Languages Acquisition Quotes

We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

Language is best taught when it is being used to transmit messages, not when it is explicitly taught for conscious learning.

Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others' hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.

The next time you see a baby, remember that there is a powerful statistical computer in front of you

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!

The child's reluctance to speak for the first few months of his residence in a new country is not pathological, but normal.

(...) Language acquisition might be like other biological functions. The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

The central hypothesis of the theory is that language acquisition occurs in only one way: by understanding messages.

The truth is that bilingual babies are like machines.

A true TBLT course, conversely, requires an investment of resources in a needs analysis and production of materials appropriate for a particular population of learners.

Mein Herz ist voller Dankbarkeit, aber meine Armut an deutschen Worten zwingt mich zu großer Sparsamkeit des Ausdruckes.

The language of academic discourse, which is crucial to academic progress beyond grade 3 is learned by all children through literacy: there are no native speakers of academic language!

Older acquirers progress more quickly in early stages because they obtain more comprehensible input, while younger acquirers do better in the long run because of their lower affective filters.

Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed.

Almost all instruction seems to revolve around language ac-(Jermaine spelling now) "q, a-kwi-si-tion acquisition!" ("What that?" I ask. "You know, to get. Language acquisition, to get some language.")

Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation.

Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! Mine pot!

What immersion has taught us is that comprehensible subject-matter teaching is language teaching — the subject matter class is a language class if it is made comprehensible. In fact, the subject-matter class may even be better than the language class for language acquisition.

Most televangelists, popular Christian preacher icons, and heads of those corporations that we call megachurches share an unreflective modern view of Jesus--that he translates easily and almost automatically into a modern idiom. The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes. Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world. He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise. He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life. He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy. He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of social security, food stamps, welfare, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy), or the welfare state. So far as we know, he expressed no opinion on the ethical issues that plague us today: abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, euthanasia, or bombing Iraq. His world was not ours, his concerns were not ours, and--most striking of all--his beliefs were not ours. Jesus was a first-century Jew, and when we try to make him into a twenty-first century American we distort everything he was and everything he stood for.

Not all babies learn to play chess or hunt penguins or play the didgeridoo, but except in cases of pathology they all master their first language. Indeed, failure to master one’s first language is taken to reflect a pathological condition; failing to master algebra or the piccolo has no such implication.

Tasks are the real-world activities people think of when planning, conducting, or recalling their day. That can mean things like brushing their teeth, preparing breakfast, reading a newspaper, taking a child to school, responding to e-mail messages, making a sales call, attending a lecture or a business meeting, having lunch with a colleague from work, helping a child with homework, coaching a soccer team, and watching a TV program. Some tasks are mundane, some complex.

It may be—I will argue so—that communication outward is only a secondary, socially stimulated phase in the acquisition of language. Speaking to oneself would be the primary function (considered by L. S. Vygotsky in the early 1930s, this profoundly suggestive hypothesis has received little serious examination since).

TBLT's solution is to employ an analytic (task) syllabus, but with a focus on form to deal with problematic linguistic features, and provision of opportunities for intentional learning to speed up the learning process and to supplement the adult's weaker capacity for incidental learning, especially instance learning.

The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of science is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow-beings. The Man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. Emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, ‘that he looks before and after.’ He is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of the Poet’s thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man.

Proper pronunciation is essential for clarity in effective communication. By aiming to be clear in your speech, you'll build self-confidence and credibility.

Because you cannot study the acquisition or use of language in an intelligent manner without having some idea about this language which is acquired or utilized.

Children's minds need not innately embody language structures, if languages embody the predispositions of children's minds!

The totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community is the language of that speech community.

There was, to begin with, my original acquisition of my native language,

Language is the highway to culture.

In my work in language acquisition, I have concluded that we acquire language in only one way: by understanding messages, or obtaining "comprehensible input" in a low-anxiety situation.

I fell in love the moment I saw her in her grandfather's kitchen, her dark curls crashing over her Portuguese shoulders. 'Would you like to drink coffee?' she smiled. 'I'm really not that thirsty.' 'What? What you say?' Her English wasn't too good. Now I'm seventy-three and she's just turned seventy. 'Would you like to drink coffee?' she asked me today, smiling. 'I'm really not that thirsty.' 'What? What you say?' Neither of us has the gift of language acquisition. After fifty years of marriage we have never really spoken, but we love each other more than words can say.

The cause of the onset of overgeneralization [of regular past tense forms to irregular verbs] is not a change in vocabulary statistics, but some endogenous change in the child's language mechanisms.

Since we nowadays think that all a man needs for acquisition of truth is to exert his brain more or less vigorously, and since we consider an ascetic approach to knowledge hardly sensible, we have lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity. Thomas says that unchastity's first-born daughter is blindness of the spirit. Only he who wants nothing for himself, who not subjectively 'interested,' can know the truth. On the other hand, an impure, selfishly corrupted will-to-pleasure destroys both resoluteness of spirit and the ability of the psyche to listen in silent attention to the language of reality.

As far as the language instinct is concerned, the correlation between genes and languages is a coincidence. People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two.

