Language Acquisition- Linguistics

How do children acquire language? - three proposals

1 parents actively teach language

2 kids just imitate language they hear

3 they don’t learn, language is innate

The dilemma of the three proposals is that all have

issues and pros

lang. dev milestones—- first few days

children can distinguish the melody and rhythm of the language they hear from those of other languages

lang. dev milestones—- 7 months

Hearing children will start to babble (bababa, dududu)

children exposed to sign language will begin a similar activity with their hands

lang. dev milestones—- 10 months

the sounds used in babbling reduce to just those of the target language

lang. dev milestones—- 1 year

appearance of first words, including words fro specific people (mama) and objects (doggie)—- holophrastic speech

lang. dev milestones—- 1.5 years

children know about 50 words

learning rate is about 5 words per day

early two-word combos (more cookie,, see daddy)

lang. dev milestones—- 2.5 years

sentences rapidly start to expand beyond two words and increase in grammatical complexity

lang. dev milestones—- 7 years

the human capacity to learn language in this particular way begins to gradually fade

prelinguistic stage— what can kids do before they can talk?

recognize sounds

discriminate speech sounds

segment speech

identify patterns in their native language

linguistic- babbling stage

babbling may be the first stage of language acquistions, where babies try to uncover units of language

this is NOT a prerequisite for language

linguistic— single word stage

12 months— babies have begun to segment the continuous speech stream, pick out some words and use them

holophrastic sentences

holophrastic sentences

one word to express a whole sentence/message

up=pick me up

dog=naming

no=assertive

uh-oh=after an accident

linguistic- single word stage

phonology simplified- mostly monosyllabic CV utterances

dog da

sounds that occur frequently in the worlds languages are the first to be used (b,m,d,k)

sounds that are infrequent are used last (θ) (th)

linguistic- two word stage

2 years old- children start to put words together

ex- mommy sock

doggy floor

push truck

no morphological markers

a variety of grammatical relationships between the two words

ex- possessive, entity + locative, action + object

linguistic— telegraphic stage

first utterances longer than 2 words are all missing function words, like telegrams

ex- what that?

he play little car

andrew want that

no sit there

Telegraphic utterances conform to word order of language being learned (ex- SVO in english, SOV in Japanese)

inflection and function words come in different stages

MLU

mean length of utterance