A2 Summer Reading

Nicole Mahoney.  Language Change. Available: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/linguistics/change.jsp. Last accessed 13th Aug 2015. Report on factors behind language change such as social, economic and political pressures. Examples of language change due to migration and invasions. Mahoney says that the needs of the speaker play important roles in language change. For example, technology, words must be coined as items are invented. Social factors are important in language change for example, the fact that we pick up new words and phrases from all the different people we talk with, and these combine to make something new and unlike any other person’s particular way of speaking. How groups in society create their own way of speaking to create a 'group identity'.

The Linguistic Society of America. Is English Changing?. Available: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/Is_English_Changing.pdf. Last accessed 13th Aug 2015. Article/pdf mentioning the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer, and why some people today believe that their language was more sophisticated.  Language may be a result of misinterpretation for example bird used to be ‘brid’, until it was pronounced differently more often and soon blended in to create “bird”. 

Lemetyinen, H. (2012). Language Acquisition. Available: www.simplypsychology.org/language.html. Last accessed 13th Aug 2015. Website post discussing the differences in the theories of behaviourists and biological psychologists in language acquisition. Skinner believed that children acquired language through association, imitation and reinforcement. He believed that our environment affects how we learn language. According to this view, children learn words by associating sounds with objects, actions, and events. They also learn words and syntax by imitating others. He suggested that adults shape their children’s language by rewarding the, reinforcing the correct, grammatical way of speaking.

Child Language Acquisition Theory. https://aggslanguage.wordpress.com/chomsky/. Last accessed 15th Aug 2015. Blog post discussing Noam Chomsky. He disagreed with Behaviourists ideas of language acquisition and proposed a biological explanation of language acquisition. Chomsky points out that adult speech is very irregular, (adult language is broken up and often ungrammatical) making it difficult for children to learn solely through imitation.  Chomsky said that humans have parts of the brain which are responsible for acquiring language at an early age, a language acquisition device (LAD) This contains all the means necessary to form language, children only need to learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures from the LAD to form sentences.