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Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Jerome Seymour Bruner was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law. He received a BA in 1937 from Duke University and a PhD from Harvard University in 1941. He taught and did research at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and New York University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bruner as the 28th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Nicaraguan Sign Language is a form of sign language developed by deaf children in several schools in Nicaragua.
Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning—otherwise referred to as L2acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. This involves learning an additional language after the first language is established, typically through formal instruction or immersion. A central theme in SLA research is that of interlanguage: the idea that the language that learners use is not simply the result of differences between the languages that they already know and the language that they are learning, but a complete language system in its own right, with its own systematic rules. This interlanguage gradually develops as learners are exposed to the targeted language. The order in which learners acquire features of their new language stays remarkably constant, even for learners with different native languages and regardless of whether they have had language instruction. However, languages that learners already know can have a significant influence on the process of learning a new one. This influence is known as language transfer.
In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are "native" or hard-wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to the "blank slate" or tabula rasa view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate beliefs. This factor contributes to the ongoing nature versus nurture dispute, one borne from the current difficulty of reverse engineering the subconscious operations of the brain, especially the human brain.
Brian James MacWhinney is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He specializes in first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and the neurological bases of language, and he has written and edited several books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. MacWhinney is best known for his competition model of language acquisition and for creating the CHILDES and TalkBank corpora. He has also helped to develop a stream of pioneering software programs for creating and running psychological experiments, including PsyScope, an experimental control system for the Macintosh; E-Prime, an experimental control system for the Microsoft Windows platform; and System for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP), a database of scripts for facilitating and improving psychological and linguistic research.
The critical period hypothesis is a theory within the field of linguistics and second language acquisition that claims a person can only achieve native-like fluency in a language before a certain age. It is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to developmental stages of the brain. The critical period hypothesis was first proposed by Montreal neurologist Wilder Penfield and co-author Lamar Roberts in their 1959 book Speech and Brain Mechanisms, and was popularized by Eric Lenneberg in 1967 with Biological Foundations of Language.
Morton Ann Gernsbacher is an American psychologist who is Vilas Research Professor and Sir Frederic Bartlett Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a specialist in autism and psycholinguistics and has written and edited professional and lay books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. She is currently on the advisory board of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest and associate editor for Cognitive Psychology, and she has previously held editorial positions for Memory & Cognition and Language and Cognitive Processes. She was also president of the Association for Psychological Science in 2007.
In linguistics, the innateness hypothesis, also known as the nativist hypothesis, holds that humans are born with at least some knowledge of linguistic structure. On this hypothesis, language acquisition involves filling in the details of an innate blueprint rather than being an entirely inductive process. The hypothesis is one of the cornerstones of generative grammar and related approaches in linguistics. Arguments in favour include the poverty of the stimulus, the universality of language acquisition, as well as experimental studies on learning and learnability. However, these arguments have been criticized, and the hypothesis is widely rejected in other traditions such as usage-based linguistics. The term was coined by Hilary Putnam in reference to the views of Noam Chomsky.
Eleanor M. Saffran, an American neuroscientist, was a researcher in the field of Cognitive Neuropsychology. Her interest in Neuropsychology began at the Baltimore City hospitals of Johns Hopkins University, where her research unit focused on neurological patients with language or cognitive impairments. In papers published between 1976 and 1982, Dr. Saffran spelled out the methodological tenets of “cognitive neuropsychology” exemplified in her studies of aphasia, alexia, auditory verbal agnosia, and short-term memory impairment.
Patricia Katherine Kuhl is a Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. She specializes in language acquisition and the neural bases of language, and she has also conducted research on language development in autism and computer speech recognition. Kuhl currently serves as an associate editor for the journals Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Neuroscience, and Developmental Science.
Seth Pollak is College of Letters and Science Distinguished Professor of Psychology and an Investigator in the Social and Affective Processes Unit of the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He specializes in developmental psychopathology, focusing on the neuropsychology of emotion, particularly the role that early experience plays in the development of brain structure and psychological functioning. Pollak received a B.A. from Franklin and Marshall College, an M.A. from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. He is married to fellow psychologist Jenny Saffran.
Judith F. Kroll is a Distinguished Professor of Language Science at University of California, Irvine. She specializes in psycholinguistics, focusing on second language acquisition and bilingual language processing. With Randi Martin and Suparna Rajaram, Kroll co-founded the organization Women in Cognitive Science in 2001. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Psychological Association (APA), the Psychonomic Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Association for Psychological Science (APS).
Elissa Lee Newport is a professor of neurology and director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University. She specializes in language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on the relationship between language development and language structure, and most recently on the effects of pediatric stroke on the organization and recovery of language.
Richard N. Aslin is an American psychologist. He is currently a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories and professor at Yale University. Until December, 2016, Dr. Aslin was William R. Kenan Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Sciences at the University of Rochester. During his time in Rochester, he was also Director of the Rochester Center for Brain Imaging and the Rochester Baby Lab. He had worked at the university for over thirty years, until he resigned in protest of the university's handling of a sexual harassment complaint about a junior member of his department.
Katherine Nelson was an American developmental psychologist, and professor.
Statistical language acquisition, a branch of developmental psycholinguistics, studies the process by which humans develop the ability to perceive, produce, comprehend, and communicate with natural language in all of its aspects through the use of general learning mechanisms operating on statistical patterns in the linguistic input. Statistical learning acquisition claims that infants' language-learning is based on pattern perception rather than an innate biological grammar. Several statistical elements such as frequency of words, frequent frames, phonotactic patterns and other regularities provide information on language structure and meaning for facilitation of language acquisition.
Statistical learning is the ability for humans and other animals to extract statistical regularities from the world around them to learn about the environment. Although statistical learning is now thought to be a generalized learning mechanism, the phenomenon was first identified in human infant language acquisition.
Judit Kormos is a Hungarian linguist. She is a professor and the Director of Studies for the MA TESOL Distance programme at the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, United Kingdom. She is renowned for her work on motivation in second language learning, and self-regulation in second language writing. Her current interest is in dyslexia in second language learning.
References
- ↑ "Jenny Saffran at the University of Wisconsin-Medison, Weisman Center". Archived from the original on 1 June 2012. Retrieved 5 November 2011.
- ↑ "Publications". Archived from the original on July 20, 2008. Retrieved 19 December 2008.
- ↑ "Saffran-Pollak Wedding Announcement". The New York Times. 5 July 1998. Retrieved 19 December 2008.
