First Language Acquisition Notes

First Language Acquisition

Acquisition

Psammetichus's Experiment

  • An experiment involving two newborn babies.
  • The children were isolated for two years.
  • Reportedly, the children spontaneously uttered the Phrygian word "bekos," meaning bread.

King James the Fourth of Scotland's Experiment

  • A similar experiment conducted around the year 1500.
  • The children were reported to have spontaneously started speaking Hebrew.

Input

Physical Capability

  • A child must be physically capable of sending and receiving sound signals in a language.
  • Infants make "cooing" and "babbling" noises during their first year.
  • Congenitally deaf infants stop making these noises after about six months.
  • To speak a language, a child must be able to hear that language being used.

Interaction

  • Hearing language sounds alone is not sufficient.
  • A crucial requirement is the opportunity to interact with others via language.

Input - Language Samples

Home Environment

  • Older children and adults provide language samples, or input, for the child.

Caregiver Speech

  • Also known as "motherese" or "child-directed speech."
  • A simplified speech style adopted by someone who spends a lot of time interacting with a young child.

Input - Salient Features of Caregiver Speech

Characteristics

  • Frequent use of questions, often with exaggerated intonation.
  • Extra loudness and a slower tempo with longer pauses.
  • "Babytalk," including simplified words (e.g., tummy, nana) or alternative forms.
  • Repetition of simple sounds and syllables (e.g., choo-choo, poo-poo, pee-pee, wa-wa).

Input - Interactive Role

Assigning Roles

  • Caregivers assign an interactive role to the young child even before he or she becomes a speaking participant.
  • Example:
    • MOTHER: Look!
    • CHILD: (touches pictures)
    • MOTHER: What are those?
    • CHILD: (vocalizes a babble string and smiles)
    • MOTHER: Yes, there are rabbits.
    • CHILD: (vocalizes, smiles, looks up at mother)
    • MOTHER: (laughs) Yes, rabbit.
    • CHILD: (vocalizes, smiles)
    • MOTHER: Yes. (laughs)

Input - Simple Structures and Repetition

Characteristics

  • Caregiver speech is characterized by simple sentence structures and a lot of repetition.
  • Speech becomes more elaborate as the child begins using more language.

Child's Process

  • The child works out a system of putting sounds and words together.
  • Simplified models produced by interacting adults may serve as good clues to the basic structural organization involved.

Acquisition Schedule

  • Cooing and babbling
  • The one-word stage
  • The two-word stage
  • Telegraphic speech

Cooing and Babbling

Timeline

  • Birth to approximately 12 months.

Early Stages

  • During the first few months, the child produces sequences of vowel-like sounds, particularly high vowels similar to [i] and [u].

Four Months

  • Infant can create sounds similar to the velar consonants [k] and [ɡ], described as "cooing" or "gooing."

Five Months

  • Babies can hear the difference between the vowels [i] and [a] and discriminate between syllables like [ba] and [ɡa].

Cooing and Babbling (cont.)

Six to Eight Months

  • The child sits up and produces different vowels and consonants, as well as combinations such as ba-ba-ba and ga-gaga (babbling).

Nine to Ten Months

  • Recognizable intonation patterns in the consonant and vowel combinations, as well as variation in the combinations such as ba-ba-da-da.
  • Nasal sounds also become more common, and certain syllable sequences such as ma-ma-ma and da-da-da.

Cooing and Babbling (cont.)

Ten to Eleven Months

  • Children pull themselves into a standing position and use vocalizations to express emotions and emphasis.

Late Babbling Stage

  • Characterized by complex syllable combinations (ma-da-ga-ba), sound-play, and attempted imitations.

Social Role of Speech

  • "Prelanguage" use of sound provides the child with some experience of the social role of speech.
  • Adults tend to react to the babbling as if it is the child’s contribution to social interaction.

The One-Word Stage

Timeline

  • Between twelve and eighteen months.