There is some evidence, after all, that a certain degree of tension, or classroom anxiety, can have a positive effect on learning (Scovel 1978), probably because it activates a process known to be critical for language learning: attention.

Some aspects of language acquisition are puzzling: Children almost always learn to say no before yes and in before on, and all children everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascinated with the idea of “gone” and “all gone.

Word learning is as scandalous an induction problem as the acquisition of syntax or the practice of science, because there are an infinite number of generalizations, most of them wrong, that are logically consistent with any sample of experiences

L2 Learners are (55%) affected by their target language and (35%) by their mother tongue. There are both the target language and Morphological Translation Equivalence that pair affixes of the two languages share with each other which enhance the Semantic Transparency of affixes

Isaiah 5:8–10. The oracle in Micah has a close parallel in the poetic oracle of Isaiah 5:8–10. This poetic segment also begins with “Ah” (“woe”), anticipating big trouble to come because of destructive social behavior. The indictment is against those who “join house to house” and “field to field,” exactly the language of the commandment and of the Micah oracle. The process consists of buying up the land of small peasant farmers in order to develop large estates. The vulnerable peasants are then removed from their land and denied a livelihood, and now coveters can bask in their newly secured isolated self-indulgence. The prophetic judgment pertains to such rural displacement; in our time, the same crisis might refer to urban gentrification that dislocates the poor and the vulnerable. The poetry traces the destruction, by acquisitiveness, of a viable neighborly infrastructure.

some linguists have also concluded that, while the innatist perspective provides a plausible explanation for first language acquisition, something else is required for second language acquisition, since it so often falls short of full success. From the cognitive psychology perspective, however, first and second language acquisition are seen as drawing on the same processes of perception, memory, categorization, and generalization. The difference lies in the circumstances of learning as well as in what the learners already know about language and how that prior knowledge shapes their perception of the new language.

When speaking of initiation, I mean engaging in practices that establish an exchange between conscious reflection and the unconscious material, and developing a form of analogical language: the acquisition of a poetic literacy. I believe this literacy of the imagination arises from a creative dialogue with the unconscious and involves recurring motifs or symbols that transform with time and seduce the initiate. And of course as conscious thought is not independent of the world, similarly the unconscious draws its ancient forms from all things around us in the this secret dialogue. New forms arise out of chaos. As the alchemists proclaimed, there can be no generation without decay.

They have a right to expect language courses, like medical treatments, to be relevant and, ideally, to be designed just for them or, at the very least, for learners like them. That is why, to be rational, relevant, and successful, language course development should begin with an identification of learners' goals and an analysis of their present or future communicative needs to achieve those goals.

When someone recommends a book to you, you know two things; that it is a good book and you have a good friend. If you listen to everybody, you will be nobody. Judge a man by what he tried, not by what he accomplished. People hate what they know but fear what they don't. A curious mind is never bored. Parents, teachers, and politicians should not be judged by their popularity. People believe in everything except the reality.

Displaying the key elements of L1 and L2 acquisition, O’Neill, R. (1998) assesses that acquiring L2 as children acquire their L1 is a “wishful thinking and… based on a profound misconception about the nature of L2 learning - just as it is a misconception about how L1 acquisition occurs”. Hereinafter, O’Neill, R. (1998) maintains that “the best way to explore the differences between the two processes is to view them side-by-side – in parallel”.

My reading has been lamentably desultory and immedthodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia, whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions, nor can form the remotest, conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first named of these two Terrae Incognitae. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear or Charles' Wain, the place of any star, or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness - and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the west, I verily believe, that, while all the world were grasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study, but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies, and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great pains taking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely unacquainted with the modern languages, and, like a better man than myself, have 'small Latin and less Greek'. I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers - not from the circumstance of my being town-born - for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it, 'on Devon's leafy shores' - and am no less at a loss among purely town objects, tool, engines, mechanic processes. Not that I affect ignorance - but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious, and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a tete-a-tete there is no shuffling. The truth will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the being left alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed man that does not know me.

Like first language learners, second language learners do not learn language simply through imitation and practice. They produce sentences that are not exactly like those they have heard. These new sentences appear to be based on internal cognitive processes and prior knowledge that interact with the language they hear around them. Both first and second language acquisition are best described as developing systems with their own evolving rules and patterns, not simply as imperfect versions of the target language.

