Children and Adult Language Acquisition

Children and adult have a different ability in learning a foreign language. The difference between child and adult ability in learning a foreign language has been researched by some experts and  teachers. What factors are influencing ability in foreign language acquisition? How can a foreign language be acquired fast? And some similar questions about child versus adult language acquisition have been answered by experts in their researches about critical age language learning.

A number of years ago, language teachers and researchers believed in a critical period for language learning (Scovel, 1988). That period was said to end with brain lateralization (early theorists posited age five as the time of lateralization; the theory was later amended to suggest that this occurs during the teenage years).

Brain lateralization refers to the brain’s finalizing the location of the functions that will be accomplished in either the right or left hemisphere – or cross-laterally. Before lateralization, functions can be picked up by the other hemisphere, e.g. speech, which is generally a left-hemisphere function, can be taken over by the right hemisphere when the left is damaged in a young child. After lateralization, this cannot happen. Lateralization is also considered to be responsible for the finalization of the range of sounds that a person can hear or learn and an explanation for why children generally acquire foreign languages without an accent and most adults have a moderate to severe accent when they speak.

Children have also been said to have a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), or “black box,” in their heads (Chomsky, 1998). This LAD is envisioned as an unseen, uncharted part(s) of the brain (or perhaps just a manner of synaptic functioning) that allows children to acquire the structure and words of a language without conscious effort. After childhood, the LAD seems to cease functioning, although the authors have heard of some instances of adults reporting LAD-type activity and at least one of us has experienced it personally as an older adult.

The fact is that in childhood language acquisition, whether a native language or a foreign language, is closely associated with a developing mind (Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek, 2000), whereas adult acquisition of language is associated with a developed mind.

Contrary to these earlier suggestions, the role of age in language acquisition is a very disputed aspect of language learning theory. Some adults have been able to do everything a child does – pronouncewords with a native accent, learn language in context, and the like (Birdsong, 1999; Leaver, 2003a). Moreover, a cognitive advantage has been found for adults – knowing one language and its lexicogrammatical system can sometimes create impediments through its influence on a learner’s expectations of how another language will work, but a good grasp of the systems behind one’s native language can also provide the learner with basic linguistic categories that are useful in learning a second language. Often, too, the learning is faster because of this cognitive advantage (Schleppegrell, 1987).

Reference

Betty Lou Leaver et al. (2005). Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition. New York : Cambridge University Press

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Children versus adults in second language acquisition

It is an accepted fact that the younger the child, the easier it is for them to learn a second language. Children are able to understand words and hear small sound differences that adults often miss -- making understanding more difficult for adults. For example, Polish students of English have difficulty differentiating between vowels such as "pen" and "pan" while German students must learn to hear a difference between the v in "vest" and the w in "west".
Scientists used to believe that the adult brain could not be retrained later in life to distinguish between these sounds: in other words the brain's plasticity (or ability to change) was set.
Dr Iverson shows that adults can retune their brains to hear these differences again. Scientists now believe that the difficulties are caused by our experience which teaches us to ignore certain sounds so that we are able to give our full attention to the sounds that (in our native language) matter most to understanding a sentence.
Two studies jointly worked on by Dr Paul Iverson and Dr Valerie Hazan, UCL's Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, have examined whether it is possible to retune how the brain processes speech sounds, and hope that their findings will help make language learning easier for adults. In one study, Japanese subjects were retrained to hear the difference between r's and l's (something that Japanese students of English tend to find particularly difficult). The study tested 63 native Japanese subjects in Japan and London, and had them complete a 10-session training course. Before and after training, the subjects were given a number of perceptual tests to evaluate their perception of acoustic cues. Similar tests were carried out in London on Sinhalese (from Sri Lanka) and German speakers who had lived in the UK for more than 20 years.
In the Japanese training study, the subjects improved their recognition of l's and r's by an average of 18%. So, for example, if an individual could identify the difference between r and l 60% of the time, at the end of training they would be able to get this correct 78% of the time - supporting the view that the brain can be returned.
Talking at the UCL workshop, which brings together specialists in language, speech and speech perception, Dr Iverson said: "Adult learning does not appear to become difficult because of a change in neural plasticity. Rather, we now think that learning becomes hard because experience with our first language 'warps' perception. We see things through the lens of our native language and that 'warps' the way we see foreign languages.
"It is very difficult to undo this learning. That is, we change our perception during childhood so that it becomes specialized to hear the speech sounds in our first language. This specialization can conflict with our ability to learn to distinguish sounds in other languages. Through training, we can essentially change our 'perceptual warping' to make second-language learning easier. I hope that this research will lead to new ways of training adults to learn second languages."

