Linguistics- Language Acquisition - Essay Example

In the sense, they will imitate every aspect and word more like how they observe than what is the exact. While imitating, almost all the children reflect a tendency to make errors, these errors could be explained as general among all children, who may belong to any origin. Some of the common errors or overgeneralizations that could be identified among children are applying the meaning of a universal statement to all exceptions. This is a behavioural mistake realised among all children. For example if “dog is explained in terms of an animal having four legs, and birds in terms of all that flies”, the child will associate all animals with four legs as dogs, and all that flies as birds, including an insect.

The simplest example would be that, children suggesting the past tense of verbs in a generalized way, the past tense of “come” might be guessed as “comed”. As they would have registered their mind according to what they have been taught as rules, “all verbs end with an “ed” while changing to past tense. This might be referred to as one of the simple examples of overgeneralization. From this we could understand that As far language acquisition is concerned, overgeneralizations occur in those who are in the beginning stage of learning, for example children who learns their first language at home, and adults who learn their second or non native language on condition.

It is the stages involved in the process of learning a language by understanding the linguistic and grammatical rules of the particular language. A child learns by distributing the various things that exists and analyse them on the basis of communicative ideas taught by the elders. For example if an elephant is described and explained as huge in size, the child might associate this explanation with any other animal [which it might see in a book]. This is called overgeneralization. As already said language acquisition is the course of learning a language by