Imagine you live on a planet where the dominant species is far more intellectually sophisticated than human beings but often keeps humans as companion animals. They are called the Gorns. They communicate with each other via a complex combination of telepathy, eye movements & high-pitched squeaks, all completely unintelligible & unlearnable by humans, whose brains are prepared for verbal language acquisition only. Humans sometimes learn the meaning of individual sounds by repeated association with things of relevance to them. The Gorns & humans bond strongly but there are many Gorn rules that humans must try to assimilate with limited information & usually high stakes. You are one of the lucky humans who lives with the Gorns in their dwelling. Many other humans are chained to small cabanas in the yard or kept in outdoor pens of varying size. They are so socially starved they cannot control their emotions when a Gorn goes near them. The Gorns agree that they could never be House-Humans. The dwelling you share with your Gorn family is filled with water-filled porcelain bowls.Every time you try to urinate in one,nearby Gorn attack you. You learn to only use the toilet when there are no Gorns present. Sometimes they come home & stuff your head down the toilet for no apparent reason. You hate this & start sucking up to the Gorns when they come home to try & stave this off but they view this as evidence of your guilt. You are also punished for watching videos, reading books, talking to other human beings, eating pizza or cheesecake, & writing letters. These are all considered behavior problems by the Gorns. To avoid going crazy, once again you wait until they are not around to try doing anything you wish to do. While they are around, you sit quietly, staring straight ahead. Because they witness this good behavior you are so obviously capable of, they attribute to “spite” the video watching & other transgressions that occur when you are alone. Obviously you resent being left alone, they figure. You are walked several times a day and left crossword puzzle books to do. You have never used them because you hate crosswords; the Gorns think you’re ignoring them out of revenge. Worst of all, you like them. They are, after all, often nice to you. But when you smile at them, they punish you, likewise for shaking hands. If you apologize they punish you again. You have not seen another human since you were a small child. When you see one you are curious, excited & afraid. You really don’t know how to act. So, the Gorn you live with keeps you away from other humans. Your social skills never develop. Finally, you are brought to “training” school. A large part of the training consists of having your air briefly cut off by a metal chain around your neck. They are sure you understand every squeak & telepathic communication they make because sometimes you get it right. You are guessing & hate the training. You feel pretty stressed out a lot of the time. One day, you see a Gorn approaching with the training collar in hand. You have PMS, a sore neck & you just don’t feel up to the baffling coercion about to ensue. You tell them in your sternest voice to please leave you alone & go away. The Gorns are shocked by this unprovoked aggressive behavior. They thought you had a good temperament. They put you in one of their vehicles & take you for a drive. You watch the attractive planetary landscape going by & wonder where you are going. You are led into a building filled with the smell of human sweat & excrement. Humans are everywhere in small cages. Some are nervous, some depressed, most watch the goings on on from their prisons. Your Gorns, with whom you have lived your entire life, hand you over to strangers who drag you to a small room. You are terrified & yell for your Gorn family to help you. They turn & walk away.You are held down & given a lethal injection. It is, after all, the humane way to do it.

Pienemann (1999, 2003) developed processability theory on the basis of research with learners of different languages in a variety of settings, both instructional and informal. One important aspect of his theory is the integration of developmental sequences with first language influence. He argues that his theory explains why learners do not simply transfer features from their first language at early stages of acquisition. Instead, they have to develop a certain level of processing capacity in the second language before they can use their knowledge of the features that already exist in their first language.

Deaf, signing parents will “babble” to their infants in sign, just as hearing parents do orally; this is how the child learns language, in a dialogic fashion. The infant’s brain is especially attuned to learning language in the first three or four years, whether this is an oral language or a signed one. But if a child learns no language at all during the critical period, language acquisition may be extremely difficult later. Thus a deaf child of deaf parents will grow up “speaking” sign, but a deaf child of hearing parents often grows up with no real language at all, unless he is exposed early to a signing community.

The study of universal grammar is a joint venture between globetrotting theoreticians who worry about impossible grammars and laboratory experimentalists who put young children through these impossible grammars. Perhaps, as in physics, one of these days there will be a grand unified theory of universal grammar. Linguistics today is where physics was in the age of Galileo and Kepler. The collection of principles may one day be replaced by one powerful principle - perhaps just the principle of recursion. that underlies them all. Universal grammar is still waiting for its Newton and Einstein. Whatever it turns out to be, its job its to keep children on the right track to their language.

Tagore criticized the ideas behind the form of political action Bengal began to witness: secret societies, acquisition of bombs and other weapons, induction of very young activists, and political assassination. This path of action created some iconic figures of revolutionary militancy against foreign rule. Tagore did not question their heroism but he questioned the political efficacy of their action. Anguished to see the death of heroic freedom fighters he urged, We must not forget ourselves in our excitement, it needs to be explained to those who are excited that … whatever the strength of the urge [to resist foreign rule], in action we have to take to the broad highway because a shortcut through a narrow lane will lead us nowhere. Just because we are in our mind impatient, the World does not curtail the length of the road nor does Time curtail itself. There was no shortcut of the kind militants imagined. Tagore went on, in his own metaphorical language, to point to the limitations of the militants’ violence. Anger against repression by government had sparked off violent action. ‘But a spark and a flame are two different things. The spark does not dispel the dark in our home’, a flame that lasts is needed. ‘The flame needs a lamp. And thus long preparation is required to prepare the lamp and its wick and its fuel.’13 Thus patient preparation in politics was required, not unthinking haste in the path of violence.

