本科留學生assignment范文-Study on Influence of Child-Directed Language Adjustment 

 

Introduction

Language acquisition is the study of processes through which learners acquire language. Nowadays, language acquisition represents, perhaps, the most impressive achievement in human development. And the whole process of language acquisition of children is under a certain language environment. The baby talk from parents is the most important speech input form in early child language acquisition and the language environment is also a key factor for child language acquisition. Child-Directed language is a special form of language aims to express the communication when a child develop over a special period and studies children’s acquisition of their native language[1]. Moreover, research shows that child directed speech contains many aspects, it includes not only speech but also sign language, gesture and action. But domestic study only limits to spoken language. 

 

Child-Directed language is a simplified language applied by the primary caregiver of the child, usually the mother or nanny. Compared with adult language or some older kids language, the adjusted speech has many extremely obvious features. In this paper, we discuss a topic whether the the language input change the linguistic complexity in different period, for example the mothers adapt to the kids’s language development over time in the early time when communicate with the kids. For children, language acquisition is the first language acquisition, through it children begin to learn their native language. It seems that children could acquire very complex language without effort. And the more surprising is that the acquisition process is so fast, a child fully acquire a kind of native language only need five or six years. What’s more, children’s progressive acquisition of a native language follow a the successive stages, it is similar with the chronology across languages.

Features of Child-Directed language

Generally speaking, there is a incorrect recognition about child directed language. Most of us may seem this kind of interaction is so meaningless although it is replicated by parents in daily life[2]. But it is quite important because it includes utterances which push this kid into question, action him, what’s more confirm things for him, every of them is a  rather complex concept. In this way, child directer speech is a kind of language used by parents to help their children reveal the magic world. However, many obstacles should be overcome firstly. Such as, while the new born infants cannot understand their parents’ words direct to them, how do these infants obtain such ability? It is obvious that though children are short of the innate language acquisition ability which operate the core function in the process of learning language, most of these babies could successfully acquire the native language corresponding to their living environment. Under such a background, teach the child linguistic and make the linguistic input meaning are so poor in information or so under-specified, exactly speaking this position holds that native language can not be learned from so impoverished input. Moreover, though the spontaneous speech contains only a few limited and finite number of sentences, the recursive character of language led to a spaceless generative capacity. The achievement seems so extraordinary impressive while considered in the perspective of infants’ “poverty of the stimulus”[3]. 

 

As we all know, parents talk to children in a special way that is quite different with the conversation among adults. That is to say child directed speech holds some special characters. The spoken language is featured by reduced grammatical complexity, an increase of repetitions, lower propositional density, simplifications, clarifications, and elaborations, and in order to help children to have a good idea of sentences do not meet grammatical and the application of little or no meta-linguistic indications are necessary. At the same time, unique prosody is the core characteristic of child directed speech. The features of Child-Directed language’s unique prosodic contain a wider pitch range, elevated pitch and slower speech rate.  From the birth of a infant, in order to adapt to the baby’s understanding capacity the mother need change her speak manner in a particular way, with exaggerated prosodic structure and simplified syntax and meaning. According to child directed language, the segmental structure not only ‘motherese’ but also ‘parentese’ refers to the special prosodic structure, it has yielded the unusual musical properties in a ‘sing-song’ language form. So, the prosodic cues convey the information which is adapted and emphasized to the children’s perceptual capabilities. All of the vocal adjustments are realized in a natural and intuitive manner. In this way caregivers appeared to provide a real tutorial and they even did not know they were doing it at all. Moreover, there is a evidence that the Child-Directed language’s prosodic features may provide cues about syntactic constituents that facilitate the language learning task.

 

In a word, the reason why adults like use Child-Directed language in the communication with children can summarized as follows. The perception of babies is limited, so they prefer to focus on things have obvious features rather than give positive responses to all things around them ,and the features of Child-Directed language rightly accord with this theory and more attractive for children with its high tone, accent, etc. Go into details the characteristics of such a language, they are better able to attract the attention of children. Make the new information more prominent, the boundaries of phrases, clauses and word more clearly in the statement, which can effectively help children successfully decompose language input flow of information into the corresponding units, in order to better understand the specific meaning of language input, then receive information contained in the language input and complete the learning task.

There is also one thing about child directed speech which alway ignored by us, it is the negotiation between infants and their caregivers. Though the children need not reply in an adult way with some complete or near-complete linguistic constituents or units like an adult does in a negotiation, the contextual of a speech is also crucial to the children. Because, the babies begins to say some adult-like utterances with the maturation tendency in physical, then the negotiation among participants becomes more syntactically, balanced and phonologically but it is not so necessarily in semantical and functional.