"Experience Modifies Perception" and "Being a Native Listener"
"Experience Modifies Perception" and "Being a Native Listener" are scientific articles that explain the language acquisition process using analogies from both adults and children (Werker, 1989) (Kuhl, 2000). The first article, "Experience Alters Perception," attempts to explain the level of explicitness required for language learning using two competing viewpoints from Chomsky, a strong nativist, and Skinner, a learning theorist. The second article, "Being a Native Listener," goes into greater detail by detailing how children and adults perceive language phonemes differently.
The Influence of Experience on Perception
I agree that experience changes perception, as seen by the stages of development of a child. I agree with the idea that experience alters perception as is evident during the stages of growth of a child. The notion originated from an argument between Chomsky and Skinner. Chomsky suggested that languages cannot be explicitly learned. He states that infants have some innate specifications about the universal rules which encompass the grammars and phonologies of all languages. He asserted that through the "poverty of the stimulus argument," the language input to a child is not specified. Skinner, on the other hand, suggested that language is learned explicitly and brought about in the child through a process of explicit feedback and external control of reinforcement contingencies. The concept of experience altering perception was then put to the test by professionals from various fields who then came up with different models of the learning and development process.
The Experiment on Children's Perception of Phonemes
It is true to say that a child's experience would alter the perception because it has been proven through various experiments performed on the children to ascertain the truth. The differences in experience bring about different perceptions of phonemes, which explain why the syllables in some language would confuse an adult who speaks another language. The conducted experiments involve exposure of children of various ages to different sound syllables and observation of the reaction to different syllables. In the article "Becoming a Native Listener," the experiments are conducted by the use of a pacifier connected to a pressure transducer, which would help the children receive visual or auditory stimulus (Werker, 1989). The experiment results were that the children would get bored after continued presentations of the same sights or sounds. This indicates that they can identify that specific syllable. They would respond by increasing the sucking rate when the stimuli would change. This means that children can discriminate the new sounds from the old, and they are therefore learning to distinguish sounds.
The Decline of Discriminative Capacity with Language Exposure
More experiments conducted on older children revealed that as they become exposed to a particular language during their growth stages, their discriminative capacity declines. This was shown by the experiment involving English children being exposed to Hindi syllables. When they were still young at around six months of age, the English babies could distinguish both English syllables and Hindi syllables, which would prove difficult for adults. The test results were different for the same children at the age of ten to twelve months old. The English babies were exposed to English, and so they still understood how to discriminate the phonemes. They experienced problems distinguishing the Hindi syllables. It was therefore determined that around the age of ten to twelve months, the discriminative capacity of children declined. This is because the experience of the language they had been exposed to had altered their perception.
The Interaction Between Learning and Development
I also agree that learning has some effect on development as research by various professionals in fields such as ethology, neuroscience, and developmental psychology has proposed. They have come up with different models to demonstrate the interaction between learning and development; some are interactive and some non-interactive. The interactive models suggest that learning and development processes go through a process of mutual interaction. This model seems to outweigh the non-interactive models, which would suggest that the two are entirely separable processes that could occur independently. The mutual interaction model of speech interaction says that language input plays a significant triggering role in the process of development.
The Effect of Experience on Perception
It is therefore true that experience alters perception, as seen in the experiments involving English children. It is the learning of the language that would trigger development following that language, and it would also make the child unable to perceive some differences in other languages.
References
Kuhl, P. K. (2000). Language, Mind and Brain: Experience alters perception. Development, 99-114.
Werker, J. F. (1989). Becoming a Native Listener. American Scientist, 77, 54-59.
