4. First Language Acquisition

First Language Acquisition

______________:The emergence of language in children with seemingly little effort. Doesn’t seem to be an active learning process—more passive

• •Speech errors provide valuable clues about how the acquisition process works; children don’t just imitate what they hear, but create rules of their   own to capture the regularities they observe (and sometimes apply them incorrectly)

Grammar

_____________: The mental system of rules that allows people to speak and understand a languages

• Mature language learners are able to produce and understand an unlimited number of novel sentences; simple memorization of a fixed inventory of words and sentences would not equip learners to deal with previously unheard utterances

Methods

• Naturalistic Approach

  • Diary Study

• Experimental Approach

  • Cross-sectional

Naturalistic Approach

Methods

______________:Observe and record children’s spontaneous utterances

• Recordings of interactions with caregivers

• Tend to be longitudinal—track language development over an extended period of time (years)

• CHILDES database

• Diary Study

Diary Study

Naturalistic Approach

______________: A researcher (usually a parent) keeps daily notes on a child’s linguistic process

Pros of a Naturalistic Study

______________: Massive amounts of information (CHILDES) as it occurs naturally in first language acquisition

Cons of a Naturalistic Study

______________: Particular structures and phenomena may occur rarely in children’s everyday speech, making it difficult to gather enough information

Experimental Approach

Methods

______________: Elicit particular linguistic activity through specially designed tasks

• Try to gauge their comprehension of a sentence like this and at what age it begins

• Cross-sectional

Cross-sectional

Experimental Approach

______________: Typically compares different children at one particular point in time (e.g., a single experiment with 2-yr-olds, 4-yr-olds, and 6-yr-olds)

Pros of Experimental Approaches

______________: Can elicit a specific type of data (e.g. fronting of the auxiliary verb when asking a question)

Cons of Experimental Approaches

______________: Many structures are hard to elicit; a child’s performance will be affected by extraneous factors, such as inattention, shyness, or a failure to understand what is expected

Phonological Development

______________: Children seem to be born with a perceptual system that is especially designed for listening to speech.

• Newborns respond differently to human voices than to other sounds,

• show a preference for the language of their parents over other languages,

• can recognize their mother’s voice

• Hearing begins in the womb, they first hear intonation (pool underwater experiment)

• By one month, English babies can perceive the phonemic difference   between [p] and [b]

• Sucking Paradigm, Babbling, Order, Early & Universal Processes

Sucking Paradigm

______________: high-amplitude sucking technique (HAS), (non-nutritive sucking), a specially designed soother

• an experimental method for testing infants from birth to age 4 months

• The number of high amplitude sucks produced is used as an index of interest.

• can be used to test infants’ discrimination of and preference for a variety of language stimuli

  • A change in the children’s sucking rate indicated that they perceived the difference between the two syllables [pa] and [ba] and that they were therefore able to distinguish between [p] and [b].

Native Language Preference

______________: More sucking activity, more interested in what they’re hearing/ Increase at beginning because interested, but for foreign speakers it drops off. Attuned very soon to their own language.

• Adoption implications

Babbling

Phonological Development

______________: the ability to produce speech sounds

• 6 mos.

• Babies practice using their vocal apparatus

• Early _________ seems at least partly independent of language

Developmental Order

Phonological Development

______________: Intelligible words by about 12 mos.

• Vowels tend to be acquired before consonants (by age 3).

• Stops tend to be acquired before other consonants.

• Labials are acquired first (they can watch parents produce them), then alveolars, velars, and alveopalatals. Interdentals are acquired last

• Phonemic contrasts are acquired word-initially first (pat-bat before cap-cab)

Typical Consonant Inventory

Developmental Order

______________:In general, the relative order in which sounds are acquired reflects their distribution in the world’s languages: sounds acquired early are found in more languages, and sounds that are acquired late are more rare.

• [θ]  [ð]  [ʒ]  age 5-6

Orthography

___________: Can give us clues on how to pronounce

Early Phonetic Processes

___________: Comprehension comes before production.

Universal Phonetic Processes

• Syllable deletion

• Syllable Simplification

• Substitution

• Assimilation

Syllable Deletion

1. Stressed syllables are retained while unstressed syllables are deleted

2. Unstressed syllables in final position tend to be retained

Syllable Simplification

___________: Systematic deletion of certain sounds to simplify syllable structure

• Final Consonant Deletion dog→[dɑ], bus→[bʌ] boot→[bu]

• Reduction of consonant clusters

[s] + stop strategy

Reduction of consonant clusters

___________: delete [s]

• stop → [tap]

• small → [ma]

• desk → [dek]

stop + liquid strategy

Reduction of consonant clusters

___________: delete liquid

• try → [taj]

• crumb → [gum]

• bring → [bing]

fricative + liquid strategy

Reduction of consonant clusters

___________: delete liquid

• from → [fum]

• sleep → [sip]

nasal + voiceless stop

Reduction of consonant clusters

___________: delete nasal

• bump → [bup]

• tent → [det]

Substitution

___________: Systematic replacement of one sound by an alternative (“easier” sound)

Stopping

Substitution

____________: continuant → stop

• s→t

  • sing→[tiŋ]

  • sea→[ti]

• z→d

  • zebra→[dibrə]

• θ→t

  • thing→[tiŋ]

• ð→d

  • this→[dis]

• ʃ→t

  • shoes→[tus]

Fronting

Substitution

____________: moving a sounds place of articulation forward

• ʃ→s

  • ship→[sIp]

• d3→dz

  • jump→[dzump]

• tʃ→ts

  • chalk→[tsak]

• g→d

  • go→[dow]

