Language Play In Children

Language Play

Did you ever wonder why young children like to tell stories, repeat what we say, make rhymes, etc? Simply because they are playing with the language that they are trying to learn. It has been proven that children’s play with the language system in terms of both cognitive and social factors all function together to allow the child learn the language systems and make meaning. Language play is an activity children engage in that is inherited in particular social and cultural contexts and which has certain meanings and values for the users (Gillen, 157). Children expand on their language by playing with all elements associated with the language such as: sounds, linguistic systems, rhymes and conventions of speech. Accordingly,

Psycholinguists believe that children are born with the ability to learn and engage actively with a language, take the initiative to respond, and make meaning. Such practice is known as protoconversations; which is the conversations between infants and caregivers. The way infants make certain movements to express understanding shows that infants have a coherent organized mind that specifies the timing and form of body movement to communicate before they even know the language (Gillen, 158-9). For that reason, the linguist Noam Chomsky, believes that children are born with an inherited ability to learn any language as it is already imprinted on the child’s mind and therefore; Chomsky suggests that every child has a ‘Language Acquisition Device,’ that has the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain, so children only learn the vocabulary and apply the syntactic structure to form sentences

(She goes back and inserts the number 7. Then she writes Tody and wet.)

Taralyn: What is the weather? It’s my turn.

Ellen: Raise your hand for the weather.

Taralyn: Today the weather is sunny.

Ellen: (Writing on the board, she asks Taralyn for help.) What comes after s-u-n?

Taralyn: N-n-y. (Isenberg, 2010).

The children in the above example show their building on what they already know that is the routines of school, teacher behaviors, basic literacy concepts and skills. Also, they play with words and letters as they test the spelling of weather and the way to record the date (Isenberg, 2010). Therefore, we can conclude that language play is an important social and anthropological factor that enhances on the development of children’s thinking and understanding.

In conclusion, we have dived into the children’s world and their learning process and its association with language play and its relation with the psycholinguistic and social anthropology fields. Playing with language is essential among all children because it enables children to: make sense of their world, develop social and culture understandings, express feelings and thoughts, think, solve problems, and enlarge their language and literacy