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Week 1-What Is Language

Children develop language abilities in their first year through learning speech sounds, word meanings, and grammar rules by communicating with others. Language is a uniquely human learned system of symbols that allows for flexible, evolving communication through speech, writing and gestures to express thoughts, needs, and culture. The four elements of language are phonology (sounds), semantics (meaning of words), grammar (structure rules), and pragmatics (effective communication). Infants begin distinguishing speech sounds from birth and recognizing words through interactions with adults.

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249 views

Week 1-What Is Language

Children develop language abilities in their first year through learning speech sounds, word meanings, and grammar rules by communicating with others. Language is a uniquely human learned system of symbols that allows for flexible, evolving communication through speech, writing and gestures to express thoughts, needs, and culture. The four elements of language are phonology (sounds), semantics (meaning of words), grammar (structure rules), and pragmatics (effective communication). Infants begin distinguishing speech sounds from birth and recognizing words through interactions with adults.

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Mesut Deniz

What is language? How do children develop their language ability? How do children learn the meaning
of words?
Infants begin making sounds at birth. They cry, coo, and laughbut in the first year they dont really do
much talking. Children must learn to hear the differences in speech sounds and how to produce them; they
must learn the meaning of words and rules for combining them into sentences and they must learn
effective ways to talk with others.
It could be argued that infants DO communicate with others, but do not have language.
Think about your languagemaybe you even speak more than one! What makes a language?
What is Language?
Language is far too complicated, intriguing, and mysterious to be adequately explained by a brief
definition. We use language to express inner thoughts and emotions, make sense of complex and abstract
thought, to learn to communicate with others, to fulfill our wants and needs, as well as to establish rules
and maintain our culture. This is a broad conceptlanguage is a system that relates sounds or gestures to
meaning. Language is expressed through speech, writing and gesture. Is it only human being in this
capability?
Many animal and even plant species communicate with each other. Humans are not unique in this
capability. However, human language is unique in being a symbolic communication system that is
learned instead of biologically inherited. Symbols are sounds or things which have meaning given to
them by the users.
A major advantage of human language being a learned symbolic communication system is that it is
infinitely flexible. Meanings can be changed and new symbols created. This is evidenced by the fact that
new words are invented daily and the meaning of old ones change. For example, the English word "nice"
now generally means pleasing, agreeable, polite, and kind. In the15th century it meant foolish, wanton,
lascivious, and even wicked. Languages evolve in response to changing historical and social conditions.
Some language transformations typically occur in a generation or less. For instance, the slang words used
by your parents were very likely different from those that you use today. You also probably are familiar
with many technical terms, such as "text messaging" and "high definition TV", that were not in general
use even a decade ago.

There are four distinct elements of language:


Phonology refers to the sounds of a language.

Semantics is the study of words and their meaning.


Grammar refers to the rules used to describe the structure of a language.
Which involves syntax or rules that specify how words are combined to form sentences?
Pragmatics is the study of how people use language to communicate effectively.

Phonemes, the basic building blocks of language


The unique sounds that can be joined to create words
The sound of p in pin, pet, and pat.
The sound of b in bed, bat, and bird.
Infants can distinguish many of these sounds, some of them as early as 1 month after birth
Can discriminate sounds they have never heard before such as phonemes from a foreign language.
The language environment for infants is not solely auditory. Much language exposure comes from faceto-face interaction with adults
Infants use many tools to identity words in speech. They dont understand the meaning of the word yet,
but they can recognize a word as a distinct configuration of sounds.
Parents and adults help infants master language sounds by talking in a distinctive style.
Think on your own

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