Question 1 [1 points] Is sign language a “real” language? Explain. Question 2 [2

Question

Question 1 [1 points]

Is sign language a “real” language? Explain.

Question 2 [2 points]

Below you can see examples of questions from Genie and from children at different stages of linguistic development. Compare Genie’s questions to those of younger children, and say how they resemble and differ from each other. What does that tell you about language acquisition? Genie:

Where is stop spitting?

Where is may I have ten pennies?

When is Genie eat cookie?

Children during normal acquisition of English:

Where kitty?

That mine?

What me think?

Why doggie run?

Explanation / Answer

American Sign Language (ASL) is a real language in the same sense that English, German, Japanese, Latin or any other spoken language is a real language. Signed languages are just like spoken languages. They have phonetic and phonemic rules for how individual lexical items are formed. They have grammar and syntax. They can express any concept that you want to express. The only difference is that their medium is visual-gestural. Genie is still at the early stage of the language development. She is at early production stage of language development.This stage may last about six months, during which language learners typically acquire an understanding of up to 1,000 words. They may also learn to speak some words and begin forming short phrases, even though they may not be grammatically correct.Genie is speaking words and forming small sentences but they are not logically and gramatically correct. She still needs to go through further development stages of language. The Two-Word Utterances-Babies begin to produce two- word utterances which can show different combination of word order. In this stage, the words lack morphological and syntactic markers but we can notice that there is a word order.This is the case with Genie as well. Chomsky believed that language is innate or inborn.Noam Chomsky believes that children are born with an inherited ability to learn any human language. He claims that certain linguistic structures which children use so accurately must be already imprinted on the child’s mind. Chomsky believes that every child has a ‘language acquisition device’ or LAD which encodes the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain. Children have then only to learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures from the LAD to form sentences.Children often say things that are ungrammatical such as ‘mama ball’, which they cannot have learnt passively.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse Q
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.