Language Development in Animals and Humans - Research Paper Example

Language Development in Humans and Animals Language development from psychological point of view explains the process and features of language acquisition. Modern science explains that a human being is different from other species of the animal world and is unique because it is the only creature able to speak the language and use it for communication purpose. The theoretical basis and practical results of the studies and research on this matter are very beneficial for the humanity because it allows for understanding the way the language is acquired and by means of this to teach and learn foreign languages and correct the possible errors of the mother tongue. Language acquisition presupposes development of four key language skills: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. According to the today’s psychological theories, the native language (together with the second one, in case of bilingualism) is developed completely in the years of childhood, while foreign languages are mastered during the entire lifetime. Language Development in Humans and Animals This research paper will investigate into language development from the point of view of psychological science and will concern the theory of language formulating in animals. Research Purpose: The development of language in humans is important to study because of practical reasons, such as languages studying and teaching and increasing of efficiency of these processes, and from the theoretical perspective to understand why this phenomenon is observed only in human beings and how it distinguishes a human being from other species of the animal world. Research Method: The method of research which will be used in this article is analysis of the information from the academic journal articles related to the topic of the present research paper. Results Use of the above mentioned research method makes it possible to give the results of the literature studying in terms of language development from psychological point of view. To better understand the results of the studies it is necessary to give short definitions of general concepts, such as language and language development. Definitions It is possible to give such definition of a language: “an organized system of arbitrary signals and rule-governed structures that are used as a means for communication”. (Brandone, Salkind, Hirsh-Pasek 2006). Everyday life of modern society is impossible without language, because it is necessary to exchange information in order to support functioning of each its element, a human being: by means of language people receive important information, such as dates of certain events, different timetables, working schedules and many other pieces of information which regulate and influence their activity. Language can also be used for transmitting of information without direct communication of its speakers, for example, by means of advertisements, commercials or other means of external information placement. Language acquisition means the process of acquisition by a human being capacity of perception and understanding of the language, and own producing and use of the words and the sentences for the purpose of communication. (Friederici 2011). The History of Language Development Taking into account a long process of evolution it is possible to observe a lot of significant qualitative changes in human’s language. As far as it is known, one of the most common activities of the ancient people was hunting with the help of which they could secure their living. The circumstances of the hunting made the first people move faster and act together, which led to necessity of communication with each other, initially by means of simple gestures and signs and later on with simple sounds. These simple sounds later on received further development and became the ground for formulating primitive words. As the number of household items and tools was increasing they had to receive their names and the number of words consequently increased as well. The variety of such tools was the evidence of the early people’s creativity which caused the major changes in their language. Later on humans needed more communication due to new activities such as viticulture and beekeeping. Although the early community was primitive one, it still had its functions and purposes and the common activity of people played the main role in the developing of their language. (Palmer 2009). In the age of antiquity it is possible to notice changes in people’s perception of the world. Different works of literary art reached modern times where the various myths took place. Such myths can tell about ancient people’s believes and fears, the way how they managed to explain the natural phenomena and even the sense of living. In this stage the paganism was their leading religion and they supported every action with the praise of the gods. Obviously, there was lack of knowledge but it did not restrain their desire for cognition. About in the Middle Ages the language received almost modern features: it became more complex, appeared new steady grammar and phonetic rules. A great role in the language development played art because it is closely connected with the culture, and these features were brightly present in the age of Renaissance. Further development of all the spheres of human’s activity influenced the language, and expansion of international relations gave a push for such phenomenon as borrowing of the words – when a certain thing emerged in one linguistic environment, it often kept its original name in other language in some modified way. The language keeps developing and improving today as well, and this proves that it is a dynamically developing structure with quantitative and qualitative changes. Stages of Language Acquisition Modern science states that language is perceived and understood yet by an embryo in its mother’s womb, that is, hearing the words and sentences pronounced by the surrounding people a developing human being understands them and develops its language capacity. (Brandone, Salkind, Hirsh-Pasek 2006). Psychology provides a point of view at the embryo’s memory as that one capable of remembering the language units, and this fact is used practically: when a pregnant woman studies foreign languages, it