12. language acquisition

child-directed speech

form of speech often used in talking to babies or toddlers; includes slow, simplified speech, a high-pitched tone, exaggerated vowel sounds, short words and sentences, and much repetition (also called parentese)

expansion

occurs with a recast when talking to children to elaborate further on what has been said

(C: I slood down the slide!

A: Oh, you slid down the slide! Was it fun?)

first language acquisition (FLA)

acquisition (unconscious learning) of one’s native language (or languages in the case of bilinguals)during the first 6 or 7 years of one’s life

fis phenomenon

children can hear and mentally represent differences in sound sequences before they can produce them → a child called a plastic fish a “fis”, when asked if the toy is a “fis”, the child disagrees, but when asked if the toy is a “fish”, it agrees but continues to call it a “fis”

generativist approach

particularly interested in what is possible in particular languages or languages in a general sense, nature based

input

languages that babies and children hear around them

language acquisition

concerned with the acquisition of both first and second languages by monolingual and bilingual speakers, and by speakers showing both typical and atypical pathways of acquisition

logical approach

seeks to understand language acquisition from the perspective of adult language, focus on the endpoint of acquisition rather than the path, assumes that children are born with the Language-acquisition-device, innate structure of language (rules) → universal grammar

language acquisition device (LAD)

an innate capacity to acquire any language

nature

innate ability

nurture

through education

observational approach

also called social constructionist or emergentist research, focuses on what we can observe about how children learn language, particularly concerned with how children learn to interpret the language around them, goes beyond sound, words and grammar, but also involves things like inference and circumstance-based language use, nurture based

overextension

tendency to overextend the meanings of words, especially when the child’s vocabulary is limited → e.g. when the child uses incorrect grammar

recast

support acquisition, e.g. when the child uses the incorrect grammatical form, and the adult rephrases it with the correct form

second language acquisition (SLA)

used to cover any languages or language acquired after the first language

underextension

opposite of overextension → one general word only refers to a specific thing