Thus three conclusions emerge from the eye story: (1) it is easier to inherit a ‘vision acquisition device’ than a full-blown hard-wired visual analyser; (2) the visual analyser, once ‘set up’, is refractory to radical restructuring—hence the existence of a critical period in its development in cats; (3) the eye seems to have evolved in steps from a light-sensitive, innervated cell to our complex organ by common evolutionary mechanisms. Something similar may have been taking place in evolution of the language organ, and may be occurring during individual development. An argument, put forward forcefully by Noam Chomsky and his followers, refers to the ‘poverty of stimulus’. Most permutations of word order and grammatical items in a sentence leads to incomprehensible gibberish. There is no way that children could learn without some internal ‘guide’ which sentence is grammatical and which is not, only on the basis of heard examples. To make matters worse, many parents do not correct their children’s grammatical mistakes (they seem to be much more worried about the utterance of four-letter words). Recent investigations clearly confirm that children’s ‘instinctive’ understanding of grammatical intricacies, between the ages 2 and 4, is far better than one would expect from a conventional learning mechanism. Thus there seems to be a ‘language acquisition device’ (LAD) in the brain, which must be triggered by linguistic input so that its working ultimately leads to proper language. It is the LAD, and not a fully developed linguistic processor, which seems to be innate.

listening to stories while looking at pictures stimulates children’s deep brain networks, fostering their optimal cognitive development. Further, the companionable experience of shared reading cultivates empathy, dramatically accelerates young children’s language acquisition, and vaults them ahead of their peers when they get to school. The rewards of early reading are astonishingly meaningful: toddlers who have lots of stories read to them turn into children who are more likely to enjoy strong relationships, sharper focus, and greater emotional resilience and self-mastery. The evidence has become so overwhelming that social scientists now consider read-aloud time one of the most important indicators of a child’s prospects in life. It would be a mistake, though, to relegate reading aloud solely to the realm of childhood.

The thing many people don’t realize about corporate lawyers is that they are nothing like what you see on TV shows. Sherry, Aldridge, and I will never step foot in a courtroom. We’ll never argue a case. We do deals; we’re not litigators. We prepare documents and review every piece of paperwork for a merger or an acquisition. Or to take a company public. On Suits, Harvey does both paperwork and crushes it in court. In reality, the lawyers at our firm who argue cases don’t have a clue what we do in these conference rooms. Most of them haven’t prepared a document in a decade. People think our form of corporate law is the less ambitious of the two, and while in many ways it’s less glamorous—no closing arguments, no media interviews—nothing compares to the power of the paper. At the end of the day, law comes down to what is written, and we do the writing. I love the order of deal making, the clarity of language—how there is little room for interpretation and none for error. I love the black-and-white terms. I love that in the final stages of closing a deal—particularly those of the magnitude Wachtell takes on—seemingly insurmountable obstacles arise. Apocalyptic scenarios, disagreements, and details that threaten to topple it all. It seems impossible we’ll ever get both parties on the same page, but somehow we do. Somehow, contracts get agreed upon and signed. Somehow, deals get done. And when it finally happens, it’s exhilarating. Better than any day in court. It’s written. Binding. Anyone can bend a judge’s or jury’s will with bravado, but to do it on paper—in black and white—that takes a particular kind of artistry. It’s truth in poetry. I

The fact that publicity is eventless would be immediately obvious if it did not use a language which makes of tangibility an event in itself. Everything publicity shows is there awaiting acquisition. The act of acquiring has taken the place of all other actions, the sense of having has obliterated all other senses. Publicity exerts an enormous influence and is a political phenomenon of great importance. But its offer is as narrow as its references are wide. It recognizes nothing except the power to acquire. All other human faculties or needs are made subsidiary to this power. All hopes are gathered together, made homogeneous, simplified, so that they become the intense yet vague, magical yet repeatable promise offered in every purchase. No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.

Nevertheless I’d like to end this chapter on a positive note about how research into how humans acquire language is leading to better informed, conscious parents. Though there has been a cultural misunderstanding that a baby’s brain is not developed enough to learn and comprehend language, nothing could be further from the truth. The acquisition of language plays a fundamental role in exercising an infant’s brain and shaping its organization, neural connectivity, and intelligence. Research on the fetal brain’s ability to acquire and download environmental experiences in the womb reveal that the nervous system’s sensory input mechanisms, such as hearing, develop long before the system’s motor outputs—in this case, coordinated muscular control needed for speech. Consequently, the brain’s potential to learn and understand language is not dependent on the infant’s ability to speak.

Language can often seem abstract and transcendent of the body, the world, and even time itself. But language is more closely tied to your body mandala than you may realize, especially where its acquisition during childhood is concerned. If you read the verb “lick,” your tongue area will light up. If you hear someone say “kick,” it activates your leg areas. Christian Keysers, a mirror neuron researcher at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, says that mirror neurons may very well be a key precursor to abstract thought and language. For example, he explains, you use the word “break” as a verb as in “I see you break the peanut, I hear you break the peanut, and I break the peanut.” The constant is the mental simulation of breaking even though the context varies in each case. So your body is the foundational source of meaning—not just of words and actions but even the meanings of things you learn about through your eyes, ears, and bodily experience.

