A newborn baby always has the faculty of wonder . . .
Psychology is the study of humans and mind. Psycholinguistics is the study about human and language which they acquire from a newborn baby, till they die. A newborn baby always has the faculty of wonder. That is how it is. If a newborn baby can talk, they will say something about what an extraordinary world it is. As time goes by, they will acquire the language used by their mom. Children are using their language creatively, no one teaches them how to use the language. Why shall we put a verb after the subject (in most language)? It is their nature to learn it. Language is a maturational controlled behavior. That is, there is a nature of language which we can learn a language on our own, and nurture, in which someone teaches us so. When individuals reach a crucial point in their maturation, they are biologically in state of readiness to learning the behavior. Most of the psycholinguists agree with these theories, but they still cannot agree with the term of innate. They cannot decide to what extent language ability is separate from another cognitive language. There is a study of child language acquisition which is done by asking the parents to write a diary, make tape recordings, videotapes, or even controlled experiments. The studies show that child language is not just a degenerate from adult language. At each stage of development, the child’s language conforms to a set of rules, a grammar. Although child grammar and adult grammars differ in certain respects, they also share many formal properties. Speaking about the nature of language by the children, it will be connected to the term of applied linguistics. Because here, in applied linguistics, we study about how parents’ language influences their children language. Such low-class parents with straightforward sentences, middle-class parents with the usual language, and high-class parents with their indirect language. Psycholinguistics is very useful to help us, a teacher candidate, to understanding our students in the class. That is, as we are an Indonesian, we shall learn more about Second language Acquisition by the children.
