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Essay About Language Acquisition

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Although scientists have not discovered all the secrets of first language acquisition, the fact that children are born with the gift for acquiring language is practically undisputed now. However, what happens if the child is deprived of a normal audio environment from the beginning? In order to acquire listening comprehension ability, children need to hear sounds in order to imitate them correctly and then to link the sounds to the object they represent. However, deaf children can still develop a fantastic sense of language through sign language. To store and process language, people rely on the neurological system responsible for processing by the brain. It is a highly sophisticated mechanism that is only possessed by humans. Although …show more content…
Audio environment indicates the language they hear every day, including their parents’ language, and teachers’ language as well as their peers’. Concurrently, age is also related to the time they first enter human society. As Krashen’s (1985) critical period hypothesis claims, there is an ideal time window to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment, after which further language acquisition becomes much more difficult and effortful. Although experts have not agreed on one final verdict as to the exact limits of the critical period so far, it cannot be denied that age plays an important role in language …show more content…
Goto (1971) implemented a hearing test to examine on Japanese adults. Experts gave them sets of words beginning with “r” and “l”, for instance, “right” and “light”, and asked them to choose the words they heard. They found out that accuracy of the answer was 50%, which indicates that the biggest problem with “r” and “l” for Japanese speakers is hearing, rather than pronouncing. They cannot pronounce “r” and “l” correctly due to the fact that they cannot distinguish them clearly in hearing. On the contrary, children are said to be much more sensitive in hearing than adults, and that is one of the reasons why they can pronounce these sounds and others better than

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