Language acquisition is a complicated concept that many scientists have been trying to understand for years. It is known that humans are the only animals to develop a vocalized form of language. However chimpanzees have proved to be capable of not only learning a language but then teaching it to other chimpanzees. The language they mastered was not a spoken language but American Sign Language and what does it mean that these animals can also master language? This paper will examine the biological aspect of language acquisition, the role of a critical or sensitive period, theories relating to the acquisition of a second language, and differences in teaching and learning a visual language as compared to a spoken language.
[...] That said, it is important that the focus instructors teaching second languages that they do much of the work out loud rather than reading and listening. This lag in the formation of the words makes sense as one can often understand a question being asked but forming the answer presents as much more challenging. What then, should instructors teaching a visual language focus on? Works Cited Almgren, Margareta, and Andoni Barrena. "The Development of Future Morphology in Spanish and Basque by Monolingual and Bilingual Children." Cognitiva (2005): 127-142. [...]
[...] There are many theories in the realm of language acquisition and specifically what it takes to learn a second language. These theories are as multifaceted as the issue itself so one must be careful to consider the whole picture and not just specific aspects of a particular theory. The theories that will be showcased here are unique because they examine specifically how people are capable of learning two languages at once. This is an interesting model to consider because it is based on children learning the two languages. [...]
[...] Many people struggle with learning a second language whether it's visual or spoken and many teachers and professors would like to be able to help them to learn. Further research specifically geared towards teachers wishing to help their students learn faster and better has revealed that much of the trouble people have with learning a second language later in life is with forming the individual words and not with understanding their meaning. This implicates Broca's Area which also works very closely with Wernicke 's area. [...]
[...] These mixed language utterances occur when a word in a sentence of one language is replaced with the corresponding word from the child's other language. The Single System Hypothesis was widely accepted as true until the late 1980's when researchers started to agree with a different hypothesis. The challenging hypothesis to the Single System is the Autonomy Hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that children separate their two language systems early on, and learn them autonomously as two separate systems. This theory is now accepted as true by many researchers, although they are still many questions surrounding it. [...]
[...] She suggests that cross-linguistic influence occurs in unbalanced children when the stronger language would be beneficial to the acquisition of the other language's grammatical domain. This would explain why the child who was dominant in German showed no cross-linguistic influence, because German is not beneficial to the acquisition of Italian determiners. Due to the appearance of cross-linguistic influence, Kupisch finds that these results favor the Single System Hypothesis. observational data on article use appear to falsify the hypothesis that bilingual learners have two autonomous grammatical systems” (Kupisch, 76). [...]
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