Monday, July 11, 2011

agents of expression


Most children learn to speak and understand what’s said effortlessly. It’s a spontaneous process that doesn’t require classroom training. The brain is innately tuned to extract the rules of spoken language. Observations show that parents rarely correct for rules of grammar during early childhood. However, they frequently correct for the rules of semantics ..making sure their children convey the proper idea [link]. That’s why it’s interesting for me to see that, while children may discover the correct rules of grammar on their own ..by adolescence they’re playing pretty loose with the rules of semantics they’d been taught. In other words, they frequently use well-formed sentences to fabricate and misrepresent what’s going on.

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