Understanding Applied Linguistics and Language Acquisition
Applied Linguistics
Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related, real-life problems. The academic fields related to applied linguistics are translation, language technology, computer-assisted language learning, second language acquisition, educational linguistics, critical discourse analysis, language policy, situated language practices, rhetoric, and terminology.
Language Variation
Variation in language use among speakers or groups of speakers is a notable criterion or change that may occur in pronunciation (accent), word choice (lexicon), or even preferences for particular grammatical patterns. Variation is a principal concern in sociolinguistics.
Dialect
A dialect is a regional variety of language distinguished by features of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation from other regional varieties and constituting, together with them, a single language.
Language Acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition is one of the quintessential human traits because nonhumans do not communicate by using language. Language acquisition usually refers to first-language acquisition, which studies infants’ acquisition of their native language. This is distinguished from second-language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.
Recast
Recast is a technique used in language teaching to correct learners’ errors in such a way that communication is not obstructed. To recast an error, an interlocutor will repeat the error back to the learner in a corrected form. Recasts are used both by teachers in formal educational settings and by interlocutors in naturalistic language acquisition.
Motherese
Motherese is a nonstandard form of speech used by adults when talking to toddlers and infants. It is usually delivered with a “cooing” pattern of intonation, different from that of normal adult speech: high in pitch, with many glissando variations that are more pronounced than those of normal speech. It frequently displays hyperarticulation, which is an increase in the distances between peripheral vowels (such as [i], [u], and [a]) within the articulatory vowel space as measured by f1 and f2 formant values. Baby talk is also characterized by the shortening and simplifying of words. Baby talk is similar to what is used by people when talking to their pets (pet-directed speech). When adults talk to each other using baby talk, it is generally either to show affection by emulating the fondness shown by adults for children or as a form of bullying or condescension, as children are much less cognitively developed than adults, implying the adult receiving speech delivered in baby talk is less intelligent than the adult talking to them.
Acquisition Through Memorization
It is obvious that children do not acquire language by simply memorizing sentences; they acquire a system of grammatical rules. No one teaches them the rules of grammar; parents are not more aware than children of the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules.
Acquisition of Grammar
Children produce accurate grammatical constructions from an early age, and researchers have tried to determine if they have learned this themselves or have copied adult speech. A famous experiment was carried out by Jean Berko (1958), who showed children pictures of fictitious creatures he called ‘Wugs’. At first, the child was shown a picture of one creature and told, ‘This is a Wug’. Then, they were shown a picture of two Wugs, and the children were asked to complete the sentence, ‘Now there are two…’. Children aged 3 and 4 replied, ‘Wugs’. As they could never have heard this word before, it became clear that they were applying the rule that plurals end in ‘-s’. However, children between the ages of 2 and a half and 5 often overgeneralize with plurals, so we hear things like ‘sheeps’ and ‘mouses’.