HESP120 Module 8- language acquisition

Theories of acquisition 

• Innateness hypothesis

  • Humans are genetically programmed with the capacity to acquire language 

  • Not born with language but born with the innate ability to learn language 

  • Innate: 

    • A skill that is species-specific and that is not taught to any member of a species 

  • Universal grammar 

    • Refers to the theoretical inborn set of structural characteristics shared by all languages 

      • Nouns, verbs 

  • May explain: speed and the same sequence of steps 

  • Critical period (birth to the onset of puberty)

    • A period in an individual's life in which behavior must be acquired 

    • If language acquisition occurs outside of the critical period, acquisition may be problematic 

• Explicit teaching 

• Imitation theory 

  • Children learn language by listening to the world around them and imitating what they hear 

  • Consists of memorizing words and sentences 

  • No correlation to genes 

  • May explain: learn the language they do

  • Doesn’t explain: children say things never heard before, producing mistakes, universal stages of learning 

  • *wug test 

• Reinforcement theory

  • Children learn to speak because they are praised/rewarded/reinforced 

  • Heavily dependent upon adult responses to communication attempts 

  • Limited support for this theory 

• Active construction of a grammar theory 

  • Children have to actually invent the rules of grammar themselves, based on patterns 

  • Children's ability to develop grammatical rules is innate but the actual rules are based on exposure (nature and nurture) 

• Connectionist theory 

  • Assumes that children learn language through the creation of neural connections in the brain 

  • Learn associations and expand networks 

    • Based on statistical frequency (what they are hearing) 

• Social interaction theory 

  • The driving force behind language acquisition is social interaction (parent-child interaction) 

  • Able to determine meanings of words and sentences 

Nature vs. Nurture 

• Not mutually exclusive to one another (think of them as a spectrum) 

• Nurture

  • Blank slate 

  • Wholly shaped by their environment 

• Nature 

  • Born with basic principles 

Phonological development 

• Speech sound development follows a similar trajectory for most children 

• Phonemes are acquired in a consistent manner even across different languages 

• Babbling 

  • Occurs before a child starts to produce words 

  • Stages (in order): 

    • Marginal: production of approximations of adult-like sounds 

    • Reduplicated/Canonical: syllables are repeatedly produced 

    • Variegated: production of sound sequences with different combinations of vowels (“atopa”, “goba”, “hapa”) 

    • Jargoning: production of sequences of sound with adult-like prosody, but no meaning 

• Stages 

  • 2-3 months (cooing stage) 

    • Emergence of velar consonants /g/ and /k/ 

  • 4-6 months (move from the back of the mouth to the front of the mouth) 

    • Vocal play- marginal babbling 

      • Sounds with lips, yelling, some putting consonants and vowels together 

  • 7-10 months (canonical babbling) 

    • Emergence of reduplicated babbling /baba/ as well as consonant babbles 

  • 11-12 (experimentation of different consonants and vowels)

    • Variegated babbling /atopa/ and jargoning 

• Speech sound development 

  • Ranges of times within which we expect to see specific sounds merge but all relative 

  • Similar order and time frame of phonological development for all children 

• Phonological processes 

  • Substitution 

• Fronting/Backing: tea → /ki/ 

  • When a sound that is supposed to be produced in the front of the mouth (T, D) is produced in the back of the mouth or vice versa (k, g) 

• Gliding: like/red 

  •  r/l → w

• Stopping: cheese → /tiz/ 

  • Word-initial fricatives and affricates are pronounced as stops 

- Syllable structure 

• Initial consonant deletion: deletes word-initial consonants 

  • Happy → /aepi/

• Final consonant deletion: child deletes word-final consonants 

  • Cute → /kju/ 

• Consonant cluster reduction: in a cluster of /s/ followed by another consonant, the child deletes the /s/

  • Snake → /neIk/ 

- Assimilation

• Consonant harmony (Place of articulation) 

  • Doggie → /gagi/ 

- FIS effect 

• A child’s understanding of a language (comprehension) is more advanced than their ability to produce language (speech) 

  • Comprehension precedes production in a language 

Language development 

• Pre-linguistic (0-12 months) Pragmatics 

  • Before a child begins to use words 

  • Key milestones:

    • 0-6: coo and make varied sounds, practicing vocalization 

    • 6-12: babbling begins, combining consonant-vowel sounds 

    • 9-12: gestures for communication 

    • 12: first words emerge, shift to linguistic development

• First Words (12-24 months) Semantics 

  • The first word occurs around 12 months 

  • Emergence of symbolization occurs around 12 months 

    • An arbitrary symbol (word) can stand for something 

  • 18: can use symbols without the person or thing it represents being present 

• Early Language (24-36 months) Semantics and Morphosyntax 

  • Vocabulary rapidly growing (up to 5 words a day) 

  • Emerging use of syntax 

  • Pragmatics 

    • Commenting on others comments 

    • Response to requests 

    • Stating facts 

  • Preliteracy 

    • Naming pictures in books 

    • “What is this?” 

    • Do not realize the words tell the story 

• Preschool Language (3-5 years) Morphosyntax and Pragmatics 

  • Active process in which child guesses rules from language context 

  • All parts of language simultaneously (pragmatics, semantics, syntax) 

  • Little actual ‘teaching’ of language 

  • Understands more words than uses 

    • Most are nouns (some other verbs, pronouns, adjectives, negatives)

    • Receptive vocab: 3000 words

    • Expressive vocab: 2000 words 

• School-age Language (5-18 years) Morphosyntax, Semantics, Pragmatics 

  • General growth in all language areas 

  • Metalinguistic skills develop 

  • Cognitive growth: literal → abstract 

  • Literacy 

    • Begins to emerge 

    • Reading becomes a way to learn new language skills 

  • Passive voice, conjunctions, derivation affixes 

  • Complete sentences 

    • Conjunctions, embedding, conditional 

Bilingual Language Acquisition

Dual language acquisition

• 2 types of bilingual language acquisition

  • Simultaneous: Acquisition of two languages from birth (at least before the age of 3) 

    • Exposure in setting like daycare, nannies, and frequent travel amy account for this 

  • Sequential: Acquisition of a second language after the age of 3 

    • Common for children whose home language doesn't match the majority language 

• Balanced bilingualism: 

  • Equally strong linguistic ability in both languages across all modalities (speaking, comprehension, literacy, etc.) 

  • Very uncommon 

• Simultaneous acquisition systems 

  • Unitary system hypothesis: multiple language share a common cognitive space as they are being acquired 

    • Eventually they split and child's ability to differentiate between the two improves over time 

    • Evidence: code switching 

  • Dual system hypothesis: each language exists in its own system 

    • Can differentiate between the languages from the get-go 

    • Two separate vocabularies and grammars 

    • Evidence: fMRI studies 

• Stages of second language acquisition

  • 1: home language stage 

    • Child uses their home language in the L2 environment 

    • Very brief period 

  • 2: nonverbal (silent) period 

    • Child accumulates receptive knowledge of L2 

    • Weeks to months long 

      • Socialization will reduce the length of this period 

  • 3: telegraphic and formulaic use 

    • Limited use of full or original sentences 

    • Children frequently give the impression that they can speak the language 

  • 4: language productivity 

    • Productive sentence:

      • S sentence that doesn’t consist entirely of a memorized word sequence 

    • Children begin to use their own nouns, verbs, and other syntactic constituents to formulate novel sentences 

• Typical bilingual phenomena 

  • Code-switching/mixing

    • The use of phonological, lexical, morphosyntactic, or pragmatic patterns from two languages in the same utterance or stretch of conversation.

    • Intra-utterance: 

      • When elements appear in the same utterance (intra-sentential)

      • Ex

        • “I have been able to enseñar María leer” [“I...teach Maria to read”]

    • Inter-utterance:

      • When elements appears across multiple utterances (inter-sentential) 

      • Saying one sentence in one language and one sentence in another 

      • Ex

        • “Oye, dime! I need to know” [“Tell me!...”]

    • Rule based and grammatical natural phenomenon 

  • Language attrition/loss (subtractive bilingualism) 

    • Loss of skills in an individual's L1 as they are learning their L2 

    • Typical for many bilingual individuals who are educated in monolingual English environments 

    • L2 may be more developed in academic language and literacy 

  • Language stabilization (fossilization)

    • Point when the second language is no longer developing (plateau) 

  • Language transfer/influence  (cross-linguistic transfer)

    • When aspects of one language can influence aspects of the other language

    • All modalities of language