Giving New Meaning to Parenting

How do children acquire language? Are their brains wired in a certain way to “soak it up” from their environment, or is there more involved in the process? What can affect a child’s language skills? There are many factors to this complicated question, but we must ask this first: What are the basic parts of a language?

The smallest unit of a word is called a phoneme. It can be a single sound, such as “p” or “c”. Changing a single phoneme can change an entire word; for example, part and cart. Although both words have similar letters, that initial sound determines the meaning. Phonology is the study of phonemes, and how they make up words.

A morpheme is made of two or more phonemes. It is the smallest combination of sounds that cannot be broken up into separate meaningful sounds. For example, bus is one morpheme. You can split up the sounds into b, uh and ssss, but none of them have a meaning on their own. Morphology is the study of morphemes.

Syntax is sometimes used interchangeably with grammar, but they aren’t necessarily the same thing. Syntax includes the rules of how words are arranged to make sense to a speaker. A change in syntax can change the meaning. For example, the classic The dog bit the man. and The man bit the dog. show a difference in syntax.

Grammar is using syntax and morphology to study a language. For example: the plural of girl is girls (you add the phoneme s to make it plural). The word girls is a noun and can be used as the subject, object, or indirect object of a sentence. The girls are inside the house. Take the pizza to the girls. He gave the girls their presents.

Paralanguage are different ways of conveying the same message at the same time. This includes distance between you and the speaker, the tone of your voice and accent, and even your appearance.

And finally, there is semantics. Lawyers quibble about the semantics of a statement made in court. The general definition of this is “meaning”, such as the difference between murder and manslaughter. They both involve the death of a person, but the circumstances are defined (slightly) differently, and it makes a difference when the jury decides the punishment.

This also includes cultural norms. When an Australian says, She’s apples, mate, an American may look at him with a strange look. If the Australian had said, It’s OK, it’s taken care of, then the American understands what he meant.

When children learn a language, they first do so by copying the adults around them. They watch how their parents move their mouths, lips, tongues and teeth to make the sounds, and try to imitate them. They learn the “Alphabet Song” (which teaches the basic sounds, the phonemes) of the native language. By a year old, they know simple words, such as cat and mama. Eventually, they learn how to string words to convey meaning, such as want cookie. A young child’s brain is flexible and learns quickly.

Most children learn language in this way, but what if a child has a learning disability that interferes with this process? What can cause these problems and how can parents help a child with speech problems? The second part of this article will address these issues.

Helpful Links:

Learning Language: This webpage is an introduction to language and language acquisition.

This Wikipedia entry outlines both first and second language acquisition.

[tags]language, learning, parenting, kids, phenomes, phonics[/tags]

Photo graciously provided by Stewart, under a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved