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empty elements

It is known from early work on phrase structure grammar that grammars with empty elements can be converted into equivalent grammars without empty elements. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and M. Perles and E. Shamir, 1961, On Formal Properties of Simple Phrase-Structure Grammars. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung. 14 (2):143-172. However grammars without empty elements cannot express things linguists want to express in a satisfying way. In the introductionary textbook on HPSG by Sag, Wasow, Bender [1] an empty head is suggested for the analysis of copulaless sentences in African American Vernacular English. Emily Bender argued at length in her dissertation that the empty copula is the only way to capture the facts in a non-stipulative manner. You may also read my paper about empty elements and surface-based syntax at [2]. In any case the claim that HPSG does not use empty elements is wrong. The analogon to movement is a mechanism that handles unbounded dependencies. I guess every theory needs something like that.

Stefan Müller, November, 5th, 2005

References missing, needed, or incomplete

  • In there are significant studies in biogenetics there's no reference/source mentioned.

stages of acquistion?

This article could really use some content on the stages children go through in L1 acq. (babbling, 1-word, 2-word, telegraphic, full language). Roy Allahades 06:10, 12 Oct 2005


rename the article ?

L1 and L2 acquisition are related however-- just look at the morpheme acquisition studies that have been done for English as both an L1 and an L2.

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=acquisition+orders+in+l2&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Instead of breaking this into two articles, we need to add a section discussing differences in L2 acquisition (and linking to the stub on Interlanguage. Roy Allahades 06:00, 12 Oct 2005


In my experience, this field has been and is called "Child's Acquisition of Language" to distinguish it from, say, adults learning a second language.

There are 3 very closely-related ideas here: "learning a second language", "initial acquisition of language by children from adults", and "how did all these languages get started ?" (Origin of language). They are all kinds of language acquisition. How do we avoid repeating much of the same stuff in 3 different articles ? --DavidCary 02:19, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Should language development be separate from this? If not, should this be renamed to cover both the acquisition and the subsequent development, and also the development of languages other than the first? Angela. 05:35, 30 Dec 2003 (UTC)

(has this already been merged ?)

When I have studied linguistics, the term that I've encountered most often is first language acquisition (to make the difference between it and second language acquisition).

other discussion

I'm terribly sorry if I've made a good deal of errors with this entry! I'm new to Wikipedia and still trying to get a better idea of what needs to be done.-Devotchka


The most popular opinion is that language acquisition results from both nurture and nature. This theory was introduced by Noam Chomsky.

The two sentences don't work for me. The first doesn't really say anything, and the second is too broad, I think. I'll try to reword them better; please check that I don't totally change what you were trying to say.---- Then welcome and relax. You are only making the same kind of mistakes almost all of us have as beginners. RoseParks

just a thought: nature and nurture are the two opposing views. nature (i.e. the innateness hypothesis) was proposed by Chomsky, while the nurture approach (i.e. language is acquired by general learning mechanisms) was introduced by people like Piaget. so saying that "this theory" was introduced by Chomsky is a bit misleading, since he really is a defender of the nature approach only. AK

Argument from the Poverty of Stimulus

The characterisation of the Argument from the Poverty of Stimulus is just plain wrong. Chomsky and others have made it clear that it's not about *degraded* input (incomplete or ungrammatical utterances) but about grammatical phenomena that cannot in principle be learned on the basis of positive data alone. To reduce it to degraded input sets up a straw man and misleads people. This needs to be thought through. I recommend the article on the APS in Kasher's volume _The Chomskyan Turn_ as a very good explanation of the argument and its role in Chomsky's view of first language acquisition.

The poverty of stimulus however is not a fact and has not been proven. Also, there is in fact a wealth of negative data in the speech environment, a few examples:
  • Self-corrections are stunningly common, see conversation analysis.
  • The hearers failure to understand what the child must be assuming to be a well-formed output is another form of negative data.
--AkselGerner (talk) 21:16, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

What has this to do with the observation that the presentation of the APS is misleading? No allusion is made to the truth of the theory, rather to the quality of the article.

etc.

Statistical methods for studies on first language acquisition http://www.biostat.sdu.dk/~wv/firstlanguage.html

nine stages of Second Language Learning http://www.bankstreet.edu/literacyguide/ellstages.html

Assisting English as a Second Language (E.S.L.) Students http://www.sasked.gov.sk.ca/docs/kindergarten/kindlang.html

"Thinking before you speak" "Researchers have found that five-month-old babies can comprehend concepts for which they have not yet learned words, thus answering the age-old question: Which comes first, an idea or the language to express it?" http://www.mirabilis.ca/archives/001977.html http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1091139009712&call_pageid=968867505381&col=969048872038


"Dogs Similar to Children When Learning Language." http://www.mirabilis.ca/archives/001812.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31130-2004Jun10.html

Language acquisition How did you learn to speak your native language? http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/rbeard/acquisition.html


Proposed Experiment in Concretized Learning by Win Wenger http://winwenger.com/part51.htm

"First Language Acquisition" http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test4materials/ChildLangAcquisition.htm

Huge Wall of Text

This article needs to be broken up into sections TheCoffee 13:11, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Clarification required I think

I have some problems with the following paragraph

However, a powerful argument against Chomskian views of language acquisistion lies in Chomskian theory itself. The theory has several hypothetical constructs, such as movement, empty categories, complex underlying structures, and strict binary branching, that cannot possibly be acquired from any amount of input. Since the theory is, in essence, unlearnably complex, then it must be innate. A different theory of language, however, may yield different conclusions. While all theories of language acquisition posit some degree of innateness, a less convoluted theory might involve less innate structure and more learning. Under such a theory of grammar, the input, combined with both general and language-specific learning capacities, might be sufficient for acquisition.

As written it doesn't explain much. If the theory of language (grammar etc) that Chomsky presents is not learnable on the input alone, then this isn't at all a powerful argument against his theory of language acquisition: it's rather the opposite, if that is his theory of language is true. Does the contributor mean that if there is a "wholemeal" theory of grammar (without inaudibilia etc) that this could be learned on the input alone without the appeal to any language specific mental devices? That is plausibly true. If for example the binding theory is not necessary to explain the distributional constraints on referring expressions and corerential expressions then the binding theory loses any power it has to motivate the assumption of an innate language faculty.

