Ç.U. Journal of Faculty of Education, N. 5, 1991, pp. 28-42.
FACTORS GOVERNING THE ACQUISITION OF SEMANTIC AND
SYNTACTIC RELATIONS
F. OZDEN EKMEKCI
INTRODUCTION
Although children vary in the length of their utterances and in their rate of language
development, the similarities observed in the process of language learning for different
individuals and languages have led researchers to investigate the factors that influence the
process of language acquisition. Consequently, they have developed theories or
hypotheses of these universal effects on children regardless of what language they
acquire. The factors that are cited by most of the scholars are the following: an inborn
system, imitation, child's learning strategies, practicing, cognitive development, surface
complexity of the language, environment, neurophysiological constraint.
The aim of this paper is to investigate the studies conducted and the outcome theories
and hypotheses formulated regarding the role of these factors in language acquisition.
Internal Language Acquisition System
Chomsky (1965) expresses his interest in linguistic language by children claiming
that the child is born with a Language Acquisition Device (LAD): A theory of linguistic
structure that aims for explanatory adequacy incorporates an account of linguistic
universals, and it attributes tacit knowledge of these universal to the child. It proposes,
then, that the child approaches the data with the presumption that they are drawn from a
language of a certain antecedently well defined type, his problem being to determine
which of the (humanly) possible languages is that of the community in which he is
placed. Language
Learning would be impossible unless this were the case (p. 27).
Since the child is not exposed to input of this type by the adults, these utterances
which are stated to be mistakes are not imitated but learned by means of underlying rules.
Thus, according to the theory of LAD, the only prerequisite of language learning for a
child is his exposure to a language.
Imitation
The tendency of children to imitate the adult's speech has been of interest to scholars
but there is no consensus as to whether imitation contributes to language learning.
Jesperson (1922, p. 35) expresses his favor for imitation: “One thing which plays a
great role in children's acquisition of language, and especially in their early attempts to
form sentences is Echoism; the fact that children echo what is said to them.”
Guillaume (1968) and Lewis (1951) limit the stage of imitation between the stage of
comprehension and beginning of speech. McNeill (1966) and Slobin (1968), on the
other hand, do not see any reinforcing effects of imitation. According to McNeill
"imitation could play a role in language acquisition by introducing novel forms into a
child’s grammar" (1971:32). A child who has not yet learned to inflect verbs for the
progressive aspect might first use-ing by imitating such sentences.
In support of the claim that imitation cannot be important in language acquisition,
Lenneberg (1967) points out that it is possible for mutes to learn language. These
people, although they are not able to speak at all, can understand speech. Ervin (1964) in
her experiment with five children concluded that imitation does not play an important
factor in the children's grammatical development.
In relation to the child's competence in imitation, Blomm (1970) and Slobin (1968,
1971) have observed that children in the early stages of syntactic development seemed to
be imitating speech a little bit more advanced than the speech they use spontaneously.
Learning Strategies
Recently, research on language development has put emphasis on the active
participation of the child, in terms of the child's strategies for actively interacting with
linguistic and nonlinguistic aspects of the environment in the course of development.
Slobin (1973) has suggested that a more useful concept than innate knowledge of
universals is that of universal strategies for language learning. By reviewing a wide
range of studies, he has been able to formulate a tentative generalization:
1. Ends of words are particularly attended to.
2. Rearranged and discontinuous structures are more difficult than continuous
one.
3. Clear marking is easier than absence of marking or complex marking. (e.g. past
-ed rather than --en form)
4. Regularities are simpler than exceptions.
Ervin-Tripp (1973) provides similar rules on the strategy of children and bases her
assumption on the order of acquisition of elements in children's speech on these rules.
For example, she expects the suffixes to be acquired before the prefixes because the child
adapts the strategy of attending to the end of the word.