Could it be that we lose some of the visual functions that we inherited from our evolution as we learn to read? Or, at the very least, are these functions massively reorganized? This counterintuitive prediction is precisely what my colleagues and I tested in a series of experiments. To draw a complete map of the brain regions that are changed by literacy, we scanned illiterate adults in Portugal and Brazil, and we compared them to people from the same villages who had had the good fortune of learning to read in school, either as children or adults.41 Unsurprisingly perhaps, the results revealed that, with reading acquisition, an extensive map of areas had become responsive to written words (see figure 14 in the color insert). Flash a sentence, word by word, to an illiterate individual, and you will find that their brain does not respond much: activity spreads to early visual areas, but it stops there, because the letters cannot be recognized. Present the same sequence of written words to an adult who has learned to read, and a much more extended cortical circuit now lights up, in direct proportion to the person’s reading score. The areas activated include the letter box area, in the left occipitotemporal cortex, as well as all the classical language regions associated with language comprehension. Even the earliest visual areas increase their response: with reading acquisition, they seem to become attuned to the recognition of small print.42 The more fluent a person is, the more these regions are activated by written words, and the more they strengthen their links: as reading becomes increasingly automatic, the translation of letters into sounds speeds up.

The human child's use of words looks entirely different from Kanzi's because it is equipotential. There is apparently no limit to the child's rapid acquisition of new words and to their very wide application, and the child is constantly using words of everything and everybody she encounters. Kanzi, however, is stuck with few words and with limited application, and apparently has no impulse to develop them on his own or to use them except for limited purposes like making a request. We suggest that Kanzi's "vocabulary" relates to a finite number of frames of limited application and that because there is no higher-level blending capacity, those frames cannot be integrated fluidly, which is the power of blending and the sine qua non of language. The Eliza fallacy here consists in taking word combinations by Kanzi and assuming that Kanzi is doing mentally what the child would be doing with those same word combinations. We have no dispute in principle with the proposal that Kanzi or Sarah might know meanings, might associate symbols with those meanings, and might put some of those symbols together in ways connected with juxtaposition of corresponding meanings. We are making a different observation: This kind of symbol-meaning correlation need not be equipotential. For the limited frames Kanzi is using, his behavior and the child's might be quite similar, even though the underlying mental processes are different. It is a fallacy to assume that Kanzi is doing essentially the same mental work as the child. This is like assuming that because a chess-playing machine can play chess, it is doing all the fabulous double-scope blending that a human being does while playing chess. We suggest that our account is corroborated by the fact that Kanzi's vocabulary tops out at fewer than 200 words of limited application, while the six-year-old child uses 13,000 words with very wide application. The actual wide-ranging human use of even a rudimentary word turns out to be a major imaginative achievement.

Now, in Scribner's window, I saw a book called The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. I went inside, and took it off the shelf, and looked at the table of contents and at the title page which was deceptive, because it said the book was made up of a series of lectures that had been given at the University of Aberdeen. That was no recommendation, to me especially. But it threw me off the track as to the possible identity and character of Etienne Gilson, who wrote the book. I bought it, then, together with one other book that I have completely forgotten, and on my way home in the Long Island train, I unwrapped the package to gloat over my acquisitions. It was only then that I saw, on the first page of The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, the small print which said: "Nihil Obstat ... Imprimatur." The feeling of disgust and deception struck me like a knife in the pit of the stomach. I felt as if I had been cheated! They should have warned me that it was a Catholic book! Then I would never have bought it. As it was, I was tempted to throw the thing out the window at the houses of Woodside -- to get rid of it as something dangerous and unclean. Such is the terror that is aroused in the enlightened modern mind by a little innocent Latin and the signature of a priest. It is impossible to communicate, to a Catholic, the number and complexity of fearful associations that a little thing like this can carry with it. It is in Latin -- a difficult, ancient and obscure tongue. That implies, to the mind that has roots in Protestantism, all kinds of sinister secrets, which the priests are supposed to cherish and to conceal from common men in this unknown language. Then, the mere fact that they should pass judgement on the character of a book, and permit people to read it: that in itself is fraught with terror. It immediately conjures up all the real and imaginary excesses of the Inquisition. That is something of what I felt when I opened Gilson's book: for you must understand that while I admired Catholic culture, I had always been afraid of the Catholic Church. That is a rather common position in the world today. After all, I had not bought a book on medieval philosophy without realizing that it would be Catholic philosophy: but the imprimatur told me that what I read would be in full conformity with that fearsome and mysterious thing, Catholic Dogma, and the fact struck me with an impact against which everything in me reacted with repugnance and fear. Now, in light of all this, I consider that it was surely a real grace that, instead of getting rid of the book, I actually read it. The result was that I at once acquired an immense respect for Catholic philosophy and for the Catholic faith. And that last thing was the most important of all.