I can see that this would be worth stating in the article somewhere (though the article is in danger of becoming Chomsky heavy) but it doesn't seem to be the purpose of this contributer's paragraph since s/he writes

"nder such a theory of grammar, the input, combined with both general and language-specific learning capacities, might be sufficient for acquisition."

In which case all you've got is a different theory of the innate language acquisition device - you don't have a theory that doesn't have such an innate device and your theory is still in the most important ways Chomskyan.

I'm loath to edit this unless there is some discussion first because I am a Chomskyan and I don't want to let my committment to generative grammar colour my editing.

Jim

Someone rewrite this without the blatant Chomsky ass-kissing, please? I don't need to be told which men are made of straw, and consider it a mark of intellectual failure that the authors of this article have included and subsequently not removed such doggerel.

Once again Wikipedia proves that All Of Us is dumber than Some Of Us.

Thanks for your comment. If you feel a change is needed, feel free to make it yourself! Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone (yourself included) can edit any article by following the Edit this page link. You don't even need to log in, although there are several reasons why you might want to. Wikipedia convention is to be bold and not be afraid of making mistakes. If you're not sure how editing works, have a look at How to edit a page, or try out the Sandbox to test your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. — mark ✎ 08:00, 31 May 2005 (UTC)


Agreed, non-Chomskyian views definitely deserve a lot more airtime here! I did a tiny bit of NPOV but it still needs way more.

-- Gabe

language "development" in adults?

is second language acquisition or learning by adults also referred to as "language development"?, as implied by the opening lines of the article . 

 Doldrums 12:02, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

broca's area

Shouldn't this article discuss Broca's area of the brain? -Jose


In what way is Broca's area relevant to the characterisation of language acquisition? Is it any more or less relevant than Wernicke's area? I don't see any reason a discussion of Broca's should be included.


It appears that Broka's area takes care of 'verbs', both in action as also in speech, whereas Wernick's area takes care of nouns. see for eg. Neural Modeling of Language Acquisition,


I have to disagree with that previous sentence. It's just plain false. --Drmarc 03:30, 2 August 2006 (UTC)


Lately there has been a marked interest on investigative and clinical studies on human brains to identify regions where different word types, nouns, verbs etc., are processed via neuropsychological or neuro-imaging techniques [1,2,3]. Apart from revealing regions of functional localizations such studies also enable identification of lesions or other damaged brain locations. It has been observed that left anterior and mid temporal lobes in human brains, Wernicke's sensory areas are associated mainly with declarative memory and operated on nouns and attended to semantic processing of the language; whereas left frontal motor regions, Broca's motor areas are associated mainly with procedural memory operating on verbs and assisting in syntactic processing of language. Any lesions or other damages in these two regions led to characteristic problems in linguistic reproduction termed respectively as Wernicke's Sensory aphasia and Broca’s agrammatical aphasia. The process by which such anatomical discriminations are developed has however remained obscure

References:

[1]. Cappa S F, Sandrini M, Rossini P M, Sosta K and Miniussi C. (2000)  : The role of left frontal lobe in action naming. Neurology, 59, pp 720-723. [2]. Damas A R and Tranel D. (1993): Nouns and Verbs are retrieved with Differently Distributed Neural Systems. Proc. National Academy of Sciences, USA, 11, pp 4957-4960. [3]. Federmeier K D, Segal J B, Lombrozo T and Kutas M.(2000) : Brain responses to nouns, verbs and class-ambiguous words in context. Brain, 123, 12, pp 2552-2562.

==== PPRao. Aug 15, 2006.

Different theories

Should the article include different (nativist) theories of language acquisition? e.g. the cue-based model? Or do we already have articles for those? - FrancisTyers 20:25, 4 December 2005 (UTC)


Baker

Baker's work is very controversial, however, because he has argued (1996: 496-515) that principles and parameters do not have biological or sociological origins, but instead were created by God (i.e. creationism).

I removed this pending a better reference. I've never heard anyone working in p&p ever argue that "principles and parameters were created by a god". - FrancisTyers 18:54, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

The reference is at the bottom of the page.

Yeah, but I don't have that book, I have The Atoms of Language and Baker doesn't mention god or creation once in that, which would be unusual since he is talking about the same thing. - FrancisTyers 19:19, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, it is unusual, but true, as you will see when you read the book.

Could you type out the paragraph where he refers to either god or creationism? Thanks. PS. You can sign your post using ~~~~ - FrancisTyers 19:41, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Here are some excerpts from Baker's 4 page discussion of his "theological" explanation for the origin of principles and parameters:

512 “If biological and sociological categories are ill-equipped to explain the possibility of syntactic diversity, are there are other candidates?…Since God is the quintessential spiritual being, and language has its origins in him, language is therefore a spiritual phenomenon…In other words, humanity is given a spiritual nature [by God] that is specifically said to be parallel in many respects to God’s. Among other things, this means that since God is a linguistic being, so are humans.”


512-3 “Strikingly, the problem of syntactic diversity is one aspect of language for which the Judeo-Christian scriptures provide an explanation…[A discussion of the Tower of Babel]...[God] creates linguistic diversity to make difficult or impossible large-scale and long-term cooperative efforts. The reason for this (given that God is good) is presumably that such endeavors have an inherent tendency toward evil and destructive manipulation”

BFSkinner

Thanks for the quotes, my university has the book in the library so I'll check it up tommorow. From what it sounds like the chapter on a theological explanation is a rhetorical look at the options and not a statement that he believes in creationism, or that god created language. Feel free to add it back in, but I'll verify it later. PS. I hope you understand my suspicion, especially considering your username ;) - FrancisTyers 20:14, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

The following additional quotations indicate that Baker does, in fact, believe in creationism. Of course, people should read the original chapter to decide for themselves.

513 "Suppose that these [spiritual] traditions are either more insightful or have better memories, or both, than the dominant modern academic tradition in this respect."

