Horizon

Notes taken from Horizon documentary - English Language - 4/9/14

How we speak - Child language acquisition CLA

Language defines us as humans, it allows us to express ourselves
Children learn language with minimal effort, learning it naturally
Nature vs Nurture
Babies understand nouns and not grammar
How learn to speak is still a mystery

Dr Deb Roy - cognitive scientist conducted the speech home project on his daughter from birth to the age of 3 monitoring her speech
Babble to single word to two words
How we talk to children affects how they learn positive reinforcement will encourage learning I.E. good job.... well done
Parents simplify heir speech so it's easier to understand, elongating spaces between words
Convergence to be at the same level - Parentese
Intonation of speech phonologically out ways the grammatical
An average 5 year old will know over 5,000 words
Determiners - this one, that one, that is a
We learn on average 3,00 words a year

Larynx in humans is lower than in animals allowing us the ability of speech
Different parts of the brain do different things during speech
Babies listen in the womb to their mother, allowing them to recognize their mother after birth
We have an innate ability to learn language when we are young

Noam Chomsky - the godfather of linguistics 
Chomskys' LAD
Forbidden experiment, a child left alone in a room and brought up with no language interaction

KE family lack a certain gene allowing them to speak properly, 15 out of 30 suffer from this
parts of chromosome 7  where broken and replaced by faulty genes.
Scientists no know that the FOX - P - 2 is responsible for our ability to talk, supporting the cognitive theory - Chomsky LAD critical acquisition
Language develops unconsciously, happening over a long period of time