English 418
Second Language Acquisition
Session Two, Part One Notes
Goals/Objectives:
1) To gain an understanding of the competencies that a second language learner must learn to control to properly speak a second
language
2) To gain an understanding of the processes that children go through when they learn their first language
3) To extrapolate a few “rules” out of the data on first language speakers that we can apply to second language learning
4) To gain an understanding of how first and second language learning differs
Questions/Main Ideas (Please Notes:
write these down as you think
 First Language “Literacy”
of them)
 What do you need to “know” to “know” a language?
 At what point can we say that someone actually “knows” a language?
 First Language “Literacy”
 Most of what we know about a language, we know unconsciously
 Linguists call this linguistic competence
 There is a catch: it can never be directly observed
 First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
 What we can observe is linguistic performance
 Linguistic competence is a person’s potential to speak a language
 Linguistic performance is the realization of that potential
 Think about your ability to ride a bike
 First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
 Since competence can’t be directly observed, linguists use performance to draw
conclusions about what competence must be like
 So what are some things that you know about language?
 That is, what are your competencies?
 First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
 Phonetics
 Part of your linguistic competence has to do with your knowledge of the sounds of your
language
 You know how to produce them easily and accurately, even though you never had to think
about the mechanics of doing so
 First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
 Phonology
 Not only can you produce and perceive the sounds of your language, you know how these
sounds work together as a system
 You have knowledge of possible sound sequences
 First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
 Have you every played the Word Jumble in the newspaper
 For example: resoh
 Five letters: 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120 possible combinations
 tablesklab
 10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 =
 3,628,800 possible combinations
 First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
 Morphology
 For the most part, speech consists of a continuous stream of sound with few pauses between
words.
 Speakers of any given language have no trouble breaking utterances down into the words
that make them up
 First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
 You also know how to break individual words down into smaller parts that have meaning or
some other function aka morphemes
 How many parts in these words:
 Balloon
 reenlistments
 antidisestablishmentarianistic
 First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
 Syntax
 As part of your competence, you can also recognize when a sentence is well-formed (that is,
grammatical)
 you up pick at I o’clock will eight
 I will picks you up at eight o’clock




























First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
I will pick you up at eight o’clock
At eight o’clock, I will pick you up
First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
Semantics
Part of your linguistic competence has to do with your ability to determine the meaning of
sentences
Your competence also allows you to determine when a sentence has more than one
meaning, that is when it is ambiguous
First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
How about these:
He gave her cat food
Miners refuse to work after death
I know a man with a dog who has fleas
Grandmother of seven makes hole in one
First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
How about this one:
Lois,
I heard from Marie Underberg and Bev Phillips you’d lost your husband at the tournament
in Groton.
First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
It also allows you to understand when two different sentences mean the same thing:
The car bumped the truck
The truck was bumped by the car
First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
We should also realize that there is a difference between grammaticality (that is, whether
the sentence is structurally well-formed) and semantic acceptability (that is, whether it
makes sense) of a sentence
A sentence can be grammatically, but not semantically, acceptable
First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
The famous example comes from Chomsky:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
Contented little cats purr loudly
 First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
 Pragmatics
 Your understanding of the meaning of sentences and larger utterances also involves
understanding how the context of those utterances influences their meaning
 First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
 For example: you are in class, there is a great deal of noise in the hallway, the instructor
says, “Can you close the door?”
 Literally, this in an inquiry about your door-closing abilities, but you would not take the
sentence so literally
 Instead, you would understand it as a request (an order?) that you close the door
 First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
 Finally, you also understand the contexts or situations in which different styles or registers
of language may be used
 You would probably never say “What up, Playa?” to the Queen of England
 You know how to vary your pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, etc.
 First Language “Literacy” (con’t)
 Learners of a second (or third, etc.) language must master all of these competencies
 A daunting task at best!!!

Question?
 Thinking back to your experiences in a second or foreign language classroom, which aspects of competency did your
teacher(s) hit?
 Why do you think they focused on those?
 First Language Acquisition
 What can we learn from first language acquisition that will help us in understanding second
language acquisition?
 In other words, are there any aspects of first language acquisition that we can grab on to that
can help us be better second language teachers?
 First Language Acquisition
 Pre-Language
 Children communicate long before they have language (proper)
 Infants use many methods to communicate their needs
 The most efficient is crying (birth – 2 months)
 They also smile and coo (2-5 months)
 First Language Acquisition
 Coos are not exactly like regular speech sounds, but they do suggest that infants are aware
of sounds and their potential significance
 For example, from approximately four to seven months, infants use these cooing sounds to
play with loudness and pitch
 First Language Acquisition
 By the age of six months an infant has produced all of the vowel sounds and most of the
consonant sounds of any language in the world
 Including some that do not occur in the language(s) their parents speak!
 First Language Acquisition
 Babbling (5-12 months)
 Infants turn to more language-like sounds
 Characterized by syllable-like consonant/vowel sounds
 Frequently the case that these sounds are taken to be “words” by wishful parents and
caregivers
 The line between babbling and true words is a very fine one
 First Language Acquisition
 How does babbling turn into word usage?
 Vihman (1996): Studied 3 children between 11 and 16 months
 For all three children, during the five month period of study, there was a decrease in
babbling and an increase in words
 Increase and decrease were not linear
 First Language Acquisition
 But for all three, there appeared to be a point where the child “gets” the concept of words
referring to something
 Once this occurs (month 14 for 2, month 15 for the other) there seems to be a significant
drop-off in the amount of babbling that occurred
 First Language Acquisition
 First Language Acquisition
 Linguistic Stage – (between 1 and 2 years)
 Words
 Children go through a one-word stage, then a two-word stage before progressing
 One Word Stage – Holophrastic Stage
 Normally lasts from one year to 18 months
 Words typically refer to some concrete object in the child’s environment
 First Language Acquisition
 Words in early child language fulfill a number of functions:
 Can refer to objects – ba for bottle
 Can refer to a range of grammatical functions – I want my bottle, that’s my bottle, etc.
 First Language Acquisition
 Can serve social functions – hi and bye
 Children have to learn that words serve all of these functions
 Points to keep in mind: words in an adult’s language do not always correspond to words in a
child’s language
 For example: allgone
 Produced at the one-word stage
 First Language Acquisition
 One device children use: intonation
 Before full grammatical knowledge, they can use the appropriate stress and intonation
contours of their language
 Can distinguish such things as statements, questions, commands
 Example: dada
 First Language Acquisition
 Children also often overextend the meanings of words
 Hoek, Ingram, and Gibson (1986): noted one child’s (19-20 months) use of the word bunny



























to refer to a doll, a hen, a shoe, a car, a picture of people, a giraffe, a cow, a bear, a
chair, a lamp, a puzzle, and a train
First Language Acquisition
Sounds and Pronunciation
In early stages, clear that pronunciation of children’s words is not identical to that of adults
Among the earliest tasks for a child is to figure out the nature of the sounds they are hearing
Some sounds are distinguished quite early: ta vs. da, ma, ba
First Language Acquisition
A question: Is it a matter of motor control or perception?
Smith (1973): a child in his study couldn’t say the word puddle; pronounced it as puggle
At first, Smith thought it was a matter of pronunciation ability
A further look showed, however, that the child used puddle for puzzle
First Language Acquisition
IOW, the child was perfectly capable of making the sounds, just not in the right places
On the other hand, children hate it when we imitate them
Ice cweam
So children can clearly perceive differences in pronunciation, even when they can’t
pronounce the differences
First Language Acquisition
In fact, children in the one-word stage can understand utterances of more than one word
when they are said to them
First Language Acquisition
After several months in the two-word stage, children start to combine words
Syntax
Usually around two years of age
A typical phrase: “Mommy cry”
Notice anything significant about this phrase?
First Language Acquisition
Function words such as articles, prepositions, and grammatical endings, are notably
lacking
Word order is therefore used to express semantic relations, since sentences lack free and
bound grammatical morphemes and auxiliary verbs
First Language Acquisition






























Agent + action
“Baby sleep”
Action + object
“Kick ball”
Action + locative
“Sit chair”
First Language Acquisition
Children then go through stages as they continue to learn parts of speech
For example, the negative:
At first, they just put “no” in front of a two-word sentence
“no baby sleep”
First Language Acquisition
Next, they insert a negative word between the subject and the verb
“baby no sleep”
“I no drink milk”
Notice that they don’t use contractions yet, since they don’t have auxiliary verbs yet
First Language Acquisition
Once they learn auxiliaries, they can start to use words like “don’t”
Morphology
Brown (1973): found that there was a predictable order of acquisition of certain inflectional
morphemes in English
First Language Acquisition
Remember that morphemes are the smallest unit that carries information about meaning or
function
First Language Acquisition
Studied 3 children
All three learned English morphemes in roughly the same order (though not at exactly the
same age)
1. Present progressing (-ing)
2/3. In, on
First Language Acquisition
4. Plural (-s)
5. Past irregular




























6. Possessive (-’s)
7. Uncontractable copula (is, am, are)
8. Articles (a, the)
9. Past regular (-ed)
First Language Acquisition
10. Third person regular (s)
11. Third person irregular
Why this order?
May be due to the notion of saliency (that which is most noticeably important)
Those parts of speech which receive stress are most salient, hence most learnable
First Language Acquisition
On average, children have mastered most of the distinctive sounds of their first language
before they are three years old
An awareness of basic discourse patterns such as conversational turn-taking appear at an
even earlier age
First Language Acquisition
Children control most of the basic L1 grammatical patterns before they are five or six
However, complex grammatical patterns continue to develop through the school years
First Language Acquisition
From the previous discussion, what can we now extrapolate about language learning?
Here are a few “rules” that we will see come up at various times throughout this course
First Language Acquisition
1) Reception precedes production
2) The process of language learning is not always smooth, but instead may occur in fits and
bursts, with plateaus in between
First Language Acquisition
3) Language learning takes time
4) What is manifested on the surface may not accurately reflect what is going on
underneath (i.e., performance may not reflect competence)
First Language Acquisition
5) People pay attention to meaning (at least what meanings are important to them), not to
form
Question?
 What are some of the implications for the classroom that come out of these rules?
 1st Language vs. 2nd Language
 What are some of the differences between first language acquisition and second language
acquisition?
 First: a first language usually involves initial experience while “second” language can
involve a third or fourth language
 1st Lang. vs. 2nd Language
 Second: a first language is usually acquired in a home environment by an infant in the care
of parents or other caregivers
 Involves many activities, both linguistic and otherwise, focused primarily on the child
 Language is closely tied to the immediate surroundings and context
 1st Lang. vs. 2nd Language
 What do Clark and Clark have to say about this?
 That is, what do young children do with their utterances?
 Gestures
 Look at X
 Tell me about/give me X
 1st Lang. vs. 2nd Language
 These two types of utterances lead to two types of Speech Acts:
 Assertions
 Requests
 Tend to concentrate on “new” information
 New to the child, that is
 1st Lang. vs. 2nd Language
 What do Clark and Clark have to say about how adults use their utterances?



















Summary/Minute Paper:
Get children to attend
Talk about the “here and now”
Teach turn-taking skills
Seldom correct and when they do, they correct assertion, not form
1st Language vs. 2nd Language
Third: an infant has not yet developed strong social identities, such as gender, ethnicity, or
social status
Thus, he or she may be more adaptable or malleable
1st Language vs. 2nd Language
For adults, language use can be emblematic of different social identities
Thus, a new language also represents new social and cultural values
For infants, this is not the case
1st Language vs. 2nd Language
Fourth: Second language learners ordinarily have linguistic (language) meta-knowledge
that is lacking in infants
Almost all learners are aware that words and sounds differ from language to language
1st Language vs. 2nd Language
Many learners have been exposed to such terms as noun,, verb, or sentence
Most learners are aware of the notions of regional, social, and foreign accents/varieties
Such meta-knowledge is normally lacking in first language acquisition