A Critical Review of Infant Artificial Language Learning Essay

They also give evidence which comes from experiments showing that newborns discriminate a passage read aloud by their mothers during the last six weeks of pregnancy from an unfamiliar one. Rebecca L. Gomez and Louann Gerken’s observation about this phenomenon is very helpful especially for those who are learning about the mystery of how children acquire their language and it is only how but also since when children especially infant acquire the language and it can be answered by Rebecca L. Gomez and Louann Gerken which stated that there’s a probability infants learn and acquire language since in the utero. Summary How children acquire language is one of the mysteries of human cognition. There is a view about thirty years ago states that children master language by means of a language-specific learning device but in earlier proposal states that children make use of domain-general, associative learning mechanisms. Language acquisition is one of the most complex learning tasks imaginable. The complexity of natural language makes it exceedingly difficult to isolate factors responsible for language learning. Infant language researchers have begun by examining four aspects of the language learner’s task. The first involves identification of word-like units in speech. The second involves encoding and remembering the order in which words occur in sentences. The third involves generalization of grammatical relations. The last involves learning at the more abstract level of syntactic categories (e. . determiner, adjective, noun and verb). This fourth sensitivity is at the root of our unique human ability to produce and comprehend novel utterances. First implication of the research on infant artificial language learning concerns artificial-language-learning studies discussed have examined infants’ sensitivity to linguistic form in the absence of semantic content. This is not to say that learners do not ultimately need to map the syntactic forms they encode durin g infancy onto meaning. Obviously they do. However, the fact is infants are able to acquire certain aspects of form prior to acquiring the meaning of these forms changes the nature of the language acquisition problem in a fundamental way. A second implication of the research on infant artificial language learning concerns the specificity of the constraints on the learner. On many accounts, these constraints have been construed as being language specific, such that for every aspect of language to be acquired, the child is born with a specific constraint. Data showing that infants can use transitional probabilities to segment grammatical tone sequences contrasts with this view. A third implication of both the infant artificial-language learning studies reviewed here and many studies of infant language perception preceding them concerns the relevance of children’s early utterances as evidence for theories of language acquisition. One of the key observations of linguistic natives involves errors that children do not make. Children never erroneously transform a statement like ‘The man who is tall is Sam’ into a question like ‘Is the man who tall is Sam? The lack of such errors, along with logical arguments concerning the poverty of the stimulus, have been taken as evidence that children never consider rules based solely on linear order in sentences. it is equally important to note that if the studies of infants’ early linguistic abilities tell us anything, it is that they have become sensitive to many asp ects of linguistic form a year or more before they ever begin to produce multiword speech. This is not to say that all of language is acquired by the age of 12 months. However, if infant language-perception studies have one theme, it is in demonstrating the extremely complex relationship between aspects of their native language infants. Thus, we must exercise caution in interpreting children’s early utterances as evidence for or against the linguistic representations they do and do not entertain. Critical Evaluation Infant Artificial Language Learning and Language Acquisition by Rebecca L. Gomez and Louann Gerken are based on the observation which they already held and also from the later observation from other experts. The main focus in this journal is about the artificial language of infant, here Rebecca L. Gomez and Louann Gerken made such a grammar for infant to determine whether infants could learn ‘grammatical’ word order, Gomez and Gerken exposed 12-month-olds to a subset of strings produced by one of two grammars. However, this journal focuses not only how children especially infant acquire language but also since when infant acquire the language itself. Rebecca L. Gomez and Louann Gerken also give evidences which make their observation stronger. The explanation given is also complete and simple. Conclusion Infant Artificial Language Learning and Language Acquisition by Rebecca L. Gomez and Louann Gerken is a journal that expose about infant artificial language. They explain how infant acquire language from their own observation and they also made a grammar special for infant in order to complete their observation but besides that, they also take some observation which also already been discovered. This journal is worthy to read especially for the linguists who try to reveal and find out one of the mysteries in human cognition which is how children acquire language.