, D & Snow, C. 2000 9-10). This critical period lasts from childhood through the onset of puberty (usually at around 12 years of age). Once this period is over, it is more difficult to learn a language because language functions in the brain have become concrete. This hypothesis can be seen with the case of Genie, a woman who was isolated from human interaction and language up to the age of 13. By the time she was rescued, she was well after the critical period for language acquisition, and as such, she did not have a full command of the English language. Had she been rescued before the age of 13, she may have had more linguistic capability. However, this accounts for firs...
In the last few decades, the notion of language and brain has been highlighted in different scientific fields such as: neurology, cognitive science, linguistics biology, technology and finally education.
Further in this term-paper I am going to describe the stages in child language acquistion starting from the very birth of an infant till the onset of puberty.