Today our topic of discussion is – Significance of research
Significance of research
On the basis of the research interest, the question might arise why it is important to look at the meaning acquisition process of Bengali speaking children from the input they get from their surroundings. Children learn only the ‘language forms’ they are exposed to.
To know how language acquisition proceeds, digging up the nature of the exposure is a necessary component of any account. Among organisms, only human kind is blessed with them language acquisition ability. Thus, determining the nature of the perceptual, cognitive, conceptual, representational and linguistic capacities that enable children to perform the language act is also very essential to any inquiry to language acquisition.
The acquisition of First language has been an area of interest for decades. David Ingram (1989) divided the history of the studyinto three periods- (a) The period of diary studies (1876-1926), (b) The period of large sample studies (1926-1957) and (c) The period of longitudinal studies (1957-present).
Starting from the early ‘Diary study’ of Charles Darwin (1877) till recent case studies, it can be seen that different studies have shed light on this issue. Darwin’s diary contains observations of the facial expressions and gestures that his son William made during the first 3 years of his life. The standard work on this topic is C. and W. Stern’s Die Kinderprache (1907), a book which summarized the observations of their three children in a masterly fashion that had been so plentiful in studying child language
acquisition during the next twenty or thirty years. This book was a guideline for further work in child observation. Even though, it was done on psychological perspectives. During the modern era of diary studies, Speech development of a bilingual child: Diary from age 2 (Leopold, 1939) has been an influential work in this field, focusing mainly on the acquisition of a child’s vocabulary.
The very first study on child’s semantic acquisition was done by Suppes (1974). In the book The Semantics of Children’s Language, Suppes tried to put up issues involved in the child’s first language acquisition. But the book has been criticized for emphasizing mostly on grammar or syntax, and too little on semantics.
Other than these major studies, specific areas such as lexical development, syntactic development, grammar and verb acquisition, phonological development (etc.) have been studied descriptively (Tomasello et al., 1986(a); Tomasello & Ferrero, 1986(b); Dromi, 1999; Tomasello, 1992; Mervis et al. 1992; Kedar et al. (2006); Weerawardhana, 2016).
If the subject matters of these researches on child language are analyzed, we can perceive that study in this field started at first inquiring issues like psychological or non- verbal development of children.
Later the focus shifted to studying issues that fall into the mainstream research on first language acquisition of children. It is true that many vital areas related to this field explored, including the research interest I share, which is semantic acquisition. But it has always been analyzed as a part of the child’s over all language development or including in inquiries on stage of language development.
Morgenthaler (1981) presented a descriptive work on semantic information of pre-school language users. Important to this study are age, gender, sense of worth, assertive behaviour, expressive
language and receptive language are potentially important but isolated factors in semantic acquisition. This study intends to project its focus on the Bengali speaking children as participants, so previous work in this field done in Bengali perspectives need to be acknowledged too as these will signify the importance of my research on this issue.
At first, professor Dil (1971) attempted to investigate the nature of ‘Bengali Baby Talk’ as a predictor of social roles such as age, sex, and kinship. This study attempted to identify the phonological, syntactic, and lexical features of Bengali baby talk and its occurrence in speech.
She studied a few well-known nursery rhymes that were sung to babies as forms of baby talks. Nasrin (2008) focused on the grammar acquisition of a two-year old Bengali speaking child; the author tried to apply the theories of first language acquisition on the child’s speech and concluded that the child’s speech was ‘grammatical’ as it follow a structured pattern. Ruby et al.
(2008) studied how British Bangladeshi children are learning Bengali after school and found that most of them are more proficient in English than in their mother tongue. Bilingual literacy and numerical tasks were created and completed by pupils aged seven to eleven at two East London primary schools through action research with mains tream and community language class teachers. Sultana et al.
(2016), studied morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology of typically-developing Bengali-speaking children between the ages of two and four, studied three verb forms, the present simple, the present progressive and the past progressive.
If we look at the subject matters of these studies, we can see that semantic acquisition has not drawn expected attention in Bangladesh or Bengali perspectives of researchers working in related fields. Scattered works are found exploring lexical, morpho-syntax or
other grammatical features. Study on continued meaning acquisition process has not been done so far. This research is significant for trying to present a descriptive analysis of Bengali children’s meaning acquisition process from linguistic perspectives and it is a primary work. Moreover, as meaning development is a vital part of children’s cognitive development process, the findings of this study will also be important to psycholinguists, language therapists and researchers interested in applied linguistics.
So in essence, this research project’s significance lie in its: (1) ability to interrogate an important linguistic issue – child meaning acquisition – in the backdrop of Bengali language, (2) willingness and aspiration to reconstitute, co-construct, and open up spaces for the participants (especially the children) to engage in conversations and acts in their natural setting, and (3) passion to
centralize the needs to explore the meaning making process with the usage-based approach as an entry point. These analyses will for the most part, build up a systematic foundation of the study of child language development and, at the same time, work on personal relationship with the child and his or her family members; which will further enhance a better environment for a child’s natural language growth.
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