Bever (1970), emphasizing the perceptual strategy in language acquisition, has
observed that surface structure relative pronouns facilitate the comprehension of relative
clauses in contrast to deleted pronouns. Clark, (1973) also indicates that in learning the
meanings of words, the child is involved in the "interpretation and encoding of perceptual
data" (p. 102). Clark's "Semantic Feature Theory" on the acquisition of word meaning
suggests that children in their extension of words to novel objects refer to the same word
in naming objects that are perceptually similar in regard to shape, size, texture, movement
and sound.
Bowerman (1978), taking these two conflicting points of view into consideration,
conducted a study on two children with two and a half years difference in age between
them. She kept a diary of their speech starting from their one word stage till they were
two years old. She arrived at the following conclusion:
Children need not adhere to a single classification principle in the early stages of
word acquisition (e.g., using only perceptual or only functional cues). Rather, they are
capable of recognizing in variances of many different kinds of classification at their
disposal. (p. 283)
Practicing
Weir (1962) illustrates the role of practice in language acquisition in the report of her
two-year-old son's pre-sleep monologues. She had sewn a microphone under his clothes
in order to record his monologues between the time he was put in his crib till he fell
asleep. These recorded monologues revealed that the child was practicing by himself
sequences of phonemes and grammatical structures he had heard during the day. He was
formulating patterns by arranging elements together and trying to arrive at some
generalizations by these replacement and completion drills. Children's attempt to build
up sentences in this manner has been observed by Braine (1971) and Scollon (1976).
Braine calls these sequences "replacement sequences," and Scollon's term for the
hierarchical order of these speech samples is vertical structures” as opposed to
"horizontal structures". Weir calls these related sequences paragraphs. As a result of
analyzing these monologues, she concludes that children do not use language as a means
of communication only but they also use these phonological and syntactical patterns to
discover the structure of their language.
Weir’s findings support Piaget’s (1959) theory on children’s egocentric language
involving three categories: repetition, monologue and collective monologue. Piaget
indicates that egocentric language consists of remarks that are not addressed to anyone
and he points out the use of this language when children play together. His thesis is that
although children seem to be talking to each other, they are talking to themselves. In
other words they are thinking aloud.
Cognitive Development
Cognitive development, as seen by Piaget (1959), consists of the child's gradual
construction of some effective schemata based on the successive stages of coordination of
the logic of actions.
Schlesinger (1971, 1975), who believes in the Piagetian theory, approaches the
process of language acquisition in terms of realization rules with which the speaker’s
intentions are converted into output sentences by means of input markers. According to
Schlesinger, input makers formalize the intentions linguistically and the realization rules
convert the input markers into linguistic input. These input markers are determined
by the innate cognitive capacity of the child. It is the way the child views the world. He
claims that input markers are universal and are affected by experience with the language
to which the child is exposed.
Cognition, in Piaget's term, is not merely a reflection of the real world as Schlesinger
(1971) indicates; on the contrary, it is a constructive act. Thus, for Piaget, language is a
secondary intellectual, which enables the child to express, in symbolic terms, the
conceptual schemata that he has already internalized (Piaget and Inhelder, 1969).
Furth (1966) shows that deaf children solve cognitive problems in the same way, as
do normal children at only slightly later ages when these problems are adequately
introduced to them
in a nonverbal manner. Furth's findings confirm Piaget's theory that cognition is not a
reflection of the world intervened through symbolic representation. On the contrary,
the concepts formed by children are abstracted from the "actions acted upon objects";
that is, the logical organization of knowledge is not derived from language. When
children at early ages are asked whether a small key or a big piece of wood will float on
water, they may think than the key will float because it is small. This proves that they
have not yet acquired the concept of density and neither have they developed the logical
structure to let them make experiments.
Consequently, in language acquisition competence comes before performance.
Slobin (1973), taking the same point of view, claims that cognitive development gives
rise to semantic relations for which the child seeks symbolic expressions. Bowerman
(1973) and Bloom (1973) have also observed that knowledge of the referential properties
has to be attained by the child before he can use the symbolic expressions to enunciate
the meaning. Bellugi (1971), who has intensively studied the stages of the acquisition of
the interrogative and negative transformation, include examples from children's speech
that are deviant from adult form. The child does not seem to respond to the corrections.