514 "However the historical details of the story [of the Tower of Babel in Genesis] are to be taken, its basic point is clear: linguistic diversity results from a direct act of God. This act was logically distinct from the act that gave humanity a linguistic nature in the first place. If macroparameters are one of the important mechanisms giving rise to serious linguistic diversity (diversity that cannot be overcome by ordinary lexical learning), then their origin is distinctly spiritual in nature."

515 "In closing, I should say that I do not intend these last few pages to single-handedly convince those who are materialists in theory or practice that there are spiritual forces at work in the world. However, it does seem right that those who are already convinced of this be alert to places where spiritual forces may shed some light on important facts of intellectual interest...I suggest that part of the meaning of the Polysynthesis Parameter is that we are not simply biochemical survival machines or the cells of a social organism; rather, we are spiritual beings that in part transcend those forces."

BFSkinner

Fair cop on Baker. I just looked it up and it seems he is a creationist. Who'd have thought it eh ;) He's probably toned it down in more recent work so he doesn't take so much flak. - FrancisTyers 21:08, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

My2Cents

I think that to what extent Baker views parameters as coming from God, Darwin, or anywhere else is immaterial in the context of a discussion of first language acquisition. While the models of the biological evolution of "parameters" can seem fanciful (there are others that are less so), the more troubling problem, and the more important one for THIS topic, is that as appealing as parameters are for typological classification and generative syntax theories, research in acquisition has had trouble showing that this is actually what children are doing when they acquire language. However, they remain an important theory since they provide a model of adult syntax that is, theoretically, learnable. It is important to bear in mind that the theoretical underpinnings of parameters as an acquisition theory are linguistic, not evolutionary or creationistic. Therefore, Baker's (or, for that matter, Chomsky's) speculations on the subject are really premature until the "fact" of parameters in adult syntax is resolved with an account of what children are actually doing when they acquire them.

Its that time again, external links pruning. See Wikipedia:External links. - FrancisTyers 00:15, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Genie

"An interesting example of this is the case of Genie, also known as "The Wild Child". A thirteen-year-old victim of lifelong child abuse, Genie was discovered in her home on November 4th, 1970, strapped to a potty chair and wearing diapers." - Genie was not discovered in her home. The abuse came to light when she accompanied her mother to a government building as her mother sought disability allowences.

Sign your comments. If there's a problem with the article, feel free to fix it. That's the whole point of a Wiki. --LakeHMM 03:09, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Average Age

Can someone please add the average age a child learns to speak? Not a huge range - *average*. --LakeHMM 03:10, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

The poster raises a really good point here: there's nothing here that covers the basic facts about language acquisition, having to do with developmental milestones. Really, what we have right now is a really nice summary of theories, but it's worthwhile including something for folks who are not so keen on the linguistics/cognitive science end of things. --Drmarc 03:34, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

DeKeyser

Regarding "DeKeyser talks about the role of language aptitude as opposed to the critical period," should this be removed? From what I've seen DeKeyser talks about both, as they are two separate ideas.

Reply to querry on Neanderthal Man .. .. under "Neuro-Modeling .. .. "

For the query on Neanderthal man, my thanks for the interest and I offer following comments: i) It is contended that reasons for all four events, viz, extinction of neanderthal man, emergence of a large cortex, of modern homo-sapien and of language skills are concurrent, guided by ‘Occams’ razor’; ii) This issue is not in main line of the theme here, ie., neural modeling, and iii) I’ve begun to doubt if the messages in this section as also in related sections under ‘Syntax’, are getting communicated to the readers or not for want of elaborations, clarity or lack of conventionality etc. Any way, a couple of sub-sections on ‘Sentences’ and ‘A few remarks on ‘Verb Software’ are planned before conclusions.

Question re. validity of reference to Neanderthal

About 100 thousand years ago, the Neanderthal man with his shallow forehead got on to the track of speech and auditory skills and evolved into modern Homo sapiens with a raised forehead and cranial structure [citation needed].

— snip —

I think this progression as written may be out of date. It is my understanding that both Neaderthal man and modern man -- Homo sapiens -- evolved from the same earlier ancestor in two different branches. That is, Homo sapiens did not evolve 'from' Neanderthal man but 'parallel to' Neanderthal man. See reference below.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/07/20/neanderthal.genome.ap/index.html

"At the Max Planck Institute, the project also involves Svante Paabo, who nine years ago participated in a pioneering, though smaller-scale, DNA test on a Neanderthal sample.

That study suggested that Neanderthals and humans split from a common ancestor a half-million years ago and backed the theory that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end, not a direct ancestor of modern humans.

The new project will help in understanding how characteristics unique to humans evolved and "will also identify those genetic changes that enabled modern humans to leave Africa and rapidly spread around the world," Paabo said in a statement Thursday."

Prabhakar P Rao 11:27, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Neanderthal Man & Firming-up-winning-Synapses

The statement in the text on the Neanderthal man implying multiple percepts is hoped to be clarified by the Neanderthal genome sequencing project being jointly pursued at Max Plank Institute in Germany and 454-Life Sciences Corporation at Connecticut. Now that a question mark, (citation required), has been superscripted on the statement, it should suffice to retain it so for the moment and we may proceed on other avenues. For example, consider the ‘firming-up-winning-synapses’ learning process:

A ‘firming-up-winning-synapses’ learning (somewhat akin to artificial neural network learning) process has been quoted in ‘Bio-neural Software model for Verbs’. A question might arise as to what happens to the ‘non-winning synapses, do they wither out?’ In general biological contraptions are not much wasteful. It is possible that the firmed-up synapses are soon delineated out for the set service and the remnant neuron pool will proceed on a hunt for finer details on information [1]; ie, in initial iterations, toddlers recognize generic animals; on a second round they use remnant neuron pool to recognize cats, tigers, birds, fish etc; they proceed further on finer classifications, such as wild, domestic, flying etc, and finally on to recognize individualities too, such as cows yield milk, dogs run after cats that run after rats, parrots talk etc. Perhaps some artificial neural circuit configurations can be devised in this direction?

