language acquisition

The development of language in children.

Second language acquisition (also known as second language learning or sequential language acquisition) refers to the process by which a person learns a "foreign" language--that is, a language other than his or her mother tongue.

See also:

• Applied Linguistics
• Baby Talk
• Chunk
• Diglossia
• First-Person Pronouns
• Interlanguage
• Language Planning
• Lexicon
• Neurolinguistics
• Overregularization
• Poverty of the Stimulus
• Principle of Least Effort
• Structure-Dependency
• Telegraphic Speech

Examples and Observations:

• "For children, acquiring a language is an effortless achievement that occurs:
  
  - without explicit teaching,
  - on the basis of positive evidence (i.e., what they hear),
  - under varying circumstances, and in a limited amount of time,
  - in identical ways across different languages.
  
  . . . Children achieve linguistic milestones in parallel fashion, regardless of the specific language they are exposed to. For example, at about 6-8 months, all children start to babble . . ., that is, to produce repetitive syllables like bababa. At about 10-12 months they speak their first words, and between 20 and 24 months they begin to put words together. It has been shown that children between 2 and 3 years speaking a wide variety of languages use infinitive verbs in main clauses . . . or omit sentential subjects . . ., although the language they are exposed to may not have this option. Across languages young children also over-regularize the past tense or other tenses of irregular verbs. Interestingly, similarities in language acquisition are observed not only across spoken languages, but also between spoken and signed languages."
  (María Teresa Guasti, Language Acquisition: The Growth of Grammar. MIT Press, 2002)



• "At around nine months of age, then, babies start to give their utterances a bit of a beat, reflecting the rhythm of the language they're learning. The utterances of English babies start to sound like 'te-tum-te-tum.' The utterances of French babies start to sound like 'rat-a-tat-a-tat.' And the utterances of Chinese babies start to sound like sing-song. . . . We get the feeling that language is just around the corner.
  
  "This feeling is reinforced by [an]other feature of language . . .: intonation. Intonation is the melody or music of language. It refers to the way the voice rises and falls as we speak."
  (David Crystal, A Little Book of Language. Yale Univ. Press, 2010)