Wednesday 11 August, 2010

LANGUAGE

Language is the spoken, written or gestured words and the ways these words are combined to communicate meaning.
There are five basic elements of language – phoneme, morpheme, grammar, semantics, syntax.
Phoneme in a spoken language is the smallest distinctive sound unit. Morpheme in a language is the smallest unit that carries meaning. Grammar is a system of rules in a language that enables us to communicate with others. Semantics is the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes or the combination of morphemes. Syntax is the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language.
Language development in children mirrors language structure. It moves from simple to complex. There are four stages in language development in children – Babbling stage, one word stage, two word stage and telegraphic speech.
Babbling stage begins at 3 to 4 months. This is a stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the house hold language. One word stage is a stage in speech development, from about 1 to 2 during which a child speaks mostly in single words. Two-word stage begins during the age of 2. The child will learn here to speak connecting two words. Telegraphic speech is an early speech stage when the child speaks in telegraphic language. E.g. “Go car” which means let us go to car. Psycholinguistics is the discipline of Psychology that studies the mental mechanisms of language processing – speaking, listening, reading and writing in both a native and a second tongue. Psycholinguistics also studies the processes underlying the acquisition of language. Psycholinguistics borrows many of its theoretical constructs from linguistics. Levels of processing, distinguished in theories of language comprehension or language production, correspond to linguistic levels, such as semantics, the lexicon, syntax, morphology, phonology and phonetics. Psycholinguistic experiments provides information about the psychological reality of linguistic units and the way linguistic information is represented and processed in the mind of the language user.

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