The field of psychology

In order to understand how a child learns their first language, psychology has been widely studied over the past 10 years. This is why the study of the innate has been the focus of this branch of psychology. The primary proponent of the inherent hypothesis, Noam Chomsky, claims that a kid picks up their first language from others around them. However, he cannot quickly rectify his structure because the speech of those around him does not use error-free language. As a result, this necessitates the development and acquisition of a priori knowledge about the structure in terms of space, time, and semantics. This makes use of memory constrains, perception abilities, learning mechanisms, and motor abilities (Clark, Carpenter, & Just, 2014).

This essay aims at examining the psychology of language development in children through a number of mechanisms, space, time, and semantics. Furthermore, the essay will delve on the analysis of a reaction paper, based on Hebert H. Clark.

The Analysis

In learning English expressions of time and space, the child acquires these expressions by learning how to apply them to a priori knowledge about what he knows about time and space. Since the child lives in then planet earth, it’s imperative that the child learns to manipulate his space in bid to learn since he possesses a given perceptual apparatus and he revolves around in a characteristic manner. Therefore, it’s worth noting that the child knows more information about space and time before he starts learning English words for space and time. The acquisition of these words is determined by the previous cognitive development (Clark, Carpenter, & Just, 2014).

Additionally, when the child is born onto the world with gravitational force, he is endowed with biological structures such as ears, eyes, and an upright posture. These structures attribute to the development of a perceptual space, P-space which has defined properties. Afterwards, the child learns how to apply English spatial terms to the P-space which determines how quickly and what he learns. Also, P-space should be synched with the concept of space underlying the English terms, L-space and used to describe the locations of the objects in space, as the author says, the properties of P-space are strikingly close to the properties of linguistic system the speaker of English uses in describing the location of the objects in space (Clark, Carpenter, & Just, 2014). This aids in the knowing the two types of hypotheses about language and language acquisition that is, the complexity and the correlation hypotheses. Complexity hypothesis is vital for the development of psycholinguistics which gives the order of acquisition of English spatial terms based on their rule of application. This rule must be applied in language development, for instance the term Tall, only applies for vertical objects. The innate characteristic of human organisms sets a process in which a child acquires spatial terms by manifesting semantic universals, for instance in German adjectives (Clark, Carpenter, & Just, 2014).

On the other side, the P-space and L-space have a number of properties that underlie English spatial expressions which can be derived from linguistic considerations. The man’s P-space can be described in line with gravity and the nature of the earth. Also, to locate an object, directions, planes, lines, and reference points are used in P-space. As such, asymmetries of perceptual space are also considered (Clark, Carpenter, & Just, 2014). The L-space needs the notion point of the object in the English prepositions and adjectives. For instance, above and below and also dimensions of a particular object in English can be used. Furthermore, time as a spatial metaphor plays a significant role in language development by giving a systematic analysis between time and space have in common about cognitive development (Clark, Carpenter, & Just, 2014).

References

Clark, H. H., Carpenter, P. A., & Just, M. A. (2014, June). “Understand” this perceptual experience without ac—. In Visual Information Processing: Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Carnegie Symposium on Cognition, Held at the Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 19, 1972 (p. 311). Academic Press.