Period of Time From the Moment of Birth to the Present

When looking at age it is essential to know that the connection between the maturing procedure and language has customarily been broken down from two points of view: the changing language utilized during the life expectancy of an individual, and the language of various associates of people living inside a speech community. When we address the aspect of speech communities we are addressing people of any social class they may be employees, students or they may even be friends or families.

Such people utilize the language according to certain attributes to share enough attributes of articulation, sentence structure and vocabulary. Eckert pointed out that age and maturing are experienced both independently and as a feature of a cohort of individuals who share a life stage, or an experience of history. When we tackle the topic of age and language we usually refer to age grading. Age grading alludes to age-explicit contrasts in an increasingly broad sense, describing the language considered suitable to and appropriate of various stages in a life span.

Lets take an example that clearly illustrate that aspect: British teenagers during the 1980s utilized the term wicked for good; this use appears to have ceased, in any case as they have grown older and relinquished the use of slang words. This, at that point, is an age-exclusive component, utilized distinctly during the adolescent years. The genuine slang vocabulary may change starting with one age of young people then onto the next, however the process of coining special in group vocabulary during this time period of life continues.

Get quality help now

Sweet V

Verified

Proficient in: Adolescence

4.9 (984)

“ Ok, let me say I’m extremely satisfy with the result while it was a last minute thing. I really enjoy the effort put in. ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

Some age-elite highlights might be because of maturational elements, reflecting, as such natural age. Examples are the single word expressions that are typical of youngsters aged about one year, or the trembling voices related with old speakers. Some specifics such as these would be expected to happen in all parts and in all countries. Other age-specific highlights are culture-explicit, reflecting societal mentalities towards various age gatherings. Just look at this study that is done by Romain (1984,164), his study reports that children in Japan are just passive listeners not expected or pushed forward to be abled participants in adult conversation they are pressed to remain silent during such times as a sign of respect to people older than them. Such is the case in Korea and amongst the Chipewyans.

Unlike them are white Anglo middle-classes people that do exactly the opposite and thus their children are seen as well capable participants in the classroom and among friends. Although conclusions may vary according to each social scientist and linguist but some may say as Holmes did that it is in this period the period of adolescence that the usage of such phonetic and semantic elements peaks and some others like Bowie (2011) suggest that the relation among aging and sociolinguistic variety has not regularly been concentrated. In this way, it is prescribed that more examinations are to be done in these two conditions: direct and characterizing age as life encounters. These studies clearly show how language develops with age, how some words get abandoned and how others replace them. But some still question if language and age are even related. There are two existing hypotheses that till this day are not proven right or wrong. They are The Innateness hypothesis, and The Critical Age hypothesis.

The thing talked about here is whether language is innate or if it is acquired in a certain period in our life. William Chomsky was the one to propose the Innateness hypothesis for he believed that our ability to learn a language is innate and that we already have the tools needed in our mind since birth that enable us to learn any language. Chomsky defended his claims by stating that in spite of the fact that youngsters hear numerous expressions, the language that is heard is deficient, boisterous, and unstructured.

The articulations incorporate slips of the tongue, false begins, ungrammatical and deficient sentences, and no data about which expressions heard are well formed and which are definitely not. But despite that aspect children do learn parts of the syntax for which they get no data. The other contradictory hypothesis is The Critical Age hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that there is a critical age between birth and puberty. During this period a person is able to understand language fully, its grammar, syntax, etc.

But if this period is missed the person will never be able to fully learn a given language. This was the contradictory hypothesis of Eric Lenneberg. His claim can be defended by the examples of feral children who missed that stage and couldnt learn the language such as the boy of Aveyron. Other example was Genie Wilder who spent that stage of her life tied to a chair and never learning the language. After she had passed that stage that linguists describe as the critical age period, she never was able to learn the language. Various investigations have investigated the obtaining of ASL among deaf singers presented to the language at various ages.

As indicated by the University of Rochester analyst Elissa Newport, early students who got ASL from birth and as long as six years old, improved much in the production and understanding of morphologically complex signs than late students who were not presented to ASL until after the age of twelve. There exists little distinction in the vocabularies or the word-order imperatives. The thing that happened to Genie as well as other isolated children and deaf children demonstrate that kids cant completely learn a language fully except if they are inside the critical age period, past the critical age the human mind has all the earmarks of not being able to acquire a bit of sentence structure and inflectional morphology. In people, at that point, the basic age for language securing does not relate to all of language, yet to explicit parts of the grammar.

With that, theories on age remain controversial and debated till this very day, but no one can doubt that language and age are influenced by one another and change as one of them changes. We saw how language varies and changes according to age, now lets see the linguistic variation according to another factor.