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Sign Language, Written Language and the Deaf

Name : Martos Alfitri
Psycholinguistics
Sign Language, Written Language and the Deaf
4.1 Soundless Language
How can a soundless language like sign language be acquired? This is one of issues which are of great practical importance for deaf people in terms of communication and education.
4.2 Language without Speech
People usually use language for communication. But that’s not everybody can speech like a deaf and dumb person. They use sign language for communication. Actually not everybody understands sign language. Such in the corner of our TV screen, we can see a person translating speech into sign for the deaf and dumb viewers. And the normal viewers don’t understand those signs. Language is for convey information. Even though only a partly person use sign language but it’s very useful for the deaf and the dumb persons. According to the language criterion not only can a fluent signer of a complete sign language whatever that speaker can say, but signer communicate at the same speed as a speaker does. The speed at which signers produce sentences in a sign conversation tends to be the same at which speakers produce sentences in a speech conversation. According to research in several country that a person who could produce and understand communication even though they are through sign rather speech, surely can reasonably said to have language. So, sign language is involved to language.
4.3 Gestures and Signs
4.3.1 Gestures without Speech
People use a variety of body movements to convey messages. Most of these movements, called gestures mainly involve the face and hands although the posture of the body is important as well we use gestures to communicate a variety of types of messages. For example:
- greetings (hello, good by – by moving the hands and arms)
- insults (the sticking out of the tongue by children, the raising of the middle finger by adults)
- answering (yes, no, I don’t know – by moving the head) etc.
Some gestures are almost universal, such as the moving of the hand or arm towards the body to indicate “come”, and we can see to another nation, like: America, Srilanka, Japanese, French, etc.
Facial movements, in particular, are used everywhere to express a wide range of emotions and feelings. We don’t need actually to litter the words ‘I am……… (Happy, surprised, disgusted, disappointed, excited, angry, etc)
In examining gestures, it becomes obvious that some gestures are more related to or suggest the ideas that they are intended to represent than are others. The hand and arm gesture for “come”, pointing to your own body for “self” or a smile gesture for “Friendliness”. These kinds of gestures having a close relationship between gesture and meaning are called “iconic” gesture, such as shaking of hands to signify agreement in the closing of a business deal.
Beside general gestures used in a culture, there are also restricted gestures which are known and used by small groups. For example:
- Stock trading: As have all seen pictures of stocks being bought and sold on the floor of an exchange.
- Betting: At a race track in Britain, we might see a man putting one right finger in his left ear.
- Music: Symphony conduction often pulls the palm back towards the body to request less volume from orchestra.
- Sports: Referees and judges use elaborate hand and arm gesture to indicate the state of play and the assignment of points and penalties.
- Television: If we were an announcer presenting the news, the person in charge drew his or her index finger across the throat.
4.3.2. Gestures with Speech
Despite the great number of gestures which are available for use. It’s clear that most of the gesturing that people engage in when they communicate is coordinated with speech. A good example of the catter is “beat” where one’s hand or finger is kept in motion and is synchronized with what a person is saying.
Beats are constant in form and don’t change with the content of the sentences. In making beats, people will move their hands up and down or back and forth. The purpose of beats, according to Mc. Neill in lies insightful analysis of gesture is basically to emphasize the discourse function to concurrent speech.
The use of beat however is more pronounced in some cultures than in others making note of what people do when they talk. Such as their production of icon beat gestures that they make can be a very interesting past time.
4.4 Sign Languages
4.4.1 Types of Sign Languages
Principally, there are two types of sign language and these differ as to whether or not the signs represent ordinary (speech-based) languages. Thus, there are sign languages which represent the words (through signs) and their order as they appear in ordinary languages.
4.4.2 Sign Languages Representing Spelling or Speech
A sign language (also signed language) is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns (manual communication, body language and lip patterns) to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's thoughts. Sign languages commonly develop in deaf communities, which can include interpreters, friends and families of deaf people as well as people who are deaf or hard of hearing themselves.