Utterances

  • Children produce recognizable single-unit utterances.
  • Everyday objects such as "milk," "cookie," "cat," "cup," and "spoon."

Holophrastic

  • The term "holophrastic" describes an utterance that could be analyzed as a word, a phrase, or a sentence.

The Two-Word Stage

Timeline

  • Between eighteen to twenty months and the age of two.

Vocabulary

  • Child's vocabulary moves beyond fifty words.

Combinations

  • By the time the child is two years old, combinations such as baby chair, mommy eat, cat bad, will usually have appeared.
  • Adult interpretation is tied to the context of their utterance.

The Two-Word Stage (cont.)

Functional Consequences

  • The adult behaves as if communication is taking place.

Understanding

  • By the age of two, a child producing 200 or 300 distinct “words” will be capable of understanding five times as many.

Telegraphic Speech

Timeline

  • Between two and two-and-a-half years old.

Characteristics

  • The child begins producing utterances classified as “multiple-word” speech.
  • Strings of words (lexical morphemes) in phrases or sentences such as this shoe all wet, cat drink milk, and daddy go bye-bye.

Sentence Building

  • The child has developed some sentence building capacity and can get the word order correct.
  • Grammatical inflections begin to appear in some of the word forms, and simple prepositions (in, on) are also used.

The Acquisition Process

Construction

  • Children actively construct possible ways of using the language from what is said to them.

Testing

  • The child’s linguistic production appears to be mostly a matter of trying out constructions and testing whether they work or not.

The Acquisition Process (cont.)

Adult Corrections

  • Adult "corrections" are unlikely to be a very effective determiner of how the child speaks.
  • Example:
    • CHILD: My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
    • MOTHER: Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits?
    • CHILD: Yes.
    • MOTHER: What did you say she did?
    • CHILD: She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
    • MOTHER: Did you say she held them tightly?
    • CHILD: No, she holded them loosely.

Developing Morphology

Timeline

  • By the time they are two-and-a-half years old.

Inflectional Morphemes

  • Children are incorporating some of the inflectional morphemes that indicate the grammatical function of the nouns and verbs used.

First Morpheme

  • The first to appear is usually the -ing form in expressions such as cat sitting and mommy reading book.

Developing Morphology (cont.)

Plural Marking

  • The next morphological development is typically the marking of regular plurals with the -s form.

Overgeneralization

  • The acquisition of the plural marker is often accompanied by overgeneralization.
  • The child overgeneralizes the apparent rule of adding -s to form plurals and will talk about foots and mans.

Developing Morphology (cont.)

Verb "to be"

  • At about the same time, different forms of the verb "to be," such as are and was, begin to be used.

Past Tense

  • Once the regular past-tense forms (walked, played) begin appearing in the child’s speech.

Third Person Singular

  • Finally, the regular -s marker on third person singular present-tense verbs appears.
  • It occurs first with full verbs (comes, looks) and then with auxiliaries (does, has).

Developing Semantics

Meaning

  • It is not always possible to determine precisely the meanings that children attach to the words they use.

Holophrastic Stage

  • During the holophrastic stage, many children use their limited vocabulary to refer to a large number of unrelated objects.

Overextension

  • Children overextend the meaning of a word on the basis of similarities of shape, sound, and size, and, to a lesser extent, movement and texture.
  • Example: bow-wow to refer to cats, cows, and horses; ball is extended to all kinds of round objects.

Developing Semantics (cont.)

Comprehension vs. Production

  • Overextension has been well-documented in children’s speech production, but it isn’t necessarily used in speech comprehension.

Example

  • One two-year-old used apple, in speaking, to refer to a number of other round objects like a tomato and a ball, but had no difficulty picking out the apple, when asked, from a set of round objects including a ball and a tomato.

Second Language Learning

Distinctions

  • "Second language" setting refers to learning a language that is spoken in the surrounding community.
  • "Foreign language" setting refers to learning a language that is not generally spoken in the surrounding community.
  • Acquisition is used to refer to the gradual development of ability in a language by using it naturally in communicative situations with others who know the language.
  • Learning applies to a more conscious process of accumulating knowledge of the features, such as vocabulary and grammar, of a language, typically in an institutional setting.

