Language Acquisition

نویسندگان

  • Stephen Crain
  • Rosalind Thornton
چکیده

Every normal child acquires a language in just a few years. By four or five, children have effectively become adults in their abilities to produce and understand endlessly many sentences in a variety of conversational contexts. There are two alternative accounts of the course of children's language development. These different perspectives can be traced back to the NATURE VERSUS NURTURE debate about how knowledge is acquired in any cognitive domain. One perspective dates back to Plato’s dialogue “The Meno”. In this dialogue, the protagonist, Socrates, demonstrates to Meno, an Aristocrat in Ancient Greece, that a young slave knows more about geometry than he could have learned from experience. By extension, PLATO’S PROBLEM refers to any gap between experience and knowledge. How children fill in the gap in the case of language continues to be the subject of much controversy in cognitive science. Any model of language acquisition must address three factors, inter alia:

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تاریخ انتشار 2008