Language Acquisition Notes

Properties of Language Acquisition

  • Language knowledge:
    • Abstract and complex, yet easily acquired by children.
    • Properties of child language acquisition:
    • Universality: All children acquire at least one language.
    • Uniformity: Any child can learn any language, succeeding in acquiring grammar from caretakers.
    • Rapidity: Children learn language faster than other complex skills.
    • Consistency of Stages: Children follow similar stages of language development simultaneously, regardless of culture.

Role of Parents in Language Acquisition

  • Parents do not teach language directly; instead:
    • Children's language acquisition is guided by innate knowledge of language structure (Universal Grammar, UG).
    • The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is responsible for applying UG in learning.
  • Evidence against explicit teaching:
    • Parents respond to children's speech but often fail to provide consistent corrections.

Positive and Negative Evidence

  • Positive evidence: Signals that a sentence is grammatical and consists of the language around children.
  • Negative evidence: Signals that a sentence is ungrammatical; children receive little reliable negative evidence from parents.

Parental Response Types

  • Different forms of feedback:
    • Explicit correction: Directly telling the child that a response is incorrect.
    • Explicit approval: Acknowledging a correct statement.
    • Repetition: Repeating the child's statement to guide them.
    • Recasting and expansion: Adults reformulate child's incorrect sentences into grammatical ones.

Findings from Studies

  • Parents rarely correct children's grammatical errors consistently.
    • Parents often approve of ungrammatical sentences (e.g., "Mama not a boy").
  • Corrections often focus on content rather than grammatical structure, creating "noisy" feedback.
  • Children's resistance to grammar correction:
    • Children often repeat incorrect grammar even after correction attempts by parents.

Stages of Early Language Development

  • Stage I: Reflexive Stage (0-8 weeks):
    • Reflexive sounds related to biological functions, no language-specific sounds.
  • Stage II: Cooing (8-20 weeks):
    • Extended vowel sounds, often with initial consonants.
    • Preference for certain sounds ([a] and [u]).
  • Stage III: Vocal Play (5-6 months):
    • A wider variety of vowels and consonants; recognizable syllables.
  • Stage IV: Babbling (6-12 months):
    • Systematic sound repetition, beginning to reflect caregiver language.

Learning through Loss

  • By approximately 10 months, children start losing their universal listening ability, focusing only on their target language's phonemic distinctions.

Later Language Development Phases

  • Holophrastic Stage (around 1 year):
    • Single words indicating full phrases, typically focusing on nouns and social interactions.
  • Two-word Stage (around 1.5 years):
    • Combining words into two-word utterances, reflecting target language structure.
  • Telegraphic Stage (around 2 years):
    • Producing longer sentences, omitting functional words and affixes.
    • Variability in development; assessed by Mean Length of Utterance (MLU).
  • Grammar Explosion (around 2.5 years / MLU 2.25):
    • Use of inflectional affixes and functional words; emergence of overregularization errors indicating rule acquisition.

Key Concepts from Language Development

  • Categorical perception in neonates shows early language preparedness.
  • Universal listeners can distinguish all phonemic distinctions until around 10 months.
  • The stages of language acquisition reflect both biological predispositions and environmental interaction.