Language acqisition: Psycholinguistical ans Sociological Aspects

Language acqisition: Psycholinguistical ans Sociological Aspects

Mirela , Fazlic

People teaching and learning a foreign language know it is a long and difficult process, yet it is amazing how easily children acquire any language.The crucial question is whether children are born as „tabula rasa“ as far as language is concerned, or whether humans are „programmed“ with an outline knowledge of the structure of language in general. This is so called nature-nurture contraversy. Psycholinguistics is trying to find out about the structures and processes which underlie a human's ability to speak and understand language. This paper deals with still unresolved questions; Do humans acquire language because they are born equipped with some special linguistic ability? Or are they able to learn language because they are highly intelligent animals who are skilled at solving problems of various types? Or could it be mixture of these two posibilities? Chomsky said that humans have an innate knowledge of language structure and it is part of „the child's biological endowment, part of the structure of the language faculty.“ Human infants know in advance what languages are like, they are imprinted with knowledge about languages (innatenes hypothesis).Chomsky also claimed that humans have the ability to understand and produce novel utterances, he called this ability creativity. The second explanation for language ability is that no special knowledge is needed, because children are highly efficient puzzle solvers in all areas of human behaviour. In recent years linguists claim that children not merely acquire the structural patterns of their language, but also learn to use them appropriately within various social settings. Therefore, psycholinguists should pay as much attention to social context as to language structure itself, particulary as children in the early stages of speech are heavily dependent on their surroundings. Impoverished linguistic environment is likely to retard language acquisition, and children living in such environment may be language deprived, while the children living in enriched verbal environment mostly become highly competent speakes.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05

924