Answer to Question #304960 in English for Mpho

Question

Babies between the stages of 10 months and 13 months are at this stage and are able to understand a number of utterances from the mother or other caregivers even though they cannot produce any utterances

Answer 1

Given a language's incredible complexity, one might anticipate learning it to be a particularly difficult undertaking; fact, for those of us trying to learn a second language as adults, this may appear to be the case. Young children, on the other hand, pick up language fast and with relative ease. Language is learned by reinforcement, according to B. F. Skinner (1957). This behaviorist view was questioned by Noam Chomsky (1965), who claimed that the mechanisms underlying language acquisition are biologically determined. Language acquisition occurs without formal instruction and appears to follow a similar pattern in children from various cultures and backgrounds. As a result, it appears that we are born with a biological proclivity for language acquisition (Chomsky, 1965; Fernández & Cairns, 2011). Furthermore, it appears that language learning has a key phase during which proficiency in acquiring language is at its peak;The ease with which people learn and master new languages decreases as they get older (Johnson & Newport, 1989; Lenneberg, 1967; Singleton, 1995).From a young age, children begin to learn about language. Indeed, it appears that this takes place even before we are born. Newborns have a predilection for their mother's voice and appear to be able to distinguish between their mother's language and others. Babies are also sensitive to the languages spoken around them, showing a preference for movies of faces moving in time with the sounds of spoken language over videos that do not (Blossom & Morgan, 2006; Pickens, 1994; Spelke & Cortelyou, 1981).Each language has its own collection of phonemes, which are used to create morphemes, words, and other forms of communication. Babies can distinguish between the sounds that make up a language (for example, they can identify the difference between the "s" in vision and the "ss" in fission); they can also distinguish between the sounds of all human languages, including ones that do not appear in their settings. By the time they are around a year old, however, they can only distinguish between phonemes that are employed in the language or languages in their surroundings (Jensen, 2011; Werker & Lalonde, 1988; Werker & Tees, 1984).