Adult: Adam, say what I say, "Where can he put these?"
Adam: Where he can put these?
The above example demonstrates that the child has not perfected his performance
although he has developed a concept for interrogatives. It also serves as evidence for the
claim that the child does not merely imitate adult speech but rather extracts from it
certain rules and applies them in his own way.
The close correlation of cognitive development and language acquisition may suggest
that children, regardless of the language they are acquiring, go through a similar sequence
of developmental stages. The existence of such stages has led same investigators to look
for a universal order of syntactical or semantical features in language development.
Slobin (1970), comparing the early speech of American, German, Russian, Samoan, Luo,
and Finnish children, notes that "there is a great similarity of basic vocabulary and basic
meaning conveyed by the word combinations" (p. 177).
Surface Complexity of the Language
The emergence of various grammatical forms apparently depends not only on their
cognitive difficulty, but also on their surface complexity. Slobin (1973) states that
although there is an order of acquisition in terms of semantic or cognitive complexity,
there is the influence of formal linguistic complexity in the ordering. Thr late acquisition
of the Arabic noun marker is a good example for this (Omar 1973). Slobin also gives
similar examples from Hungarian and Serbocroatian. Evidence for the linguistic
complexity factor in the language learning process can be provided among the speech
samples of bilingual children.
Celce-Murcia (1978), who has studied a two-year-old English-French bilingual,
gives an example of the child's strategy of avoiding the fricative in "football" and
replacing the first part of the compound word with the French equivalent which starts
with a voiceless stop that is easier to articulate.
Brown (1973) reports that the order of acquisition in regard to fourteen morphemes is
mainly determined by the semantic and syntactic complexity of the language rather than
the frequency of each morpheme in adult speech. The manner in which meaning is
conveyed in the sentence in a language affects the language acquisition process.
Languages like English direct children in attending to the order of words in conveying the
message because syntactic complexity of the language rather than the frequency of each
morpheme in adult speech. The manner in which meaning is conveyed in the sentence in
a language affects the language acquisition process. Languages like English direct
children in attending to the order of words in conveying the message because the word
order is fixed in English. In Turkish, however, meaning is conveyed by means of
inflections. Thus Turkish children try to learn the application of suffixes on single words
before they put two words together (Ekmekci 1982).
De Villiers and de Villiers (1973) have conducted a cross-sectional study with
twenty-one subjects around the age of 16-40 months to discover the determinants in the
order of the fourteen morphemes proposed by Brown. Out of a number of possible
factors, they have considered a) the frequency of these morphemes in the parent’s speech
to the child, b) grammatical complexity of the morphemes, and c) semantic complexity.
The results of their study indicated no correlation of frequency of use in parental speech
with order of acquisition; however, grammatical and semantic complexity were
highly correlated with acquisition order.
Environment
In contrast to Chomksy’s point of view, some scholars (Mowrer 1960; Staats 1971)
strongly emphasize the influence of the environment in shaping and controlling children's
learning. In this view, children learn the linguistic behaviors that are presented to them
and then they are reinforced by the environment. Thus, they consider imitation as a
necessary prerequisite for reinforcement and learning.
Very recent research focuses on the role of child’s immediate environment. This
could be either the mother or any of the child’s peers or the caretaker. The aim of these
studies is to discover in which way the adult or the peer contributes to the development of
the child’s speech. The initial motive for the studies directed to the children’s linguistic
environment comes from attempt by transformational linguists to minimize the
importance of the environment for language learning. Chomsky (1965) pointed to the
errors in adult performance and reasoned that if children had to depend on adult speech,
they would not be able to make generalizations on regularities of language.
The studies on parent's speech indicate that adults talking to children adjust their
speech according to the level of their language development. Consequently, their speech
is presented in short, simple and redundant sentences in relation to content with restricted
vocabulary (Snow 1972). It is flexible and adjusted to the needs of the child in different
contexts. It is progressively modulated to the child's developing capacities.
