Acquiring Language

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En provenance du cours de University of California, Santa Cruz

Children Acquiring Literacy Naturally

27 notes

University of California, Santa Cruz

Children Acquiring Literacy Naturally

27 notes

In this short course you will explore the possibility that children might acquire written language in a way that is similar to how they acquire spoken language—without instruction. You will encounter various aspects of behavioral science and technology that are relevant to this proposition. You will have the opportunity to learn the the perceptual, cognitive, and neurological capacities of children during their first years of life. You will advance your understanding of children and how they learn language. You will also be more attuned to current advances in the technology of human machine interactions, and what these phenomena imply for learning to read at an early age.

À partir de la leçon

Week 2 Acquiring Spoken and Written Language

Influences on language learning, iconicity, recognition skills of infants, visual processes in reading, and rapid serial visual processing.

Acquiring Language6:10

Learning Words5:32

Multiple Sources of Information Perspective part 16:55

Multiple Sources of Information Perspective part 25:28

Rencontrer les enseignants

Dr. Dominic William Massaro
Research Professor
Psychology

[MUSIC]

From birth onward, children acquire a spoken language seamlessly when surrounded

by talking caregivers.

Although parents might worry about their baby's health, or paying for

child care, private school, or even college,

they won't usually be concerned with their child's language development.

Most children follow a reasonable trajectory in their language acquisition.

Even so, there are large individual differences in the number of words that

are understood and produced during a child's first few years of life.

No satisfying explanation has been given for these individual differences.

We will discuss however the multiple influences

that contribute to the acquisition of a child's vocabulary.

Does language manifest itself only in spoken language?

Perhaps not.

Tadoma is another method of communication used

by some individuals who are both deaf and blind.

It was named after the first two children to whom it was taught, Tad and Oma.

The Tadoma users place their hands on various parts of the speakers lips and

jaw to track her articulatory movements.

Helen Keller used this method to communicate as can be seen

in her visit with President Eisenhower.

I don't know that anyone has learned tadoma from birth onward without direct

instruction however.

One might argue, in addition, that tadoma is simply tracking the vocal channel,

using a kinesthetic rather than an auditory channel.

As many of you have probably anticipated, sign language offers

a stronger example to show that language is not inevitably tied to speech.

Sign language is a visual-gestural language.

It has been rapidly growing in popularity and is also responsible for

baby signs being used by parents to facilitate dialogue with their babies.

Linguists have shown that sign languages are as rich and

complex as any spoken language.

And they do not necessarily have a visual correspondence through their referent.

That is they are not simply a pictorial language.

Most importantly for our purposes, there are strong evidence that sign

languages are naturally learn from birth without any formal instruction.

Spoken language and sign language can be acquired naturally from birth onward.

On the other hand, it is commonly believed that learning to read must be delayed and

usually requires formal instruction.

Why would such a dramatic difference exist?

It cannot be the modality of discourse.

Yes, it is true that spoken language is auditory and reading is visual.

When born to signing parents however, deaf children acquire sign language at more or

less the same rate and with the same competence as speech.

Evolutionary theories might rationalize the difference in speech and

reading acquisition because speech has an older history than writing.

The age of speech cannot be estimated exactly, but

it is at least 50,000 years old or more.

Whereas writing arrived later, around only 5,000 or 6,000 years ago.

So perhaps ontogeny, development, does recapitulate phylogeny,

its evolutionary history.

But we can counter with drawing a distinction between proximal and

distal causes.

Influences that support current speech and reading acquisition

might not resemble those that led to their original occurrence.

Although it is true that writing, at least in alphabetic orthographies,

is a surrogate of spoken language,

it does not imply that reading must be formally taught

as a system derived from spoken language.

Evidence for

acquiring reading independently of speech would exist if some children,

for example the deaf, would learn to read without learning speech or

if there were synergy in learning speech and reading simultaneously.

Somewhat related, there are impressive observational results of preschool

children who talk late but are able to communicate via

augmentative and alternative communication devices,

which often depend on orthographic indices.

We will emphasize another potential important difference between

speech perception and reading, which can be described by time-on-task.

This variable is a major influence of learning

across all domains that have been studied.

To date,

children have been immersed in spoken from even before birth and certainly after.

This type of immersion does not currently occur for written language.

Thus time-on-task,

a significant determinant of learning, might be responsible for

the discrepancy we now have between speech and reading acquisition.

If time-on-task is the culprit,

how do we implement the necessary time for written language immersion?

[MUSIC]

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