COG - Components of Language and Language Acquistion Lesson
Learning Targets:
- Synthesize how biological, cognitive, and cultural factors converge to facilitate the acquisition, development, and use of language.
- Debated the appropriate testing practices, particularly in relation to culture-fair test uses.
AP psychology course and exam description, effective fall 2020. (n.d.). https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap-psychology-course-and-exam-description.pdf
Language
Language is the most tangible indication of our thinking power and one of the most amazing of all our cognitive abilities. It is a means of communication in which we combine arbitrary symbols to produce meaningful statements. American linguist Noam Chomsky called it our "human essence". It is what sets us above all others and allows us to share and express meaningful information.
Language can be flexible, versatile, and complex. It is created using symbols. Symbols are sounds, written words, or gestures. Due to the arbitrary nature of the connection between a symbol and its meaning, language is extremely flexible. The meaning of symbols is shared by those who speak a common language, thus making foreign languages sound meaningless and bizarre because we do not share a connection between sound and meaning.
All languages contain certain elements and rules. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language. There are 869 phonemes in human speech. Morphemes are the smallest unit of meaningful sound. They can be words such as "a" or parts of words such as the prefix or suffix. Grammar describes the system of rules in a language that enables us to communicate and understand each other. Semantics are the rules of a given language. Syntax describes the order of words in a particular language. We are unaware of these rules until they are violated.
Language Acquisition
Language acquisition refers to the process by which humans learn or acquire language and the ability to both produce and comprehend words and sentences to communicate. There are three stages in which we learn language and several proposed theories to explain how it is acquired.
Stages of Language:
- Babbling Stage - Develops around 1-3 months and is characterized by spontaneous sounds. Babies create sounds from all languages. By about 10 months these sounds have been narrowed down to those of the language of the house.
- Holophrastic Stage - Around 1-year children begin to use one word to identify objects. At this stage, family members can understand them.
- Telegraphic Speech - Around 2 years children enter the two-word stage and begin to use nouns and verbs to communicate. At this point, they are functionally deaf to sounds outside their language.
Take a moment to watch this short video explaining the theories of the initial stages of language acquisition.
Do Animals Think? 
Without question, animals can communicate. Numerous examples can be seen in the wild, especially when animals are communicating warnings of impending dangers. Studies have found that the closer the animal is to a human the greater the language capabilities. Psychologist Wolfgang Kohler found that chimpanzees could develop language skills on par with that of a 2-year-old human.
Karl von Frisch discovered that the Western honeybee communicates distance, location, and quality of pollen sources by performing a little dance known as the "waggle dance". The language revealed in these dance sessions showed that the bee covers more distance in the summer than in other months of the year.
[CC BY 4.0] UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED | IMAGES: LICENSED AND USED ACCORDING TO TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION