CHAPTER 13: FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Acquisition

The first two or three years of development, a child requires interaction with other language-users in order to bring the general language capacity into contact with a particular language such as English.

Input

Under normal circumstances, human infants are certainly helped in their language acquisition by the typical behavior of older children and adults in the home environment who provide language samples, or input, for the child.

Caregiver Speech

A type of conversational structure that seems to assign an interactive role to the young child even before he or she becomes a speaking participant.

The Acquisition Schedule

All normal children develop language at roughly the same time, along much the same schedule. Since we can say the same thing for sitting up, crawling, standing, walking, using the hands and many other physical activities, it would seem that the language acquisition schedule has the same basis as the biologically determined development of motor skills and the maturation of the infant’s brain.

Cooing

The earliest use of speech-like sounds has been described as cooing.

Babbling

Between six and eight months, the child is sitting up and producing a number of different vowels and consonants, as well as combinations such as ba-ba-ba and ga-ga-ga. This type of sound production is described as babbling.

The One-Word Stage

-Between twelve and eighteen months, children begin to produce a variety of recognizable single-unit utterances called the one-word stage,

-Holophrastic speech (meaning a single form functioning as a phrase or sentence) to describe an utterance that could be a word, a phrase, or a sentence.

The Two-Word Stage

The two-word stage can begin around eighteen to twenty months, as the child’s vocabulary moves beyond fifty words.

Telegraphic Speech

Between two and two and a half years old, the child begins producing a large number of utterances that could be classified as “multiple-word” speech is described as telegraphic speech.

The Acquisition Process

It is often assumed that the child is, in some sense, being “taught” the language.

Learning through Imitation?

Similar evidence against “imitation” as the major source of the child’s speech production comes from studies of the structures used by young children. They may repeat single words or phrases, but not the sentence structures.

Learning through Correction?

Adult “corrections” are a very effective determiner of how the child speaks.

Developing Morphology

By the time a child is two and a half years old, he or she is going beyond telegraphic speech

forms and incorporating inflectional and functional morphemes.

Developing Syntax

Forming Questions

- A wh-form (Where) to the beginning of the expression

-More complex expressions can be formed,noticeable that more wh- forms, such as What and Why

-The change in position of the auxiliary verb in English questions, called inversion,but doesn’t automatically spread to all wh-question types.

Forming Negatives

-A simple strategy of putting No or Not at the beginning.

-The additional negative forms don’t and can’t appear, and, with no and not, are increasingly used in front of the verb rather than at the beginning of the utterance.

-The incorporation of other auxiliary forms such as didn’t and won’t while the typical Stage 1 forms disappear. A very late acquisition is the negative form isn’t, with the result that some Stage 2 forms (with not instead of isn’t) continue to be used for quite a long time

Developing Semantics

Can be developed by being exposed to language, social interactions

Later Developments

Some types of antonymous relations are acquired fairly late (after the age of five).