Blog 9

The Science of Accents

In the article the author, Esther Inglis Arkell, states that a person's accents varies depending where one lives. Humans are not the only ones that have accents, animals as well. She states that " Goats say bahhhh with different accents, depending on where they live" (Arkell). Babies ar ealso born with the ability to absorb any type of sound and language. At some point in our lives, we lose the ability to make certain sounds due to the fact that we cannot longer hear them.  A scientists at the University of Washington did hearing tests on babies from 6 months to 1 year old. This experiment was established to understand what kind of sounds babies could hear. the scientists discovered that babies who have been around Japanese speakers, could not hear the letter "R". It was surprising that babies who have been around English speakers had a hard time distinguishing the letter "R" from "I" as well.

Blog 8

Humans are the only known species to acquire a complex language. We are able to express ourselves in full sentences with the limited grammar that we have. In the Article, "Language Acquisition", by  Henna Lemetyinen she states that infants who are at least 12 months old are able to understand causative languages and grammar. Skinner's conclusion was that children learn language by associating words with meanings. However, Chomsky argued that children will not acquire the tools they need with just the language input alone. He proposed the theory of Universal Grammar and use verb categories with noun categories. Further research suggests that children are sensitive to patterns in language and will detect utterances from what they have heard.

Language Acquisition