The lust of property, and love: what different associations each of these ideas evoke! and yet it might be the same impulse twice named: on the one occasion disparaged from the standpoint of those already possessing (in whom the impulse has attained something of repose, who are now apprehensive for the safety of their "possession"); on the other occasion viewed from the standpoint of the unsatisfied and thirsty, and therefore glorified as "good." Our love of our neighbor, is it not a striving after new property? And similarly our love of knowledge, of truth; and in general all the striving after novelties? We gradually become satiated with the old and securely possessed, and again stretch out our hands; even the finest landscape in which we live for three months is no longer certain of our love, and any kind of more distant coast excites our covetousness: the possession for the most part becomes smaller through possessing. Our pleasure in ourselves seeks to maintain itself by always transforming something new into ourselves, that is just possessing. To become satiated with a possession, that is to become satiated with ourselves. (One can also suffer from excess, even the desire to cast away, to share out, may assume the honorable name of "love.") When we see any one suffering, we willingly utilize the opportunity then afforded to take possession of him; the beneficent and sympathetic man, for example, does this; he also calls the desire for new possession awakened in him, by the name of "love," and has enjoyment in it, as in a new acquisition suggesting itself to him. The love of the sexes, however, betrays itself most plainly as the striving after possession: the lover wants the unconditioned, sole possession of the person longed for by him; he wants just as absolute power over her soul as over the body; he wants to be loved solely, and to dwell and rule in the other soul as what is highest and most to be desired. When one considers that this means precisely to exclude all the world from a precious possession, a happiness, and an enjoyment; when one considers that the lover has in view the impoverishment and privation of all other rivals, and would like to become the dragon of his golden hoard, as the most inconsiderate and selfish of all "conquerors "and exploiters; when one considers finally that to the lover himself, the whole world besides appears indifferent, colorless, and worthless, and that he is ready to make every sacrifice, disturb every arrangement, and put every other interest behind his own, one is verily surprised that this ferocious lust of property and injustice of sexual love should have been glorified and deified to such an extent at all times; yea, that out of this love the conception of love as the antithesis of egoism should have been derived, when it is perhaps precisely the most unqualified expression of egoism. Here, evidently, the non-possessors and desirers have determined the usage of language, there were, of course, always too many of them. Those who have been favored with much possession and satiety, have, to be sure, dropped a word now and then about the "raging demon," as, for instance, the most lovable and most beloved of all the Athenians Sophocles; but Eros always laughed at such revilers, they were always his greatest favorites. There is, of course, here and there on this terrestrial sphere a kind of sequel to love, in which that covetous longing of two persons for one another has yielded to a new desire and covetousness, to a common, higher thirst for a superior ideal standing above them: but who knows this love? Who has experienced it? Its right name — friendship.

A prelingual hearing loss occurs prior to the development of speech and language while a postlingual impairment refers to a hearing loss manifesting itself after the acquisition of speech and language.

The acquisition of expressive language [is] related to less aggression,

Thinking caused anxiety the way walking upright caused backaches. Our ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and use language, all recent acquisitions, did not mesh well with ancient regions of the brain that had guarded us for eons, knew only the present, and did not distinguish between imaginary fears and real trouble.

The fastest way to learn a language is to tell the truth.

far better way of understanding the acquisition of speech, and indeed the acquisition of any emergent characteristic in humans, is the selection and genetic-drift model, and via a changing interaction between culture and our genes, a mutation in FOXP2 set in a framework from which language could develop. We don’t know if the Neanderthals had that same framework; we can reasonably imagine that they did, given their similarities in material culture, morphology, and a version of FOXP2 that is the same in us and different from chimps. I suspect that they were speakers, but it will take a very clever experiment to help clarify that question, one of which I cannot quite conceive, at least not yet.

are biologically programmed for speech. We have the neurological, genetic and anatomical template that green-lights the possibility of language. We have a latent ability to acquire language, by copying the sounds of the people around us. Some birds have that too: they learn their love songs from each other. Each bird species has a few songs, enough that a well-trained ear can identify a species by its sound, though many have regional dialects (as indeed some whales do). In contrast, humans currently speak over 6,000 distinct languages, all of which are continually evolving, most of which are heading for extinction, and you probably know tens of thousands of words and can deploy them at will. We also learn syntax and grammar from those around us, our brains a software platform specific to language acquisition. Anyone with children will have heard them make

Preschool age children successfully acquire their L2 productivity. Perhaps - in addition to their capability to unconsciously acquire their L1 linguistic rules - there is their effective acquisition of productive morphemes and productive word-formation rules and patterns of their L1 (i. e. morphemes and complex words most frequently used in everyday life) which grants them an early native-like look, even if they possess a small vocabulary (10,000 words) compared to adults.

L2 learners do not naturally acquire L2 productivity. Perhaps - in addition to their incapability to unconsciously acquire their L2 linguistic rules - there is their arbitrary, or rather their nonnative-like acquisition of L2 productive morphemes and productive word-formation rules, which impede them from attaining an early native-like manifestation of their target language, even if they may possess a larger vocabulary compared to pre school age native children.

In other words, there is native children’s’ sensitivity for their L1 productivity, and, L2 learners’ reliance on Orthographic & Phonological Overlap and Morphological Translation Equivalence, resulting in L2 learners’ divergence from the natural order of acquiring L2 productivity, which makes native children look native-like, and impedes intermediate L2 learners from attaining an early native-like manifestation of their target language.

Pair prefixed words of the two languages share Morphological Translation Equivalence as well (e. g. unemployed, disoccupato). Likewise, roots forming pair compounds of the two languages may share Translation Equivalence. Besides, the same rule for the combination of roots may apply in the two languages (e. g. welcome, benvenuto). Such pair compounds of the two languages share Morphological Translation Equivalence as well.

Alike preschool age Polish children, preschool age Albanian children are presumed to acquire mostly complex words formed according to productive word-formation rules and patterns (i. e., derived words) of their L1 during their preschool age. When enter school, their lexicon is presumed to be enriched mostly by complex words formed according to less productive word-formation rules and patterns (i. e., compound words) of their L1. Even, they are presumed to have acquired most of their L1 derivatives by the fifth grade.