A common misconception is that sign languages are somehow dependent on oral languages, that is, that they are oral language spelled out in gesture, or that they were invented by hearing people. Hearing teachers in deaf schools, such as Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, are often incorrectly referred to as “inventors” of sign language
There are both one-and two-hand systems of finger spelling. The Americans and Swedes, for example, use one hand, while the British use two. The two-handed system is faster and provides more easily identifiable letters but it does not allow a hand free for other uses.
Signing Ordinary Language (SOL) system has certain important advantages for the learner. By learning it, not only will the person be able to communicate with other hearing-impaired persons (who know the system) but the learner will have knowledge of the syntax and vocabulary of the ordinary language as well. The ordinary language would then not have to be learned as a remote second language (as far as vocabulary and syntax is concerned) by persons whose native language is an independent sign language. For the same reason, too, learning to read will not be as difficult.
4.4.3 Independent Sign Language (SL)
Three basic components of SL:
1. Hand Configuration, how the hand is formed;
2. Place of articulation, where the hand is formed;
3. Movement, how the hand moves.
SL has syntactic rules too. SL sentences are radically different with languages such as Signing Exact English. SL sentences are not linear sequences but three-dimensional creations. Such a space allows for combinations of meanings and the simultaneous blending of a number of meaning elements that cannot be produced quickly and with a minimum of effort.
4.5 The Sign Language Struggle in Deaf Education
4.5.1 SL out of the Closet and Into Respectability
In the 1970s the proponents of SL began to succeed. Soon SL was actively taught in a large number of schools for the deaf in the US, Sweden, and other countries. The SL deaf community came out of the closet, so to speak. Signers began to gain confidence and pride and to communicate such feelings to the public at large. SL has become so widespread that most people in the deaf community in the United States and Canada now use ASL in communicating with one another. SL allows them to communicate in a highly efficient way with a means that is most congenial to them.
4.6 The Oral Approach
The Oral Approach has a worthy aim, to teach the hearing-impaired to produce and understand speech so that they can communicate with the hearing community. Unfortunately, historically, its supporters, who controlled education in the schools, advocated the use of speech to the exclusion of any other means of communication.
The Oral Approach focuses on the teaching of speech production. A great problem with the Oral Approach is that it tends only to work for a portion of the hearing-impaired population.
4.7 The Written Language Approach
4.7.1 The Importance of Literacy and Essentials of the Approach
Since the hearing-impaired person’s knowledge of speech-based language is usually quite limited, the ability of that person to acquire literacy based on that knowledge is similarly limited. It is not surprising that we find that most hearing-impaired people are able to secure only low-level jobs, when they are able to secure jobs at all. A high level of literacy is essential if the hearing-impaired are to realize their potential. The essential idea of this approach is that the meaningful written forms of an ordinary speech-based language such as English or Spanish (its words, phrases and sentences) are acquired through direct association with objects, events and situations in the environment.
4.7.2 Historical Perspectives
Alexander Graham Bell had taught written language to a 5 years old deaf boy with some success and those 200 years before him a thinker by the name of Dalgarno had, in 1680, formulated the same approach at Oxford.
4.7.3 Written Language and Reading Distinguished
The main difference is that written language is learned directly from the environment without the use of any prior linguistic medium, such as sign language or speech. Reading, by contrast, is learned through a linguistic medium.
4.7.4 Assessment of the Written Language Approach
There are a number of distinct advantages to the Written Language Approach:
1. The learning medium is appropriate;
2. Written language knowledge need not be acquired by the instructors;
3. Instruction can begin early;
4. All hearing-impaired children can benefit;
5. Written language acquisition is compatible with other approaches;
6. Written language knowledge can facilitate speech;
7. Written language can raise intellectuality.
4.8 A Parting Note on Deaf Education
A number of different approaches to deaf education have been discussed. Sign Language, the Oral Approach, Total Communication, and the Written Language Approach. The hearing-impaired would benefit by the application of all of these approaches. While some approaches may be more beneficial than others, depending on the degree of hearing loss, it is a matter of justice that every hearing-impaired person should be given the opportunity to expand their linguistic skills through each and every one of them.

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