Terry Kit-fong Au, Janet S. Oh, Leah M. Knightly, Sun-Ah Jun, and Laura F. Romo go through the basics of childhood language learning being special to begin their article. As weâ??ve learned in class and in previous psych courses, people who are exposed to language as children learn the phonology and morphology much better than those who, however intensively they study, learn languages later in life. When a child learns a language very young but then stops using it, they lose their ability to understand and use it. However, it is possible for them to reaccess the language through age-regression hypnosis.
The study that Terry Kit-fong Au, Janet S. Oh, Leah M. Knightly, Sun-Ah Jun, and Laura F. Romo did essentially found that, â??both acoustical analyses and native-speaker accent ratings revealed that childhood speakers sounded more native-like than childhood hearers, who did not sound reliably better than the novice learnersâ??. One connection to class would be to the discussion we had of hearing children born to deaf parents who also did not speak. Their prime source of spoken language might be from a television, but because television (unless it is a show such as Blueâ??s Clues, but even that hardly counts) isnâ??t interactive, children canâ??t do hypothesis testing to try their hand at using language. To further support this, they write from their findings that, â??speaking a language during childhood helps adults learn to speak the language later with more native-like phonologyâ??. What they did find that slightly contrasted this information is that childhood â??overhearersâ?? had similar phoneme recognition as childhood â??speakers.â?? Although perhaps not expected, this still makes sense since they were exposed to just as many sounds even if they didnâ??t have to make them themselves.
This also applies to class because it speaks to sign languageâ??s need to be taken seriously as a language in itself. If deaf children arenâ??t identified early because people think that they can pick up signing easily since it isnâ??t a valid language, then they will never learn it and internalize it as well as they could have if they had been taught and exposed to sign language younger. Furthermore, it extends into practical application in the world because it proves that children need to learn second and third languages beginning at a young age if they are ever to approach multilingualism.
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