Do Albanian pupils outperform their English counterparts as regards the knowledge of their L1 derivational morphology? Early school age Albanian, French and English children demonstrate equal Knowledge of Lexical Semantic Relationship.

Albanian and French pupils’ high awareness of their L1 derivatives grants them a high ‘memory of language’. Consequently, compared to their English counterparts, they are more aware of the ‘Constraints’ their L1 imposes over derivational rules

Comparing Patty’s results with those of Tyler & Nagy (1989), Lardiere, D. (2006) notes that Patty’s Knowledge of Syntactic Properties of English Suffixes (as demonstrated by Patty’s scores in the nonce-words test) is higher than that of eighth grade English children, while, on the other hand, her ability to choose the proper real-derived word which suits the given syntactic context (as demonstrated by Patty’s scores in the real-word items test), equalizes that of sixth grade English children. Such results divulge hat there is a disparity between L1 and L2 acquisition of Syntactic Properties of Suffixes.

Examining early acquisition of word-formation devices, we noticed that preschool age English children acquire mostly root words. Root words constitute 31% of the first grade English children’s vocabulary. Literal compounds constitute 25% of the first grade English children’s vocabulary, and derived words solely 16% (Anglin 1993, 69-72). Imitating L1 acquisition we may uphold that pre intermediate L2 learners first have to acquire mostly root words during their early stages of L2 acquisition. It is well recognized among the scholars that knowledge of the root word and of affix/es facilitates acquisition of the derivative’s meaning in L2 acquisition.

When teaching vocabulary, teachers have to provide the counterparts that L2 complex words have in pupils’ L1. Presenting the counterparts that L2 complex words have in pupils’ L1 assists L2 learners in transferring the decomposition capability of L1 complex words to L2 complex words. Morphological Translation Equivalence that pair complex words share with each other assist L2 learners in transferring the information of the L1 complex word to its counterpart in pupils’ L2 (e. g., transitive verbs read, lees plus suffix –able/-baar resulting in adjectives readable leesbaar).

Grammar is just like a jigsaw puzzle. When putting a puzzle together, one should sort the pieces by colors, groups, and patterns to identify different sections of it because organizing the pieces effectively allows for efficient and timely assembly. The same happens with language, knowing its elements and how they work together allow for clear and effective communication.

Communication is the expression, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning with a purpose in a given context.

Language acquisition can be daunting, but with rapid learning, the journey becomes more efficient. Overcoming vocabulary challenges, reducing anxiety, and maintaining language proficiency become achievable goals through rapid learning principles.

Language acquisition comes from input, not output; from comprehension, not production.

A tip here for Parents, “catch them young”. If you want a smart kid, get your kids reading very early and reading every day.  More experimental studies are showing that excess TV exposure has been linked to lower attention in kids and could affect their language acquisition.

As foreigners, we're totally out of the communication loop. We're really considered off the totem-pole in this status-obsessed culture. It's not that we're too low or too high-we're not even there to begin with. This cannot be changed. A foreigner in Korea will always be just that. No amount of language acquisition, soju tolerance, or chopstick dexterity will make up for it.

When I told my Berkeley therapist that I was having panic attacks in the elevator of International House, he asked me why, as if they were voluntary. He cut me off before I could point the finger at childhood beatings, the Holocaust, or the Freudian saga of the dwarf cherry tree from Cooper’s Nursery that turned out to be full-size, outraging my mother, who had me lop the top off every fall. “Here’s why,” he said, tapping the eraser of his pencil against the dome of his conveniently shaven head, high above his eyes. “They’re called frontal lobes.” I laughed but he did not. It was a simple fact, he said, that the brain had evolved in stages and the parts fit together badly. Thinking caused anxiety the way walking upright caused backaches. Our ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and use language, all recent acquisitions, did not mesh well with ancient regions of the brain that had guarded us for eons, knew only the present, and did not distinguish between imaginary fears and real trouble. Fair enough, but why was it my frontal lobes’ fault if the primitive portion of my brain was too drunk on limbic moonshine to distinguish between real and imaginary monsters? Because, he told me, there is no difference between real and imaginary monsters, just as there is no difference between the past and the future: neither exists. Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life on the elevator floor, I had better realize that the brain isn’t an intellectual, any more than the stomach is a gourmet. The brain is the body, and the body lives in the present, which is all there is.

Whether or not these ideas alone would solve any of the problems discussed, I look forward to the day when SLA is more widely recognized as the serious and socially responsive discipline I believe it can be. Chapters like this one (unpleasant for writer and assuredly some readers alike) would no longer be needed. One could instead concentrate on the genuine controversies and excitement in SLA and L3A: the roles of nature and nurture; special and general nativism; child-adult differences and the possibility of maturational constraints; cross-linguistic influence; acquisition and socialization; cognitive and social factors; resilience; stabilization; fossilization, and other putative mechanisms and processes in interlanguage change; the feasibility of pedagogical intervention; and, most of all, the development of viable theories.