Reference: [1]: http://arvo.ifi.unizh.ch/~andel/neurowiki/nw.cgi/SynapticPlasiticity/

=== PPRao, July 23, 2006.

Concurrent Model for Nouns .. ..

Concurrent Model for Abstract Nouns?

Development of concurrent neural networks for representation, ie., of objective nouns, such as teddy, sweet cake etc, and their meanings in the associational cortex by toddlers as part of their first language acquisition has been brought out in the text[1]. How about abstract nouns, (of course not for toddlers, but say, for adolescents) such as, battle, empathy, values etc? Biological systems often use any facility for multiple services (eg, our blood circulation system) as also, they reuse any methodology acquired for similar other services. It might thus be worthwhile to contemplate on how such abstract nouns get represented in our brains/minds and what kind of concurrent neural networks could enable their recognition, perception.


Concurrent or Connectionist Model?

On some reflections it appears that the ‘Concurrent Model for Nouns’ introduced here has many features paralleling the “Connectionist models, which emphasize the idea that a person's lexicon and his thoughts operate on some kind of (neural) network”[2] and the ‘Bio-neural Software Model’ introduced here appears to possess a few features of the “Nativist models, which assert that there are specialized devices in the brain dedicated to language acquisition” [3] with the implication that these devices refer to the Bio-Neural Software acquired by the toddlers. In order to avoid unnecessary duplicities, I propose to place ‘Connectionist Model’ in place of ‘Concurrent Model’ above. The other term, ‘Bio-neural Software Model for Verbs’ has however, certain specific functionality implied; hence it shall remain as it is.

References 1.Concurrent Model for Nouns & their Meanings :http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Language_ Acquisition

2.Connectionism: http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Connectionism/

3 Psychological Nativism: http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Psychological_nativism/

=== PPRao, Aug 11, 2006.

Huh?

I was never able to understand this part of this paragraph:

"However, an argument against Chomskian views of language acquisition lies in Chomskian theory itself. The theory has several hypothetical constructs, such as movement, empty categories, complex underlying structures, and strict binary branching, that cannot possibly be acquired from any amount of input. Since the theory is, in essence, unlearnably complex, then it must be innate. A different theory of language, however, may yield different conclusions."

Perhaps it can be reworded? 66.21.203.42 19:12, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

War of Arguments

NPOV needed in the Criticism and alternative theories section, please. this is not about arguments, but about language acquisition. the one who wrote this section starts saying "(...) Nevertheless, Snow's criticisms might be powerful against Chomsky's argument, if the argument from the poverty of stimulus were indeed an argument about degenerate stimulus, but it is not. The argument from the poverty of stimulus is that there are principles of grammar that cannot be learned on the basis of positive input alone, however complete and grammatical that evidence is. This argument is not vulnerable to objection based on evidence from interaction studies such as Snow's.

However, an argument against Chomskian views of language acquisition lies in Chomskian theory itself." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.156.27.184 (talk) 03:37, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Skewed article

The bias in favor of generativist theory in this article is astounding. I propose that the whole thing be reorganized into a chronological account. The study of language acquisition is older than Chomsky and the article should not be focused on generativist theory. The generative and functional theories should be both given a quota (say 400 words) to avoid too much superfluous information that goes in too much detail into the theories. This is wikipedia, not a textbook. The whole critical point should be moved to the nativist section. Examples as given are not necessary and are not wikipedia material.--AkselGerner (talk) 21:26, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Misleading wording: language-specific

"One hotly debated issue is whether the biological contribution includes language-specific capacities, often described as universal grammar. For fifty years, linguists Noam Chomsky and the late Eric Lenneberg argued for the hypothesis that children have innate, language-specific abilities that facilitate and constrain language learning[1]."

Language-specific implies that the biology includes capacities related to the specific first language of the language learner; this is NOT what Chomsky has said. Chomsky has said that the Universal Grammar has parameters that are set on the basis of first-language data, UG is NOT language-specific, on the contrary it determinalistically delimits the possible grammar of ANY language: Chomsky posits that no grammar is possible that does not fit in the binary parametres of UG. This is obviously preposterous, but not as obviously preposterous as having elements of, say, the thai language coded in the genetics of the Thai peoples, this would lead to the question of linguistic cross-breeding and other monstrosities. Chomsky may be a misguided old crank, but he's not stupid.--AkselGerner (talk) 21:31, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Went ahead and changed it... took me a while to figure out what was probably intended.--AkselGerner (talk) 20:32, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Check my anti-vandalism

Someone had gotten bored a while back... the vandalism had been partially corrected, but not by undoing, so I had to figure out which particular changes had already been undone and what was left. I may have missed something, so please give this article a careful read. Ken (talk) 00:28, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Article digressed

This article digressed from it's original subject of language acquisition and now is almost entirely about the UG/nativist debate. The article also propagates this endless polemic dispute and places it as the pivotal issue of language acquisition which, while very interesting, it certainly isn't. Pretty useless to anyone looking for information about the title subject, if you ask me. 217.132.43.80 (talk) 00:39, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

I agree, there is almost no discussion of either the nature of child phonology/syntax/semantics, the psycho-/neurolinguistics of language development or indeed second language acquisition, which are all central areas of research. 128.232.231.16 (talk) 22:47, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Does this phenomenon have a name? Is it common?

I have some memories of my language acquisition phase in my early childhood. One of them involved observing how people around me referred to themselves as "I" and to me as "you". At the time, I concluded that the right thing to do was mimic them exactly, which means referring to them as "I", and to myself as "you". So, for example, if someone asked me "Are you happy?" and I was happy, I replied "Yes, you are happy.". I also remember being corrected by mother for this. Now, is this a common phenomenon in language acquisition? Is it worthy to be mentioned in the article? Devil Master (talk) 15:42, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

"I" and "you" are known as referring expressions. I am uncertain as to whether the mimicry you have described is common in typical language development, but my guess would be that it is probably not unheard of in the early stages of syntactic development. In a related vein, I know of one study that examined the use of referring expressions in children with autism and found that they tend to confuse "I" and "you" in the way that you have described. Here is a link to a PDF of the article from the author's homepage in case you are interested: http://www.unc.edu/~jarnold/papers/ArnoldBennettoDiehl_final.pdf. (LMBM2012 (talk) 08:31, 7 January 2009 (UTC))

Archive 1Archive 2

"Acquisition" or "development"?