Ervin-Tripp and Miller (1977), who have analyzed the early discourse of children in
regard to their answers to the questions formulated by the adults arrive at the following
conclusion:
... the older partner adjusts questions on the basis of beliefs about
semantic difficulty, difficulty of speech acts and social
appropriateness, and calibrates only in part from feedback from
the child's success in replying (p. 24).
Along with the same type of reasoning Snow (1977) proposes that an input that is
adjusted to the child's semantic ability will facilitate his syntactic acquisition.
Nelson’s study (1973) indicates that use of commands by parents affects the
cognitive development of children. Nelson also reports that children whose mothers
reinforce pronunciation and word choice did not develop more rapidly than those whose
mothers were generally accepting. In fact, reinforcement of this type has proved to have
a negative effect. Newport et al. (1975) have found that neither complexity nor wellformedness were correlated with any aspect of children's later development. These
studies seem to indicate a relatively minor role in acquisition for the syntactic
adjustments that mothers make when addressing young children.
Neurophysiological Constraint
Lenneberg (1967) consider the neurophysiological aspects of language acquisition.
He claims that language development is related to the "neurophysiological integrative
activity" of the child. He proposes that language acquisition process increases with the
maturation of the structural constituents of the human brain. Children are, therefore,
restricted in the length of their production due to their neurological and physical
development. Their systematic reduction of the adult's speech seems to reflect this type
of restriction.
Waterson (1978) is concerned with the factors influencing the child's production in
regard to phonetic and phonological development. As a result of her longitudinal study
with her eldest child, Waterson as well as Ekmekci (1979) have noticed a systematic
increase in length and in amount of use of their subjects' speech at the levels of
syllable, word and sentence. Waterson suggests a close relation between this
systematic development of these elements of speech and the "neural processes". In
her analysis of the data, she has observed that the type and number of contrasts within
sequence of utterances played an important role in language development. In other
words, what the child is able to produce at different levels of language development can
be determined by the type and number of articulatory contrasts within a syllable,
contrasts of syllables within a word and contrasts of words within a sentential utterance.
Children acquire the sound patterns of language as they perceive the particular sound
features in the words they are learning (Waterson 1971). Ingram (1974) remarks that,
in addition to what a child perceives or misperceives of the adult system, the child’s own
production influences his phonological development; "the child's word may have a
certain syllable structure due to the syllable structure of the adult word and due to the
constraints of his own (productive) system" (p. 51).
Ferguson, Peizer, and Week (1973) claim that phonological development, which
shapes the child’s language, is directly related to "recognizing, remembering and
producing the appropriate sound"
(p. 39).
Menn (1971), as a result of his longitudinal study on the phonological development of
an English speaking child to indicate the reduction rules in baby talk, proposes that
simplification in child's speech is done principally by assimilation embracing the whole
monosyllable within word boundaries. Consequently, he claims "the word is an entity
stored and accessed as a block" (p. 247). Researchers seem to agree that a child learns
phonology according to the features he perceives and that he tries to discriminate these
features in the words that he hears. In his attempt to pronounce these words, the position
and the stress of storing these sound patterns in memory.
Conclusion
All the above factors seem to be significant in language learning. Investigators that
view the language acquisition process as a system of its own include at least three of the
factors in their description. Ervin-Tripp (1973), for example, defines language
acquisition system as one that develops a way of understanding and producing situated
sentences. She indicates that "such a system must include ways of changing stored
knowledge and developed skills, on the basis of the types of input which are
characteristic of human societies" (p. 285).
Bloom and Lahey (1978) see the necessity of both linguistic and nonlinguistic imput
in the process of language acquisition. They indicate the correlation of 1) linguistic
events (A), 2) non-linguistic events (B), 3) mental capacity of the child to perceive and
organize the provided input in understanding and producing massages (C).
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