The widely documented failure of late starters to achieve native-like proficiency, even when motivation, cognitive abilities, and opportunities are optimal and plentiful, all agree, is one of the most salient facts about SLA. It is a weighty empirical problem, in Laudan's sense, crying out for a solution.

In the absence of either a widely accepted theory of language learning or a solid empirical base for classroom practice, teachers and learners have always been, and will always be, vulnerable to drastic pendulum swings of fashion, the coming and going of various unconventional and unlamented "Wonder Methods" being an obvious recent example. The sad truth is that after at least 2,000 years, most language teaching takes place on a wing and a prayer - sometimes successfully, but often a relative failure.

We have trained ourselves to be fearful and anxious when presented with problems. If we choose, we can retrain ourselves to be calm and to allow God to express God’s self in us once again. As I discussed in chapter one, problems begin, unequivocally, in our minds. We may have to remind ourselves that our mind is where the problem exists, nowhere else. Thus the “illusion” which I mentioned earlier. Correct the error, and the illusion disappears. Our conditioning has led us to the error of thinking of ourselves in terms of finite beings. James Carse, in his book Finite and Infinite Games, describes a world of finite games in which winners and losers, rules, boundaries, and time are all extremely important. In the world of finite games, titles, acquisitions, and prestige are of paramount significance. Planning, strategy, and secrecy are all crucial. To become a master player in the world of finite games you have an audience who knows the rules and who will grant you a reputation. Being identified with losers in the finite game is frightening and dangerous. The finite game values bodies, things, and reputations. The ultimate loss is death. In his book, Carse explains that the final result of the finite game is self-annihilation because the machines that we invent to assist us in this finite game of winners and losers will destroy those who rely upon them. Technology, marketing, productivity are all terms to encourage players to buy more machines and one’s worth is dependent on how many machines players have and how well they operate them. There is also the infinite game, which you can begin to play if you so choose. In this game there are no boundaries; the forces are infinite that allow the flowers to grow and those forces cannot be tamed or controlled. The purpose of the infinite game is to get more people to play, to laugh, love, dance and sing. Life itself is infinitely non-understandable. These forces were here before we were and will continue beyond the boundaries of death and time. While the finite player must debate and learn the language/rules to operate all the machines, the infinite player speaks from the heart and knows that answers are beyond words and explanations. This is not to imply that players of the infinite game cannot also play finite games, it’s just that they don’t know how to take the finite games seriously. This is a choice.

the Comprehension Hypothesis,12 elaborated by Stephen Krashen in the early 1980s. It holds that one factor above all is responsible for second language acquisition: comprehensible input in that language.

It is unnecessary, he added, to pressure students to produce speech or writing in the second language before they are ready, because “output” contributes nothing. It is the result of second language acquisition, not the cause. In fact, putting pressure on children to speak or write can be counterproductive, increasing stress and raising the affective filter.

educators of English learners should be well-versed in theories of second language acquisition and in methodologies such as sheltering and scaffolding. Their work should be informed by professional development and coaching from experienced colleagues on effective techniques in the classroom. But is there no room for diversity in teaching styles and techniques? Is there really just one way to shelter instruction?

Third, the Comprehension Hypothesis, on which Krashen’s concept of sheltering is based, holds that input is what matters in second language acquisition—not output. As noted above, forcing students to “produce” a second language can be counterproductive. Output per se does not contribute directly to language acquisition, and forcing speech before students have acquired enough language to express their meaning tends to create anxiety and embarrassment, thereby raising the “affective filter” that keeps input from getting through.

perfect pitch is much more common among people who speak a tonal language, such as Mandarin, Vietnamese, and several other Asian tongues, in which the meaning of words is dependent on their pitch.

ACQUEST  (ACQU'EST)   n.s.[acquest, Fr. from acquerir, written by some acquist, with a view to the word acquire, or acquisita.]Attachment, acquisition; the thing gained. New acquests are more burden than strength.Bac.Hen. VII. Mud, reposed near the

According to an extensive study comparing identical twins to fraternal twins, headed by University of New Mexico’s Dr. Philip Dale, only 25% of language acquisition is due to genetic factors.

Studies of language acquisition have found that the quickest learning comes from face-to-face tutoring. The slowest learning comes from video- or audiotapes. Plus,

Now we have come full circle to the subtitle of this book: children learn by unlearning other languages. Viewed in the Darwinian light, all humanly possible grammars compete to match the language spoken in the child's environment. And fitness, because we have competition, can be measured by the compatibility of a grammar with what a child hears in a particular linguistic environment. This theory of language takes both nature and nurture into account: nature proposes, and nurture disposes.

Universal grammar is about what language is: it is to be distinguished from prescriptive grammars, often distilled in newspaper columns, which tell us what language should be. We are all entitled to our own opinions of what is appropriate, be it in the arrangement of words or flowers - as long as we keep in mind that these are just opinions. The properties of universal grammar linguists have unearthed, however, are a useful defense when language "authorities" try to rationalize their pontifications: none of the don'ts they advertise can be found in the book of universal grammar.

A child's ability to learn many words is so completely different from anything observed in other species that many researchers propose that some neural mechanism must be especially dedicated to this acquisition of linguistic knowledge.