Acquisition Barriers

Proficiency

  • Very few adults seem to reach native-like proficiency in using an L2.

Vocabulary and Grammar

  • Some features of an L2, such as vocabulary and grammar, are easier to learn than others such as pronunciation.

Critical Period

  • The critical period for first language acquisition lasts from birth until puberty.
  • When the critical period for language acquisition has passed, it becomes very difficult to acquire another language fully.

Acquisition Barriers (cont.)

Optimum Age

  • Early teens are quicker and more effective L2 learners in the classroom than older individuals.
  • The optimum age for learning may be during the years from about ten to sixteen.
  • Flexibility of inherent capacity for language has not been completely lost.
  • Maturation of cognitive skills allows a more effective analysis of the regular features of the L2 being learned.

Affective Factors

Definition

  • Affect can be defined as the emotional reaction to language learning and can act as an acquisition barrier.

Factors

  • Strong element of unwillingness or embarrassment in attempting to produce the different sounds of another language.
  • Lack of empathy with the other culture
  • Dull textbooks
  • Unpleasant classroom surroundings
  • An exhausting schedule of study and/or work.

Methods

  • The grammar-translation method.
  • The audiolingual method.
  • Communicative approaches

The Grammar-Translation Method

Characteristics

  • Vocabulary lists
  • Grammar rules
  • Memorization
  • Written language rather than spoken language is emphasized.

Problem

  • It doesn’t address how the language might be used in everyday conversation.

The Audiolingual Method

Characteristics

  • Focuses on the spoken language.
  • Mid-20th Century
  • Belief that the fluent use of a language was essentially a set of “habits”.
  • A systematic presentation of the structures of the L2, moving from the simple to the more complex, in the form of oral drills that the student had to repeat.

Communicative Approaches

Beliefs

  • Based on a belief that the functions of language (what it is used for) should be emphasized rather than the forms of the language (correct grammatical or phonological structures).
  • Partially a reaction against the artificiality of “pattern practice” and also against the belief that consciously learning the grammar rules of a language.

Specific Purpose

  • Example: “English for medical personnel”

Focus on the Learner

Shift

  • Shift from concern with the teacher, the textbook, and the method to an interest in the learner and the acquisition process.

Errors

  • Example: In the room there are three womens.

Transfer

Definition

  • Some errors may be due to “transfer” (“crosslinguistic influence”).
  • Transfer means using sounds, expressions, or structures from the L1 when performing in the L2.

Positive Transfer

  • If the L1 and L2 have similar features (e.g., marking plural on the ends of nouns), then the learner may be able to benefit from the positive transfer of L1 knowledge to the L2.

Negative Transfer

  • Transferring an L1 feature that is really different from the L2 results in negative transfer (interference), and it may make the L2 expression difficult to understand.

Motivation

Instrumental Motivation

  • Many learners have an instrumental motivation.
  • They want to learn the L2 in order to achieve some other goal, such as completing a school graduation requirement or being able to read scientific publications.

Integrative Motivation

  • Other learners with an integrative motivation want to learn the L2 for social purposes.
  • They want to take part in the social life of a community using that language and to become an accepted member of that community.

Communicative Competence

Definition

  • Communicative competence can be defined as the general ability to use language accurately, appropriately, and flexibly.

Grammatical Competence

  • The first component is grammatical competence, which involves the accurate use of words and structures.

Sociolinguistic competence

  • The ability to use appropriate language is the second component, called sociolinguistic competence.

Strategic Competence

  • The third component is called strategic competence.
  • This is the ability to organize a message effectively and to compensate, via strategies, for any difficulties.

Communication Strategy

  • A way of overcoming a gap between communicative intent and a limited ability to express that intent, as part of strategic competence.