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Quotes & Sayings About Language Acquisition

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Top Language Acquisition Quotes

Language Acquisition Quotes By Stephen D. Krashen

The central hypothesis of the theory is that language acquisition occurs in only one way: by understanding messages. — Stephen D. Krashen

Language Acquisition Quotes By Patsy M. Lightbown

some linguists have also concluded that, while the innatist perspective provides a plausible explanation for first language acquisition, something else is required for second language acquisition, since it so often falls short of full success. From the cognitive psychology perspective, however, first and second language acquisition are seen as drawing on the same processes of perception, memory, categorization, and generalization. The difference lies in the circumstances of learning as well as in what the learners already know about language and how that prior knowledge shapes their perception of the new language. — Patsy M. Lightbown

Language Acquisition Quotes By Leonard Bloomfield

The totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community is the language of that speech community. — Leonard Bloomfield

Language Acquisition Quotes By Stephen D. Krashen

Older acquirers progress more quickly in early stages because they obtain more comprehensible input, while younger acquirers do better in the long run because of their lower affective filters. — Stephen D. Krashen

Language Acquisition Quotes By Noam Chomsky

UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of thisfaculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language. — Noam Chomsky

Language Acquisition Quotes By Oliver Sacks

Deaf, signing parents will "babble" to their infants in sign, just as hearing parents do orally; this is how the child learns language, in a dialogic fashion. The infant's brain is especially attuned to learning language in the first three or four years, whether this is an oral language or a signed one. But if a child learns no language at all during the critical period, language acquisition may be extremely difficult later. Thus a deaf child of deaf parents will grow up "speaking" sign, but a deaf child of hearing parents often grows up with no real language at all, unless he is exposed early to a signing community. — Oliver Sacks

Language Acquisition Quotes By Sapphire.

Almost all instruction seems to revolve around language ac-(Jermaine spelling now) "q, a-kwi-si-tion acquisition!" ("What that?" I ask. "You know, to get. Language acquisition, to get some language.") — Sapphire.

Language Acquisition Quotes By Chuck Thompson

Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed. — Chuck Thompson

Language Acquisition Quotes By Carrie Coon

I ended up doing four or five plays in college and being an English major with my thesis in language acquisition, which I was planning to study in graduate school. — Carrie Coon

Language Acquisition Quotes By Michael H. Long

Whether or not these ideas alone would solve any of the problems discussed, I look forward to the day when SLA is more widely recognized as the serious and socially responsive discipline I believe it can be. Chapters like this one (unpleasant for writer and assuredly some readers alike) would no longer be needed. One could instead concentrate on the genuine controversies and excitement in SLA and L3A: the roles of nature and nurture; special and general nativism; child-adult differences and the possibility of maturational constraints; cross-linguistic influence; acquisition and socialization; cognitive and social factors; resilience; stabilization; fossilization, and other putative mechanisms and processes in interlanguage change; the feasibility of pedagogical intervention; and, most of all, the development of viable theories. — Michael H. Long

Language Acquisition Quotes By Stephen D. Krashen

The child's reluctance to speak for the first few months of his residence in a new country is not pathological, but normal. — Stephen D. Krashen

Language Acquisition Quotes By Jennifer Egan

Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! Mine pot! — Jennifer Egan

Language Acquisition Quotes By Gary F. Marcus

In a 1957 experiment that helped launch the modern study of language acquisition, the late Roger Brown showed that children know that if you say, "Can you see a sib?" you probably have in mind an action or a process. No other mammal seems to be equipped to use such clues for word learning.

Even more dramatically, no other species seems to be able to make much of word order. The difference between the sentence "Dog bites man" and the sentence "Man bites dog" is largely lost on our nonhuman cousins. There is a bit of evidence that Kanzi can pay attention to word order to some tiny extent, but certainly not in anything like as rich a fashion as a three-year-old human child. — Gary F. Marcus

Language Acquisition Quotes By Steven Pinker

( ... ) Language acquisition might be like other biological functions. The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth. — Steven Pinker