I notice that the first mention of "language acquisition" in the lede was recently changed to "language development". I'm not quite sure of the reasons for this change, but per WP:LEDE the bolded words at the start of the article should usually be the same as the article title, so I undid the change. Maybe our articles on language acquisition and language development are close enough that a merge could be on the table? — Mr. Stradivarius ♫ 23:57, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Mea culpa. I hadn't realized I was messing with the title, but I now see exactly what you mean. I was using what I thought was a simple change to show students how to sign one's edit. So even your correction (thank you for the teaching within it) will be helpful to them, as it is to me. Best, CM — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cecilemckee (talk • contribs) 20:08, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
No worries at all. By the way, you don't need to sign your edits if you are editing articles - it's only for when you're commenting on talk pages. You can look at our guide to using edit summaries for the details. As always, let me know if you have any questions about this (or anything else for that matter). — Mr. Stradivarius ♫ 01:00, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
We still (2015) have separate WP articles on Language Acquisition and Language Development, though they cover very similar ground. Why was the idea of merging them never followed up? I have not seen any sign of opposition to the idea. RoachPeter (talk) 09:48, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

Proposed revision to Phonology

A main process of cognitive development is language acquisition. The development of language is considered incredibly complex and difficult to specify. Language development may be categorized into the learning of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics; all of these interact and relate with one another.

Phonology is the sounds of language and how they are organized to form words. Phonemes are the actual sounds in the word. For example, /stu/ has 3 phonemes- s sound, t sound, and u sound (Taylor et al, 2011). Phonological development is focused on the appearance of each phoneme in speech of children with typical and atypical language development. It is also centered upon the relationships between babbling and later phonological competence (Zanobini, 2012). Phonological development may be assessed by the number of acquired consonants, number of phonological error patterns, and phonological mean length of utterance (MLU). To test the number of acquired consonants all syllable initial consonants produced by the child are surveyed. A consonant may be considered acquired if the consonant was attempted at least 3 times with a percentage of correct production of at least 75%. To test the number of phonological error patterns, all typical and unusual phonological error patterns produced by the child are analyzed. These error patterns are considered as a result of the child’s undeveloped sound system. Typical error patterns, commonly found in normal development, can contain cluster reduction and part of the cluster is omitted (for example, “cay” for “clay”). Unusual error patterns are found in impaired speech but are rare in normal language development.

We measure the MLU to gain insight into the child’s whole-world complexity. The MLU reveals the length of the child’s words and the number of correct consonants; it is properly defined as the mean length of the child’s word productions, in addition the number of correct consonants in each production. The MLU is calculated by averaging the score over numerous meaningful words, usually 25 or more (Van Noort-Van Der Spek, 2010).

Children develop phonology usually around certain ages. From birth to three months, cries are produced, coos and gurgles, and there is reflexive sound making which produces a glottal catch and vowels (such as ah or uh). Around the age of 3-6 months, babbling begins. Therefore, infants produce double syllables (consonant, vowel consonant), nasal sounds and puts lips together to say sounds like “m.” Self-initiated vocal play is presented but often stops when an adult enters the room. Around 6-9 months, infants uses m, n, t, d, b, p, y in babbling multiple syllables. They also use a large variety of sound combinations including non-English sounds. Intonation may be heard as well. From 9-12 months, they vocalize during play, uses consonants and vowels in most sounds, and their first word is usually heard. From 1-1.5 years, the child uses sentence-like intonations, accurately imitates some words and have basically unintelligible speech with the exception of a few words. Once the child is 1.5 to 2 years, words are increasing in frequency, they ask questions by raising intonation at end of phrase, and some words are produced with CVC structure. From 2-2.5 years, approximately 70% of speech is intelligible and they may omit final consonants, reduce consonant blends or substitute one consonant for another. Until the age of 3, there are still some substitutions and distortion of consonants but 80% of speech is intelligible. Consonants p, m, n, w, h are mastered. From 3-3.5 years, phonological processes disappear. Consonant assimilation, diminutization, doubling , final consonant deletion, prevocalic voicing, reduplication, unstressed syllable deletion and velar fronting vanish. By 4 years of age, intelligibility of connected speech is pretty good. The consonants b, d, k, g, f, y are finally mastered. From 4-4.5 there should be few omissions and substitutions of consonants. Until the child is 5, most of the consonant sounds are used consistently and accurately; however, they may not be mastered in all contexts. Between 5-7, all the consonants are mastered (Gard, Gilman, Gorman). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Geor0232 (talk • contribs) 05:00, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Looks good to me! But I really hope that when you put it in the article, you write complete references and use ref-tags (<ref></ref>). Lova Falk talk 08:21, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
How strange, to an outsider, that the article itself contains virtually nothing on the very important topic of phonology, but a reasonable shot at a phonology section has been sitting here in Talk for a couple of years. Can anyone comment? RoachPeter (talk) 09:32, 11 January 2015 (UTC)
I am in agreement here. I have been going through the language acquisition pages (eg. here, Second-language acquisition, Language transfer, Language contact, Multi-competence and I am seeing a lot that reasonably ought to be added. Foremost in my mind is something on transfer effects in bilingual acquisition, which has been a very hot topic in the literature on acquisition in the context of mental representation, as I cannot see anything that appropriately addresses this topic on wiki. I think it may need an article all of its own, given how many aspects there are, though for now it may be best here or in one of the above articles until it is of sufficient length. The issue with the whole ordeal is (a) some of the theories and discussions have been very divided over the years (with its fair share of frankly appalling theory, in the early decades) and (b) the sheer amount of reading, writing, and subsequent editing to bring everything together, while also not stepping on anyone's toes as far as infringing on the rights of journal publishers goes.LingNerd007 (talk) 02:12, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Proposed revision to Neurocognitive Research Section

