Research Information System
in: Digitalizing English Language Teaching, Yunus Emre Akbana,Gülten Koşar, Editor, Pegem A Yayıncılık, Ankara, pp.149-174, 2023
Imagine a British mother’s joy on hearing her baby’s first word ever as “mama”, an Italian father hearing “papà”, or a Turkish grandfather hearing “dede”. They presumably feel privileged like billions of others throughout the history of parenthood. Whereas can it be explained merely by an infant’s having a deeper love and belonging to a particular parent compared to the others? It might matter but cannot account for all the language acquisition. The infant must have already experimented with the articulation of sounds in earlier stages such as cooing or one-syllable babbling. Even so, the most stimulating moment of language acquisition is probably the canonical babbling stage, in which CV (C= consonant, V= vowel) syllables are repeated often twice (Guasti, 2002) and thus uttered the first meaningful morphological units.
From a psycholinguistic point of view, the window of opportunity to acquire a language is a limited period. Like playdough, the brain is subject to plasticity after this critical period, preventing us from mastering the language as native speakers. Likewise, the rule system of any language is also limited as well and we reproduce an infinite number of utterances from this finite set of rules. Nevertheless, the mastery of vocabulary is one of the few linguistic operations with lifelong progress. It is because exposure to new words is an ongoing process in its own right, evolving and reformulating itself over time. To illustrate, most of us were not familiar with the concept of “pandemic” before 2020, but even preschool children know it today. Similarly, it is not uncommon to hear “touchscreen” or “smart devices” from the elderly, though they are rarely happy using them. All in all, words are not solely rule-governed metalinguistic items but are contextual elements for meaning-making. Now that language is before all for communication, words inevitably matter.