Language Acquisition Quotes By Charles Yang

Universal grammar is about what language is: it is to be distinguished from prescriptive grammars, often distilled in newspaper columns, which tell us what language should be. We are all entitled to our own opinions of what is appropriate, be it in the arrangement of words or flowers - as long as we keep in mind that these are just opinions. The properties of universal grammar linguists have unearthed, however, are a useful defense when language "authorities" try to rationalize their pontifications: none of the don'ts they advertise can be found in the book of universal grammar. — Charles Yang

Language Acquisition Quotes By Noam Chomsky

Because you cannot study the acquisition or use of language in an intelligent manner without having some idea about this language which is acquired or utilized. — Noam Chomsky

Language Acquisition Quotes By Stephen D. Krashen

What immersion has taught us is that comprehensible subject-matter teaching is language teaching - the subject matter class is a language class if it is made comprehensible. In fact, the subject-matter class may even be better than the language class for language acquisition. — Stephen D. Krashen

Language Acquisition Quotes By Charles Yang

The study of universal grammar is a joint venture between globetrotting theoreticians who worry about impossible grammars and laboratory experimentalists who put young children through these impossible grammars. Perhaps, as in physics, one of these days there will be a grand unified theory of universal grammar. Linguistics today is where physics was in the age of Galileo and Kepler. The collection of principles may one day be replaced by one powerful principle - perhaps just the principle of recursion. that underlies them all. Universal grammar is still waiting for its Newton and Einstein. Whatever it turns out to be, its job its to keep children on the right track to their language. — Charles Yang

Language Acquisition Quotes By Mark Twain

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river! — Mark Twain

Language Acquisition Quotes By Charles Yang

Now we have come full circle to the subtitle of this book: children learn by unlearning other languages. Viewed in the Darwinian light, all humanly possible grammars compete to match the language spoken in the child's environment. And fitness, because we have competition, can be measured by the compatibility of a grammar with what a child hears in a particular linguistic environment. This theory of language takes both nature and nurture into account: nature proposes, and nurture disposes. — Charles Yang

Language Acquisition Quotes By Dan Rhodes

I fell in love the moment I saw her in her grandfather's kitchen, her dark curls crashing over her Portuguese shoulders. 'Would you like to drink coffee?' she smiled.
'I'm really not that thirsty.'
'What? What you say?' Her English wasn't too good. Now I'm seventy-three and she's just turned seventy. 'Would you like to drink coffee?' she asked me today, smiling.
'I'm really not that thirsty.'
'What? What you say?' Neither of us has the gift of language acquisition. After fifty years of marriage we have never really spoken, but we love each other more than words can say. — Dan Rhodes

Language Acquisition Quotes By Richard Wright

Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others' hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs. — Richard Wright

Language Acquisition Quotes By Steven Pinker

As far as the language instinct is concerned, the correlation between genes and languages is a coincidence. People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two. — Steven Pinker

Language Acquisition Quotes By Jean Berko Gleason

Literacy, written language is a very late acquisition in terms of human evolution. — Jean Berko Gleason

Language Acquisition Quotes By Patsy M. Lightbown

For usage-based theorists, acquisition of language, while impressive, is not the only remarkable feat accomplished by the child. They compare it to other cognitive and perceptual learning, including learning to 'see'. That is, the visual abilities that we take for granted, for example, focusing on and interpreting objects in our visual field, are actually learned through experience. — Patsy M. Lightbown

Language Acquisition Quotes By Michael H. Long

The widely documented failure of late starters to achieve native-like proficiency, even when motivation, cognitive abilities, and opportunities are optimal and plentiful, all agree, is one of the most salient facts about SLA. It is a weighty empirical problem, in Laudan's sense, crying out for a solution. — Michael H. Long

Language Acquisition Quotes By Stephen D. Krashen

Language is best taught when it is being used to transmit messages, not when it is explicitly taught for conscious learning. — Stephen D. Krashen

Language Acquisition Quotes By Josef Pieper

Since we nowadays think that all a man needs for acquisition of truth is to exert his brain more or less vigorously, and since we consider an ascetic approach to knowledge hardly sensible, we have lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity. Thomas says that unchastity's first-born daughter is blindness of the spirit. Only he who wants nothing for himself, who not subjectively 'interested,' can know the truth. On the other hand, an impure, selfishly corrupted will-to-pleasure destroys both resoluteness of spirit and the ability of the psyche to listen in silent attention to the language of reality. — Josef Pieper