I agree that there are several citations referring to fmri and pet scans, but there is a great deal more out there Chomsky, N. (2000), Linguistics and Brain Science. In A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita,and W. O’Neil eds., Image, Language, Brain. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 13- 28. Dapretto, M., and Bookheimer, S. Y. (1999). Form and content: Dissociating syntax and semantics in sentence comprehension. Neuron, 24, 427-432. Burton, M. W. (2001). The role of inferior frontal cortex in phonologicalprocessing. Cognitive Science, 25, 695–709. Caplan D., Alpert, N., and Waters, G.. (1998). Effects of syntactic structure and propositional number on patterns of regional cerebral blood flow. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 10, 541-52. fmri studies include - Angela D. Friederici, Martin Meyer, D.Yves von Cramon Auditory Language Comprehension: An Event-Related fMRI Study on the Processing of Syntactic and Lexical Information: Volume 74, Number 2 (2000), pages 289–300

Close, R.L. Scheef, L. (2007). Supramodal language comprehension: Role of the left temporal lobe for listening and reading. Neuropsychologia,45(10), 2407–2415 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.78.146.233 (talk) 15:56, 23 April 2013 (UTC)



New paragraph to Neurocognitive Research Section:

Many different areas of the brain may be linked to certain aspects of language. PET and fMRI technology and imaging has allowed for some conclusions to be made about where language may be centered. In oral language, auditory input is sent from the medial geniculate nucleus in the thalamus to primary auditory and auditory association areas, the latter pertaining to phonological representations of words. For written language, the primary visual area contains information of a ventral "what" projection and a dorsal "where" projection. The ventral projection includes the fusiform gyrus which may contain orthographic representations of words, which are the abstract mental representations of the spelling of words (Buchwald & Rapp 2006). The dorsal projection includes the superior parietal lobe, which may be important in aspects of reading that involve spatial attention. Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area are two important parts of the brain involved with language. Wernicke’s area is in the temporal lobe and is associated with receptive language and auditory comprehension. This area also may be responsible for the integration of spoken and written word forms that give rise to meaning or semantics. Through the arcuate fasciculus, Wernicke’s area is connected with Broca’s area which includes brain regions for speech production or articulatory word forms involving segmented phonology and syntactic processing and is located in the frontal lobe (Booth & Burman, 2001). Broca’s area is associated with expressive language and speech production. In previous experiments, a transcranial magnetic stimulation was hooked up to a person’s motor cortex to observe face movements and increased lip movements were recorded. This led to a hypothesis that the parts of the motor cortex may be correlated to facial movements during speech. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Whee8009 (talk • contribs) 03:33, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

I have no specific comments on your text, but you might think of a somewhat less informed reader when you write. Your text is difficult for most who don't know yet what you are telling them. Lova Falk talk 18:05, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Never stops

Language acquisition is a process that never quite stops. A 50-year old has a different writing style than a 20-year-old, or a 10-year-old.

Vocabulary is constantly being learned. People learn new words every day. Or pronunciation, such as correctly pronouncing "often", "mischeivous", or "nuclear" after all this time saying it wrong. Ticklewickleukulele (talk) 04:05, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Removed paragraph from lead

I removed a recently added paragraph from the lead; it was a paraphrased version of the textbook it cited -- acceptably, though not well, paraphrased. However, I think it's too much detail to put into the lead. There's nothing about morphemes and phonemes in the body of the article, and I think there might be a place for a better-done version of this material somewhere lower down, but am not expert in this area so I don't want to attempt it myself. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:32, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

A couple of days ago, I reinserted the first line of this removed paragraph (without having read your comment here on the Talk page), which I thought was of a general character: "The capacity to successfully use language requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive vocabulary." I fully agree though on removing the morphemes and phonemes stuff. Lova Falk talk 07:19, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
I agree - a general statement like that is fine. By the way, I'm very glad to see you return to active editing; I was sorry to see the students' work stress you to the point of taking a break. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:07, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
Thank you! You just brought a smile on my face. Lova Falk talk 16:26, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

User:Beyond My Ken (https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/User:Beyond_My_Ken) reverted my edits to the article Language acquisition (thus removed a table Some vocabulary sizes related to language acquisition... that I had just inserted today), because they are based on a doctoral dissertation. Because of this User:Beyond My Ken requested that questions about peer-review, as well as possible copyright violation (since the table is said to be "adopted from" one in the dissertation) need to be discussed on the article's talk page. I was also asked to read WP:SCHOLARSHIP (https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/User_talk:AcademicResearchResults BMK (talk) 03:31, 31 December 2015 (UTC)). I am thankful for all the feedback and advice that I have got. I am the author of the doctoral dissertation in question and can personally allow rights to publish the table also in Wikipedia. I have aimed in good faith to augment the current knowledge content of the Wikipedia article with a new overview perspective by inserting a table that is based on a review of previous research and it has been peer-reviewed by the academics listed on the page 3 of the pdf of the dissertation (open access via https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Language_acquisition&oldid=697534051#cite_note-:0-56). I am hoping to hear soon from you a confirmation of acceptance so that I could still again insert the same table to augment the article. Best wishes AcademicResearchResults (talk) 04:35, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

WP:SCHOLARSHIP says, in part:

Completed dissertations or theses written as part of the requirements for a PhD, and which are publicly available (most via interlibrary loan or from Proquest), can be used but care should be exercised, as they are often, in part, primary sources. Some of them will have gone through a process of academic peer reviewing, of varying levels of rigor, but some will not. If possible, use theses that have been cited in the literature; supervised by recognized specialists in the field; or reviewed by third parties.