will be easier for her child to study them later. Taking this peculiarity of memory into consideration, many prospective parents practice reading fairytales to a future child when he or she is still not born. This makes the child used to hear the speech and to perceive the language rules and expand vocabulary. “The growing fetus can hear a number of sounds generated both inside and outside of the mother’s abdomen. As a result of these experiences, infants at birth are already familiar with some of the phonology of their language, including its intonational patterns and prosodic contours” (Brandone, Salkind, Hirsh-Pasek 2006). When a child is born, it already possesses the language peculiar to it only. The child can produce its own noises, the basis for the sounds, such as laughing and cooing. The intonation which the child uses to transfer its emotions with already allows for understanding the child’s mood. At four months, the child starts manipulating its vocal apparatus within the process of the vocal play, and the initially produced noises change their nature. The age of six-seven months is characterized by such significant event as change of the noise sound into the ones similar to the original language sounds, and this phenomenon is called babbling. (Brandone, Salkind, Hirsh-Pasek 2006). This language development feature coincides in time with development of new movements and discovers new places, the child can get a thing which he or she likes, and the success the child reaches by doing this is expressed by the appropriate sounds produced by the child. The supporters of early education use this fact and start teaching their six-month-old children to read by means of cards with words written on them. The age of 9-12 months is the period of final stage of pre-linguistic vocalization, or the jargon stage, and the jargon “consists of strings of sounds and syllables produced with the rich variety of stress and intonation that mimic the sounds of adult speech”. (Brandone, Salkind, Hirsh-Pasek 2006). The children of this age understand near fifty words, including the names of relatives and familiar people, repeating actions and the household items. It is useful to ask an infant to bring or to put his or her favorite toy, to show the parts of the body or to point out something in the picture. The micro-sensoric training with the help of various playing aids facilitates further language skills development with the children. By eighteen months the children’s vocabulary expands, in this age they can use two-word sentences which have the nature of a request or a fact statement. In this age infants become interested in watching cartoons, but still the psychologists state that them do not stimulate the language of the children, moreover spending a lot of time near the TV-set influence their psyche negatively, that is why they recommend to limit the time of watching the cartoons, and it is preferable for parents to comment what goes on on the screen. The psychologists distinguish the crisis of the first year and the second year of life, and the latter has more expressed features. By this age the child learns to cope with his or her body, to perform certain actions and to play simple games. In spite of great success reached by him or her, he or she still loses patience in case of the least misfortune. Being rather egoistic he or she does not accept failures and it is rather difficult to prove him or her something, but it is necessary for parents to make their statement clear and never change their position. The period of two years is the most appropriate for developing games. The main aims are to learn shapes of the objects, their colors and the actins with these objects. For this purpose special toys called “sorters” exist, which have not only entertaining, but also didactic features. They can also stimulate independent activity which increases the memory and help a child to evaluate his actions. During the period of two years the child also learns to make comparisons: small-big, fast-slow, wet-dry. It is high time to use questions in his speech so that a mini-dialog with his parents took place. It is a new stage in developing of the language, because an infant becomes an active participant of a conversation. The size of vocabulary is near two-hundred words. (Brandone, Salkind, Hirsh-Pasek 2006). At the age of three years the child already understands basic terms of space, such as in, under, on, above and so on. After half a year, at forty-two months, the child starts understanding semantic relations between such conjoined and adjacent sentences as temporal, additive, contrastive, causal. Basic words of colors are also comprehended at this stage, along with the basic terms of kinship. Between three and a half and four years, understanding of the questions “how” and “when” occurs, the child is already capable of using conjunctions “because” and “and”. This period is also characterized by distinguishing the shapes and use of appropriate words – triangle, square, circle, and basic vocabulary use – such words as small and big. The age of 4-5 years is the period when the child knows the names of the sounds, letters and numbers and is capable of counting, and use of more conjunctions, such as if, when, because, so. Between the ages five and seven years the lexical knowledge of the child reorganizes to semantic networks from those episodic ones, and the average size of expressive vocabulary reaches approximately five thousand words. (Brandone, Salkind, Hirsh-Pasek 2006). When the child goes to school, namely between seven and nine years, the child encounters new words which he or she has not heard and used in usual conversation. At this stage use of pronouns instead of nouns occurs, the definitions of the word expands to categories and synonyms, it is already understood by the child that some words can have more than one meaning, and there is an increase for figurative language production. (Brandone, Salkind, Hirsh-Pasek 2006). The period of nine-twelve years brings in more abstract vocabulary in the texts taught at school, and it is expected that the students acquire more new knowledge and information from the texts. The student is already able to explain relation between the meanings of the words which have many meanings. At this stage the idioms that are considered