FIRST LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
OBJECTIVES
• Know the language system a child of the age 5
acquire.
• List the issues that are related to 1L acquisition.
• Explain the theories that interpret 1L acquisition.
• List the requirements for L1 acquisition.
• Explain the role of Caretaker speech (motherese) in
L1 acquisition.
• Explain the stages of L1 acquisition.
• Explain how children develop morphological,
syntactic and semantic language systems.
“The capacity to learn language is deeply ingrained
in us as a species, just as the capacity to walk, to
grasp objects, to recognize faces. We don’t find any
serious difference in children growing up in congested
urban slums, in isolated mountain villages, or in
privileged suburban villas”
Dan Slobin, The Human Language Series 2 (1994)
FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
• Every language is complex.
• Before the age of 5, the child knows most of the
intricate system of grammar:
• Use the syntactic, phonological, morphological and
semantic rules of the language
• Join sentences
• Ask questions
• Use appropriate pronouns
• Negate sentences
• Form relative clauses
ISSUES IN FIRST LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
• How do children acquire such a complex system so
quickly and effortlessly?
• Does a child decide to consciously pursue certain skills?
(e.g., walking)
• Do babies make a conscious decision to start learning a
language?
• We correct children’s errors sometimes. Does it help?
“Nobody don’t like me”
THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
• Nature vs. Nurture
• Behaviorism (1950s)
Children learn language through imitation, reinforcement
and analogy
- Look at these examples
He go out.
A my pencil
What the boy hit?
Nobody don’t like me
THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
• Innateness hypothesis
Children are equipped with an innate template for
language (Language Acquisition Device and
Universal Grammar)
• Evidence:
• we end up knowing more about language than
what we hear around us.
• The same stages in all cultures and languages
BASIC REQUIREMENT
• Environment and interaction to bring this capacity
into operation- E.g. Genie
• The child must be physically capable(being able to
hear)
• Interaction.
All these requirements are related.
THE ACQUISITION SCHEDULE
• In spite of different backgrounds, different locations, and
different upbringings, most children follow the very same
milestones in acquiring language.
• The biological schedule is related to the maturation of
the infant’s brain to cope with the linguistic input
• Young children acquire the language by identifying the
regularities in what is heard and applying those
regularities in what they say.
CARETAKER SPEECH (MOTHERESE)
• A type of simplified speech adopts by someone
who spends time with the child characterized by:
• Frequent use of questions
• Simplified lexicon
• Phonological reduction
• Higher pitch- extra loudness
• Stressed intonation
• Simple sentences
• A lot of repetition
• example: Oh, goody! Now Daddy will push choo
choo!
CARETAKER SPEECH (MOTHERESE)
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•
•
•
•
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Assign interactive roles to young children
MOTHER: Look!
CHILD: (touches picture)
MOTHER: what are those?
CHILD: (vocalizes a babble string and smiles)
MOTHER: yes, there are rabbits
CHILD: Vocalizes and smiles
MOTHER: (laughs) yes, rabbit
L1 ACQUISITION
Stage
Typical Age
Description
cooing
3-5 months
Vowel-like sounds
babbling
6-10 months
Repetitive CV patterns
One-word stage
12-18 months
Single open-class words or
word stems
Two-word stage
18- 20 months
"mini-sentences" with
simple semantic relations
Telegraphic stage
24-30 months
sentence structures of lexical
words no functional or
grammatical morphemes
Later multiword
stage
30+ months
Grammatical or functional
structures emerge
COOING
• Few weeks: cooing and gurgling, playing with
sounds. Their abilities are constrained by
physiological limitations
• They seem to be discovering phonemes at this
point.
• Producing sequences of vowel-like sounds- high
vowels [i] and [u].
• 4 months- sounds similar to velar consonants [k] &
[g]
• 5 months: distinguish between [a] and [i] and the
syllables [ba] and [ga], so their perception skills are
good.
BABBLING
• Different vowels and consonants ba-ba-ba and gagaga
• 9-10 months- intonation patterns and combination of
ba-ba-ba-da-da
• Nasal sounds also appear ma-ma-ma
• 10-11months use of vocalization to express emotions
• Late stage- complex syllable combination (ma-dagaba)
• Even deaf children babble
• The most common cross-linguistic sounds and patterns
babbled the most, but later on they babble less
common sounds
THE WORD STAGE (HOLOPHRASTIC)
• Single terms are uttered for everyday objects ‘milk’,
‘cookie’, ‘cat’
• Produce utterance such as ‘Sara bed’ but not yet
capable of producing a phrase.
• Differ from adult language:
•
•
•
•
[da] dog
[sa] sock
[aj] light
[daw] down
• Convey a more complex message
TWO-WORD STAGE
• Vocabulary moves beyond 50 words
• By 2 years old, children produce utterances
‘baby chair’, ‘mommy eat’
• Interpretation depends on context
• Adults behave as if communication is taking
place.
TELEGRAPHIC STAGE
• By 2 years & a half, they produce multiple-word
speech.
• Developing sentence building capacity.
E.g. ‘this shoe all wet’, ‘cat drink milk’, ‘daddy
go bye-bye’
• Vocabulary continues to grow
• Better pronunciation
THE ACQUISITION PROCESS
• The child does not acquire the language by
imitating adults but really they are trying out
constructions and testing them.
• CHILD: my teacher holded the baby rabbit and we
patted them
• MOTHER: did you say your teacher held the baby
rabbit?
• CHILD: yes. she holded the baby rabbit and we
patted them
• MOTHER: Did you say she held them tightly?
• CHILD: no, she holded them loosely
DEVELOPING MORPHOLOGY
• By 2-and-a-half years old- use of some inflectional
morphemes to indicate the grammatical function
of nouns and verbs.
• The first inflection to appear is –ing after it comes
the –s for plural.
• Overgeneralization: the child applies –s to words
like ‘foots’ ‘mans’ and later ‘feets’ and ‘mens’
DEVELOPING MORPHOLOGY
• The use of possessive ‘s’ appears ‘mommy’s bag’
• Forms of verb to be appear ‘is’ and ‘are’
• The –ed for past tense appears and it is also
overgeneralized as in ‘goed’ or holded’
• Finally –s marker for 3rd person singular
• preset tense appears with full verbs first
• then with auxiliaries (does-has)
DEVELOPING SYNTAX
• A child was asked to say the owl who eats candy
runs fast and she said The owl eat candy and he run
fast.
• The development of two syntactic structures- three
stages
• Forming questions
• Forming negatives
FORMING QUESTIONS
1st stage:
• Insert where and who to the beginning of an
expression with rising intonation
E.g. sit chair? Where horse go?
2nd stage:
• More complex expression
E.g. why you smiling? You want eat?
3rd stage:
• Inversion of subject and verb
E.g. will you help me? What did I do?
FORMING NEGATIVES
Stage 1:
• Putting not and no at the beginning
e.g. not teddy bear, no sit here
Stage 2:
• Don’t and can’t appear but still use no and not
before VERBS
e.g. he no bite you, I don’t want it
Stage 3:
• didn’t and won’t appear
e.g. I didn’t caught it, she won’t go
DEVELOPING SEMANTICS
• During the two-word stage children use their limited
vocabulary to refer to a large number of unrelated
objects.
• Overextension: overextend the meaning of a word
on the basis of similarities of shape, sound, and size.
e.g. use ball to refer to an apple, and egg, a grape
and a ball.
• This is followed by a gradual process of narrowing
DEVELOPING SEMANTICS
• Antonymous relations are acquired late
• The distinction between more/less, before/after
seem to be later acquired.