I take it form your comments that your dissertation is publicly available, and has been peer reviewed, and that, as the author, you can authorize use of the material if it is copyrighted (but you may have to show proof of your identity to WP:OTRS -- but as an expression of your own research, I believe it would be considered to be a WP:PRIMARYSOURCE. Therefore the question of whether it can be included or not hinges on whether it has been cited. Can you provide data on that? BMK (talk) 04:54, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
I've opened a discussion on our Reliable Sources Noticeboard, inthehope that someone more familiar with our use of dissertations will chime in. You can find the discussion here - feel free to participate. BMK (talk) 04:58, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
To answer User:Beyond My Ken's question made above, according to my knowledge the doctoral dissertation has been so far publicly referred to by a respected academic in a blog post at http://dhumanities.blogspot.fi/2015/04/lauri-lahti-computer-assisted-learning.html and besided that I have myself referred to the dissertation in the following peer-reviewed articles: http://www.infonomics-society.org/IJCDSE/Computational%20Method%20for%20Supporting%20Learning.pdf (open access: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-201503182042), http://www.editlib.org/p/148865/ (open access: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-1-939797-12-4), http://www.editlib.org/p/150943/ (open access: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-201503182052) and http://www.editlib.org/p/151985/ (Open access: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-201509294488). The dissertation is also listed at http://www.hict.fi/theses?page=1. I am still hoping to have a possiblity to insert the same table to augment the Wikipedia article. Best wishes AcademicResearchResults (talk) 06:09, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
I do not believe your own citations would count towards the reliability of the dissertation as a source, and, in general, blogs are not considered reliable sources (see WP:SPS). Given this, I would be reluctant to say go ahead and re-insert the table, without any consenting opinions from other editors. BMK (talk) 07:33, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

There are three separate issues here. (1) Is the information reliably sourced? (2) Is the choice of items to put into the table a violation of WP:SYNTH? (3) Is copyright a problem? I'll address each in turn.

(1) Each item carries a citation, but I cannot see them explained. For example, what is "Nation & Waring 1997"? Sourcing requirements will be met if all of the citations in the table are given completely and they meet WP:RS.
(2) An argument can be made either way on this, but I think it would be enough to state that the compilation was made by the author of the thesis, with a citation to the thesis.
(3) I'm not an expert on copyright but I assume that the requirements can be met with AcademicResearchResults's cooperation. Note that it is not enough to give publication permission to Wikipedia. A more general licence is needed, see WP:COPYRIGHT for details. As an administrator I'd be content with a statement by AcademicResearchResults here that the relevant pages of the thesis are released under one of the licences specified at WP:COPYRIGHT. I can't promise that the administrators who specialise in copyright issues will agree.

Zerotalk 09:19, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for comments and advice. According to my understanding Wikipedia allows the fair use of copyrighted material (https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Fair_use; https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-free_content). I am the copyright holder of the dissertation and I am happy to accept publication of selected parts of the dissertation with a fair use motivation that seems to be typical for USA legislation which appears to be affecting Wikipedia. Since the source country of the dissertation is Finland (part of EU) it is still useful to note that Finnish legislation does not have a such an approach that would directly correspond to the fair use idea of USA legislation (https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use, in Finnish). Instead Finnish legislation recognizes for example (among other things) a right to quote (https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitaattioikeus; https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Right_to_quote; http://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/1961/19610404) and a right to use material for educational purposes.

To clarify that all citations in the inserted table have a clear source I put here all the full citation references in the insert table that are naturally provided also in the reference section of the dissertation (open access https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Language_acquisition&oldid=697534051#cite_note-:0-56):
Nation, P., & Waring, R. (1997). Vocabulary size, text coverage, and word lists. In Schmitt, N., & McCarthy, M. (eds.), Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition, Pedagogy. Cambridge University Press, New York, USA, 6-19.
D'Anna, C., Zechmeister, E., & Hall, J. (1991). Toward a meaningful definition of vocabulary size. Journal of Reading Behavior, 23, 109-122. http://jlr.sagepub.com/content/23/1/109.full.pdf
Kuhn M., & Stahl S. (1998). Teaching children to learn word meanings from context: a synthesis and some questions. Journal of Literacy Research, 30(1), 119-138.
Graves, M. (1986). Vocabulary learning and instruction. In Rothkopf, E. & Ehri, L. (eds.), Review of research in education, vol. 13, 49-89. American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC, USA.
White, T., Graves, M., & Slater, W. (1990). Growth of reading vocabulary in diverse elementary schools: decoding and word meaning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82, 281-290.
Laufer, B. (1989). What percentage of text-lexis is essential for comprehension? In C. Lauren and M. Nordman (eds.), Special Language: From Humans Thinking to Thinking Machines. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK.
Hsu, W. (2009). College English textbooks for general purposes: a corpus-based analysis of lexical coverage. Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, 6(1), 42-62. http://eflt.nus.edu.sg/v6n12009/hsu.htm
Chujo, K. (2004). Measuring vocabulary levels of English textbooks and tests using a BNC lemmatized high frequency word list. In Nakamura, J., Inoue, N., & Tabata, T. (eds.), English corpora under Japanese eyes, 231-249. Rodopi, Amsterdam, Netherlands. http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~chujo/eng/data/rodopi.pdf
Nagy, W., & Anderson, R. (1984). How many words are there in printed school English? Reading Research Quarterly, 19(3), 304-330.
Lehr, F., Osborn, J. & Hiebert, E. (2004). Research-based practices in early reading series: a focus on vocabulary. Regional Educational Laboratory, Pacific Resources for Education and Learning. http://vineproject.ucsc.edu/resources/A%20Focus%20on%20Vocabulary%20PREL.pdf
Wikipedia statistics (2013). Wikipedia statistics - tables - article count (official). Online available at http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesTotal.htm. Retrieved on 16 August 2013.
Zlatic, V., Bozicevic, M., Stefancic, H., & Domazet, M. (2006). Wikipedias as complex networks. Physical Review E 74, 016115 (2006). http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/931270/files/0602149.pdf?version=1
Fletcher, W. (2012). Corpus analysis of the World Wide Web. In Chapelle, C. (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Wiley-Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0254.
Alpert, J. & Hajaj, N. (2008). We knew the web was big... The official Google blog, Posted on 27 July 2008. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html
Bounie, D., & Gille, L. (2012). International production and dissemination of information: results, methodological issues, and statistical perspectives. International Journal of Communication, 6, 1001-1021.
Azevedo, F., Carvalho, L., Grinberg, L., Farfel, J., Ferretti, R., Leite, R., Jacob Filho, W., Lent, R., & Herculano-Houzel, S. (2009). Equal numbers of neuronal and nonneuronal cells make the human brain an isometrically scaled-up primate brain. The Journal of Comparative Neurology 513(5), 532–541. doi:10.1002/cne.21974. PMID 19226510.