to be the most common ones are understood and use of adverbial conjunctions is started. (Brandone, Salkind, Hirsh-Pasek 2006). The period of twelve-fourteen years is characterized by wide use of abstract meanings of the words, and the student is already able to explain what meanings the contextual proverbs have. Fifteen to eighteen years make the student and the graduate of high school possess the average size of vocabulary of ten thousand words. (Brandone, Salkind, Hirsh-Pasek 2006). The theoretical framework of language development study from psychological point of view includes also such theories as behaviorist theory, nativist theory, and empiricist theory. The behaviorist theory is primarily a psychological one, founded by J. B. Watson, concerning itself with the native language learning. According to it, “the babies obtain native language habits via varied babblings which resemble the appropriate words repeated by a person or object near him. Since for his babblings and mutterings he is rewarded, this very reward reinforces further articulations of the same sort into grouping of syllables and words in a similar situation”. (Demirezen, 1988). The nativist theory developed by Noam Chomsky has it that the mind of the human being composes the basis of the language structure that is determined biologically and is transmitted genetically. (Chomsky 1959). This theory contradicts with the behaviorist one and argues that the language acquisition is based on the model of stimuli and response. The empiricist theory states that the child should have an environment created by the parents of the persons giving care in order to receive complete information and learn the language. Experiments on language perception by primates demonstrate that not only a human being possesses the feature of language, and that the primates use a complicated system of signals such as gestures, sounds and face expressions. The “Lana” project investigated into the matter of the apes’ language and explored capability of primates to perceive the language. (Rumbaugh, Fields, Taglialatela 2000). The project was aimed at investigation into the matter whether the primates can create sentences based on the material studied prior to the experiment. It was studied that it was difficult for the chimpanzee to compose sentences from lexigrams – images with words, but it understood everything that was told to it by these lexigrams. The chimpanzee also used her communicative skills only when it wanted something, and it was necessary to use unusual techniques to make her respond to the challenges of the experiment, for example, to hide food in different rooms or placing it to wrong locations. When performing the assignment with the sentences combining, it took the chimpanzee from 5 to 15 efforts to create a correct sentence out of the set of words. (Rumbaugh, Fields, Taglialatela 2000). This evidences that the primates possess the basic principles of communication by means of language, and it is possible to suppose that they have their own language, provided that the meaning of the word language is not limited by its traditional sense – words, grammar, sounds. Discussion Studying of the reference literature from academic journals results in statements that the human language is acquired by the human being from the very beginning of the life in the mother’s womb, when an embryo is capable of perception and understanding the language heard from the surrounding people, and till the beginning of the adulthood, that is, till the age of eighteen years. There are different theories of language acquisition each having their strong and weak points, but the generally used today’s periodization of the process is similarly to completely reflect the problems and issues of the language development and acquisition. The primates, according to the recent and previous researches, possess their own complicated signal system similar to the language provided that under the word language namely a system and means of communication is meant. The problem is that experiments do not always demonstrate clear results due to difficulties while finding approach to them from the human’s side to complete the experimental tasks. The future direction of the research of the language acquisition by the human beings may be directed at practical matters of the speech, for example, speech defects and mastering of the foreign languages, and the research of primates language can be directed at understanding their communication and principles of their language. Limitations The findings of the research are limited to the part of the language of the primates, as there is no clear system of interaction between those people who conduct the experiments and the primates examined, and the future development of such system would facilitate understanding of the parties of the experiment and give acceptable results in terms of the primates language research. Conclusion The research concluded that the human being starts acquisition of the language since the moment of the life beginning in the womb and continues doing this till the beginning of the adult age. The study of language acquisition is beneficial from practical perspective as it helps to use progressive methods of language acquisition and to apply them while studying other languages. It is also concluded that the primates have their own communication system which can also be considered as their language due to the same purpose, communication, and the complicated structure. References Brandone, A., Salkind, S., Hirsh-Pasek, L. (2006). Language Development. Childrens needs III: Development, prevention, and intervention, 499-514. Chomsky, N. (1959). A Review of B. F. Skinners Verbal Behavior. Language, 35 (1), 26-58 Demirezen, M. (1988). Behaviorist Theory and Language Learning. Hacettepe Üniversitesi Egilim Fakültesi Dergisi, 3, 135-140. Friederici, A. (2011). The Brain Basis of Language Processing: From Structure to Function. Physiological Reviews, 91 (4), 1357-1392. Palmer, K. (2009). Understanding Human Language: An In-Depth Exploration of the Human Facility for Language. Student Pulse, 1(12), 1-5. Rumbaugh, S., Fields, W., Taglialatela, J. (2000). Ape Consciousness–Human Consciousness: A Perspective Informed by Language and Culture. Integrative and Comparative Biology, 40 (6), 910-921. Read More