For this Language Instinct update I will review chapter 9: Baby Born Talking-Describes Heaven. At the start of the chapter, he debunks the tabloid style readings of infants born speaking. He takes a developmental approach and investigates what is occurring in the minds of infants when they are first born to the point when they begin speaking. Pinker illustrates infants begin learning sounds throughout their first year. Leading up to this first year, infants begin learning phonemes of their native tongue. During five months to seven months babies begin playing with sounds and articulate the manner of speech. Physiology-wise during this time period before infants each one year, their larynx descends down into the throat and opens the cavity that allows the tongue to move forward and backward, thus creating a wide vary of vowel sounds. By 8 months they begin babbling syllables. After a year the child’s language dooms drastically and builds upon grammatical categories. Moving on, Pinker investigates the types of language obstacles children must overcome. He disagrees with the stereotype that children struggle grammatically and illustrates an study analyzed by psychologist, Karin Stormwold. She wanted to record how many times children would make mistakes that had to do with natural grammatical generalization of sentence patterns. For example, “Does he seem happy?” versus “Does he be smiling?” Astonishingly Karin Stormwold found in grammatical errors in that sense!
Currently, I’m reading chapter 10 Language Organ and Grammar Genes. I hope to get out of this chapter that an in depth look into the brain specially the Broca’s area, where speech has been s[peculated to arise from.
No comments:
Post a Comment