Gliding

Substitution

____________:Replacing a liquid with a glide

• l→j

  • lion→[jajn]

• l→w

  • look→[wuk]

• r→w

  • story→[stowi]

Denasalization

Substitution

____________:Replacing a nasal with a non-nasal stop

• n→d

  • spoon→[spud]

• m→b

  • jam→[daeb]

Assimilation

___________: Modification of one or more features under the influence of neighbouring sounds

• Voiceless sound becomes voiced when next to voiced sounds

Vocabulary Development

___________: 50 words or more by 18 mos. Dominated by nouns, verbs, then adjectives

Common items in the first fifty words

Meaning Errors

• Overextensions

• Underextensions

Overextensions

Meaning Errors

____________: the meaning of the child’s word is more general or inclusive than the adult form

• typically compensate for vocabulary limitations, and disappear when children learn the correct word for the objects they have been mislabelling (like “cat,” “crumb,” “grapefruit,” or “button”).

Underextensions

Meaning Errors

____________: the meaning of the child’s word is more restricted than the adult form

• E.g.: “kitty” is only the family pet; “dog” refers to labs and retrievers, but not chihuahuas.

• show preference for the prototype (labs and retrievers have  more properties associated with the concept dog than tea-cup chihuahuas or  hairless dogs).

Morphological Development

• Overgeneralization/Undergeneralization

• A developmental sequence

• Word formation processes

Overgeneralization/Undergeneralization

Morphological Development

____________: Children may have to hear an irregular form up to 100 times before eliminating ___________.

(Hence, words with irregular inflection that occur more frequently (go/went, child/children) are learned quicker than less frequent words (sink/sank, ox/oxen).

• One of the best indications that children have mastered an inflectional rule is their ability to apply it to forms they have not heard before.

The development of affixes

1. Stage 1: Case-by-case learning (plural boys, men, etc.; past tense walked, ran, etc.)

2. Stage 2: Overuse of general rule (plural mans; past tense runned) May seem like they’re moving backwards, but they’re not

3. Stage 3: Mastery of expectations to the general rule (plural men; past tense ran)

A developmental sequence

Morphological Development

____________:The development of bound morphemes and functional categories (determiners and auxiliaries) is surprisingly regular. First the -ing morpheme, then plural s, etc.

• And seems to be at least partly independent of adult speech. Adults say the most, but children acquire if 4th

Word formation processes

Morphological Development

____________: The major word formation processes are derivation (adding affixes) and compounding (sticking two words together)

Suffixes in the speech of a child prior to age 4

Ending	Meaning	Example
-er	‘doer’	walker
-ie	‘diminutive’	doggie
-ing	‘activity’	Running is fun.
-ness	‘state’	happiness

Innovative N-N Compounds

Word Formation Processes

____________: Building words with known words may be less demanding on the memory than learning an entirely new word for each concept.

Syntactic Development

• Babbling

• One-word stage/holophrases (1-1.5 yrs)

• Two-word stage (1.5-2 yrs)

• Telegraphic stage (2-2.5 yrs)

• Later Development (2.5+ yrs)

One-word stage/holophrases (1-1.5 yrs)

Syntactic Development

__________:Single open-class words or word stems

Two-word Stage (1.5-2 yrs)

Syntactic Development

__________: ”Mini-sentences” with simple semantic relations, almost always exhibit appropriate word order (general word order rule by 3 years old)

Telegraphic stage (2-2.5 yrs)

Syntactic Development

__________: Sentence structures of lexical rather than functional or grammatical morphemes. Starting to create phrases consisting of a head and a component ([her name], [ride bus])

Later Development (2.5+ years)

Syntactic Development

_________: Grammatical or functional structure

What makes language acquisition possible?

• Experience

• Feedback

• Cognitive Development

• Inborn Knowledge

Experience

What makes language acquisition possible?

___________: Exposure to large amounts of speech

• Motherese/caregiver speech

• Carefully articulated speech

• Note: in Western Samoan, speech to   children is not simplified, yet Samoan   children have no trouble learning Samoan

Motherese/Caregiver Speech

All languages seem to possess this

Phonetic

• Slow, carefully articulated speech Higher pitch

• Exaggerated intonation and stress

• Longer pauses

Lexical and semantic

• More restricted vocabulary

• Concrete reference to the here and now (not existential)

Syntactic

• Few incomplete sentences Short sentences

• More imperatives and questions

Conversational

• More repetitions

• Few utterances per conversational turn

• IDS/CDS child or infant directed speech

Feedback

What makes language acquisition possible?

___________: Corrections have little impact

• Recasts may help: providing with potentially useful information that might be helpful to move from the target form (adding a missing verb, etc.)

  

Cognitive Development

What makes language acquisition possible?

___________:Language acquisition appears to be independent of other types of cognitive development to a large extent

Inborn Knowledge

What makes language acquisition possible?

___________: Are children born with a Universal Grammar, a set of inborn categories, operations, and principles common to all human languages? (Noam Chomsky)

• Phrases embedded within each other

• Why do languages all have nouns and verbs, embedding?

• LLMs have causes us to challenge the idea that we have an inborn grammatical template

Is there a critical period?

___________: The ability to acquire a first language in an effortless and ultimately successful way begins to decline from age 6 and is likely linked to brain lateralization

• Before 6, using our whole brain, after it begins to lateralize

• Genie Wiley: Genie was not spoken to until the age of 13

• It has been reported that hearing children growing up in homes with non-speaking deaf parents cannot learn spoken language from radio or even television.

  • Can you think of any reasons for this?

  • What are the implications of these findings for our understanding of the type of experience that is required for language acquisition?

Language Acquisition in Chisasibi language (eastern cree)