After all these discussions and clarifications I would be happy to hear from you if I can have an acceptance to still again insert the same table to augment the article. Best wishes AcademicResearchResults (talk) 19:57, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

If you reinsert the table, you need to insert the references as well. Whether the table belongs in the article is a question of WP:WEIGHT, relevance, etc, anf you will need to make such arguments it anyone objects. About "fair use", it isn't decided by what the copyright holder agrees to, but by law and case law. However, probably we would get away with that argument provided the table is clearly indicated as a quotation or close paraphrase of the thesis. As I said before, the copyright gnomes might have a different opinion from my amateur opinion. Zerotalk 23:21, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
I think the problem is somewhat different than is being discussed here. As the copyright holder, there is no problem with AcademicResearchResults releasing what he owns under our license, so that's not an issue. The sourcing problem cam be solved with references, so that's not a problem. The pertinent question is, I think, whether this is valid scientific information. That question is not answered by the existence of the dissertation, or even the peer reviewing that it may have undergone. Whether it's valid -- a WP:WEIGHT question -- can only be determined by knowing how it has been received by the scientific community, and that can only be answered by reference to the number of citations it has received (not inclusive of the author's own citations). If the scientific community hasn't adopted the information as valid or useful, then it has no place being in the article. I'm sorry to be so blunt about it, but that's my understanding. BMK (talk) 00:22, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia should not generally be using unpublished doctoral dissertations as major sources - especially not when inserted by the author. If the information the dissertation citation is used to support is broadly accepted in language acquisition then a real published study should be used instead. If the information has not been previously published or is not yet broadly accepted then it shouldnt be in the article at all.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 00:29, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments! As a part of writing my doctoral dissertation I was required to make a review of the previous research in the related scientific fields. Once I had gathered - from sources that I considered reliable - a small synthesis of the sizes of vocabulary and other information structures and it has been published in April 2015 as a peer-reviewed printed dissertation book (open access via https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Language_acquisition&oldid=697534051#cite_note-:0-56) I thought that this knowledge collection could positively help to augment the content of Wikipedia as well. By insterting the table from my dissertation to Language acquistion article my aim was to provide to the readers of Wikipedia an easy access and overview of such results of the previous research (from years 1986-2013) that seem to be relatively agreed and mentioned by researchers in the related fields. Thank you for your advice about Wikipedia practices! I still kindly suggest that in the future developement work of Wikipedia it could be possible to consider using editing pratictices that have some resemblence with the approach that I have now proposed. Thank you for a disscussion to everybody! Best wishes, AcademicResearchResults (talk) 04:49, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

I think this will have to be the last time this is said, and then you had best drop the stick: until your dissertation is cited multiple times to indicate that it is in the realm of accepted, normal science, you cannot put the table in the article. BMK (talk) 07:39, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Learning box

There is presently an illustration of a "learning box" but that phrase does not seem to be discussed in the article. I don't want to remove it because it seems interesting. Does someone know what this is and can add info? 129.219.155.89 (talk) 12:24, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

This illustration should be removed. A learning box is not a thing (not in cognitive psychology, anyway, and certainly not in language acquisition research). I also really cannot see what the figure is supposed to be illustrating. It is possible that the term "learning box" is meant to refer to "Language acquisition device"... but in any case the illustration is not informative. Ishkibib (talk) 21:26, 30 September 2016 (UTC)

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Merge Speech acquisition to Language acquisition

In 2012 I proposed merging Speech acquisition to Language acquisition at the page Talk:Speech acquisition#Proposed merge. I noted that the page was very short and the two topics are closely related – so much so that the source cited at Speech acquisition refers to "early language acquisition".

Other editors, User:Cecilemckee and User:Dolfrog, suggested that the two topics are distinct, and that the Speech acquisition page would soon be expanded.

Since that time, however, the page has not been greatly expanded (though I thank Dolfrog and one anonymous user for additions to the page, especially for noting Further reading on the topic). Moreover, it is still not clear to me that the topics are distinct. The lead section of Speech acquisition seems to distinguish it from consideration of syntax, and some of the further reading is specifically about neurophysiology and control of speech articulators. To me, however, that suggests that speech acquisition is a subset of language acquisition.

I would welcome arguments, especially based on the nature of the topics or the state of the Wikipedia articles, regarding a renewed proposal to merge the two articles. Cnilep (talk) 03:18, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Hello, I'm new to Wikipedia editing so this may not be the way to contribute to this discussion but here goes... I believe the pages ought to remain separate. I have added several topics such as the typologies of sound acquisition and models of normative data in which people use to determine typical speech sound development. While some may view it as a subset of language acquisition, the development of speech sounds is a complex and wide ranging topic of study that deserves a dedicated space to be explored.SpeechCookie2016 (talk) 06:53, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
Closing, given that discussion is stale; there has been a reasonable, unopposed objection and no support.
Resolved
Klbrain (talk) 15:29, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

Expanding on "As a typically human Phenomenon" Section

I feel that if this section is to be included in the article, it should contain a great deal more information, such as a more in depth explanation of what distinguishes human language from animal communication, any controversies this distinction has created/dissent in the field of linguistics, etc. As a standalone paragraph it hardly merits its own section. Pau.guerra (talk) 03:32, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

To caveat on the above comment: a section describing the dialogue about language as something specifically human or not should certainly be included in a page dedicated to human language acquisition. It does, however, require much lengthening as outlined above. Dynwrighter (talk) 17:57, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Overhauling the Artificial Intelligence Section?

I'm not sure there's any value to this section of the page unless it gets fleshed out substantially. Zwiseguy15 (talk) 17:12, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Meaning section merger

I propose merging the "Meaning" section with the Vocabulary Acquisition section. The Meaning section as it stands summarizes over-application as an example of how children, during the language acquisition process, make speech errors. The example of how children over-apply the meanings of the words they are learning is a very useful example that should be included on a language acquisition page, just not in its own section.Dynwrighter (talk) 18:16, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

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