Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Developmental linguistics is the study of the development of linguistic ability in an individual, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.It involves research into the different stages in language acquisition, language retention, and language loss in both first and second languages, in addition to the area of bilingualism.
Language development and processing begins before birth. Evidence has shown that there is language development occurring antepartum. DeCasper and Spence [44] performed a study in 1986 by having mothers read aloud during the last few weeks of pregnancy. When the infants were born, they were then tested.
Historical linguistics involves several key areas of study, including the reconstruction of ancestral languages, the classification of languages into families, (comparative linguistics) and the analysis of the cultural and social influences on language development. [2] [3]
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
John L. Locke is an American biolinguist who has contributed to the understanding of language development and the evolution of language.His work has focused on how language emerges in the social context of interaction between infants, children and caregivers, how speech and language disorders can shed light on the normal developmental process and vice versa, how brain and cognitive science can ...
The development of connectionist models that when implemented are able to successfully learn words and syntactical conventions [43] supports the predictions of statistical learning theories of language acquisition, as do empirical studies of children's detection of word boundaries. [44]
The theory has often been extended to a critical period for second-language acquisition (SLA). David Singleton states that in learning a second language, "younger = better in the long run", but points out that there are many exceptions, noting that five percent of adult bilinguals master a second language even though they begin learning it when they are well into adulthood—long after any ...
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...