終於把考試題目"順利"寫完了,寫的好不好我並不知道，至少會讓我過吧~~~
其實考試前莫名的緊張，一方面是不相信教授竟然會大大洩題，把整份考卷的題目都給了,另一方面是竟然題目都給了，再考不好簡直是對不起自己也對不起教授。不過考試題目也不簡單，簡答題可以寫的東西好多卻只讓只讓你寫2-3句話，且這短短的兩三句話就價值8分........ 然後教授果然選了一篇我最不想寫的essay題目當作考試題目...... 還好我兩的都有準備不過真的覺得第一題好寫多了.......
還好我整張考卷都寫完了啦，essay也順利寫完，雖然與事先寫好得有些出入，至少該寫的都寫上去了，只希望分數不要給太低啦~~~ 拜託念在我的英文不是第一語言就放過我吧 >
寫essay的過程中，改變了我對人類學語言的想法。現在覺得天生的能力大於後天的學習。 如果我們沒有與生俱來的能力去學語言,那我們的語言能力就只能和鸚鵡或猩猩一樣了。不過我還是相信兩種能力缺一不可,光有天賦而不努力也不會把語言學好的。
Children from birth to 12 months are characteristic as pre-linguistic stage in language acquisition. Although this development stage is being termed “pre-linguistic” stage, the children have the knowledge of pragmatic, semantic and discourses. There are 5 major language developments stages from birth to 3 1/2 years old:
6-8 months children start babbling;
9-18 months they are able to produce one word;
18-24 months they are able to produce mini-sentences with simple semantic relations;
24-30 months they are able to produce “telegraphic” sentences without grammatical
morphemes
30 months and beyond, emerge of the grammatical structure.
I will further describe the production and perception development in children’s language development.
1) Vocalizations in the first year of life
Infant have the ability to produce sound since birth and during the first four months of life, infant vocalizations are mainly expressions of discomfort, along with sounds produced as a by-product of reflexive actions such as sucking. The earliest comfort sounds may be sighs, with later versions being more vowel-like "coos", refer as cooling. During the period of 4-7 months, infants typically engage in "vocal play", manipulating pitch, loudness and also manipulating vocal tract to produce "raspberries" sounds. At about 6 months, "canonical babbling" appears and infants start to make extended sounds into syllable-like sequences. Around 10 – 12 months, repeated sequences are often produced, such as [bababa].And "variegated" sequences in which the characteristics of the consonant-like articulations are varied [bagidabu] also appear in this stage. The variegated sequences are initially rare and become more common later on during this stage of development (10-12 months).
From the study of language of other species, it reveals that no other animal does anything like babbling. It has often been hypothesized that vocal play and babbling have the function of "practicing" speech-like gestures, helping the infant to gain control of the motor systems involved, and to learn the acoustical consequences of different gestures. At birth, the larynx in infant vocal tract is in some ways more like the ape. As the infant grows, the tract gradually reshapes itself and the larynx is located in lower position in comparison with other animals which allow us good to produce speech sound. The distinct feature of babbling and vocal track made us have innate capacity to produce sound.
2) Perception development in language acquisition:
From birth to 4 months, the children have the ability to discriminate categorically all possible sounds (CD). By 6 months, they tend to attenuate vowel, consonant discrimination. During 10-12 months, they increase the ability to discriminate and perceive within native language and decrease the ability to discriminate non-native language. After one year old, they develop the morphological and syntactic knowledge. At about the age of two, children begin to use grammatical elements but they often make constant grammatical errors. By age of 3 1/2, they have the basic language ability of their target languages.
Children under 6 months have innate ability to discriminate phonetic contrasts in both native and nonnative oral phonetic contrasts; however, by 10 to 12 months of age, infants begin to perform like adults and discriminate only their native language phonetic contrasts. More recent study also shows that normal 4 months old children without expose to sign languages are able to discriminate sign language phonetic hand units. The study shows that language can develop through both the hand and the mouth, regardless of modality. Infant are born with the capacity to detect and categorize phonetic unit and they have the ability to learn any natural language, regardless of modality before the decline in discrimination at 14 months of age on sign-phonetic segments and non-native oral language phonetic.
In addition, it is common for children to over-generalize of grammatical rules throughout their language development. For example, mouses instead of mice and Billy hitted me, incorrectly adding the usual past tense suffix –ed to hit. These grammatical errors can not came from the stimuli from the environment because adults usually generally use correct grammar when address to children. This phenomenon should be due to that human have the innate capacity in developing language skills and it is the process that we will all go through in the course of language acquisition. Although the environment stimuli play an important role in language acquisition we can’t not achieve the level of language ability that we have now with out the innate ability to learn language.
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