First and Second language
acquisition
Language Acquisition is the process through
which a human being gets to know the
grammar/vocabulary of a specific language.
First language acquisition
• Why are we interested in it?
Some obvious and yet interesting facts about child language acquisition:
• Every aspect of language is extremely complex; yet very young children
(before the age of 5) already know most of the intricate system we call the grammar
of a language.
• Children do not learn a language by storing all the words and all the sentences
in some giant mental dictionary. The list of words is finite, but the sentences are
infinite in number.
• Children learn to construct/understand sentences, most of which they have
never produced/heard before.
• Children must therefore construct the ‘rules’ that permit them to use language
creatively.
No one teaches them these rules. Their parents are no more aware of the
phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules than are the children.
Theories of Child Language
Acquisition
1.
Learning by Imitation
Some people think that children acquire a language merely by
imitation. Is this a plausible hypothesis?
•
•
This is not a plausible hypothesis because:
Children do not hear many of the utterances they produce (e.g. Cat stand
up table);
Even when they try to imitate what they hear, they are unable to produce
sentences that cannot be generated by their grammar (e.g. ADULT: He’s
going out. CHILD: He go out.);
•
Children who are unable to speak for neurological or physiological reasons
learn the language spoken to them and when they overcome their speech
impairment, they immediately use the language for speaking.
2. Learning by Reinforcement
Another view of language acquisition suggests
that children learn to produce grammatical
sentences because they are positively
reinforced when they say something right and
negatively reinforced when they say something
wrong. Is this a plausible hypothesis?
• No, because:
Brown and his colleagues report from their studies
that reinforcement seldom occurs, and when it does it
is usually incorrect pronunciation or incorrect
reporting of facts that is corrected, rather than
syntax. Even if it did occur often, it wouldn’t explain
how or what children learn from such adult responses.
In fact, attempts to correct a child’s language seem to
be doomed to failure!
3. Learning by Analogy
• It has been suggested that children learn how
to put words together to form phrases and
sentences by analogy, by hearing a sentence
and using it as a sample to form other
sentences. Is this a plausible hypothesis?
• Lila Gleitman (1994) nicely argues against this hypothesis:
-Suppose the child has heard the sentence
“I painted a red barn”
By analogy s/he can say:
“I painted a blue barn.” So far, so good!
In addition, s/he might also hear
“I painted a barn red.”
So, it looks as if you can take the last two words and switch them around.
The child hears the sentence:
“I saw a red barn.”
By analogy, s/he may construct the sentence
“I saw a barn red!”
The analogy doesn’t work!!
None of the above theories can account for:
-the non-random mistakes children make,
-the speed with which the basic rules of grammar are
acquired,
-the ability to learn language without any formal
instruction,
-and the regularity of the acquisition process across
languages and environmental circumstances.
4. The Innateness Hypothesis
Noam Chomsky:
“What accounts for the ease, rapidity, and
uniformity of language acquisition in the face
of impoverished data?”
• The answer is
Universal Grammar or UG
Poverty-of-the-stimulus:
• The linguistic input a child is exposed to simply
isn’t explicit or rich enough for a child to
deduce the rules of the language based on
experience alone.
• Consider, for example, the following sentences: (The question is how the child
comes to acquire the contrasts below:)
1.
I wonder who [the men expected to see them]
1’. The men expected to see them.
2.
John ate the apples vs.
2’. John ate.
3. John is too stubborn to talk to Bill.
3’. John is too stubborn to talk to.
• How are the pronouns below interpreted? (They are very complex!)
4. John believes he is intelligent.
he = John or someone else
4’. John believes him to be intelligent.
him = NOT John
Note: Children are not explicitly taught/trained to understand the differences.
• Noam Chomsky suggested the following solution for the above
problem in the mid/late 50’s: The knowledge is innate (or built
in). This innate knowledge is also known as Universal Grammar
(UG). This approach to Linguistics now has many proponents,
known as generative linguists.
• UG consists of some universal principles and a set of
grammatical options (known as parameters). The child’s task is
to set the parameters via exposure to data.
• UG  Data  Grammar of a particular
language
The Stages of Child Language Acquisition
•
•
The earliest period: cooing
the noises produced by infants in all language communities
sound the same.
infants will increase their sucking rate when stimuli (visual or
auditory) presented to them are varied, but will decrease the
sucking rate when the same stimuli are presented over and
over again. Infants respond to phonetic contrasts as well, so a
•
•
change from [pa] [pa] [pa] [pa] to [ba] results in increased rate
of sucking.
infants respond to phonetic contrasts that are not phonemic in
the language spoken in the baby’s home. So, for instance,
Japanese infants can distinguish between [r] and [l], while
their parents can’t. Or the alveolar ‘t’ and the retroflexed ‘t’
which exist in Hindi, sound the same to English-speaking
parents but they sound different to their infants!
babies do not respond to sound signals that never signal
phonemic contrasts in any human language. While [i]
pronounced by a male is physically different from the same
sound pronounced by a female, the baby, just like an adult,
ignores the difference. No change in sucking rate! They seem
to be born with the ability to recognize linguistic sounds!
• After 6 months: babbling
From about 6 months on, babies begin to lose their
ability to discriminate between sounds that are not
phonemic in their language. Japanese infants no
longer hear the difference between [r] and [l].
Around the same time, infants start to babble.
• Some time after one year: children begin to use the same
string of sounds repeatedly to mean the same thing. They are
producing their first words! Before the age of two, children
learn a lot of words. According to some estimates, children
learn a new word every two hours! Around two (18-20 months),
they enter a new stage, the two-word stage. There are no
inflections for number, person, tense, etc. at this stage.
• Between two and two and a half years of age, a
child’s expressions become considerably more
complex
The morphemes and grammatical structures are generally
acquired by children in a set order (see textbook).
Interestingly, this order does not correlate with frequency of
parental use! The most frequent of the morphemes in parents’
speech is the articles, which is learned rather late.
Overgeneralization is common in child language acquisition
(e.g. foots, eated, etc.)
Critical Period
It has been suggested that there is a critical
period for language acquisition (usually around
puberty). During this period, language learning
proceeds easily, rapidly, and without external
intervention.
• There have been a number of cases of children raised in environments of
extreme social isolation. These children never fully developed language. A
fairly recent case was Genie, who was found in 1970 confined to a small
room under conditions of physical restraint and had received only minimal
human contact from the age of 18 months to 14 years. Later she did acquire
language to some extent but her language lacked auxiliary verbs, the third
person singular –s, the past tense marker, and most pronouns. She did not
invert subjects to make questions. Such cases support the critical age
hypothesis.
Receptive Competence vs. Productive
Competence
•
While most language acquisition research is based on a child’s productive competence, it
should be noted that a child may in fact have the right grammar (receptive competence) and
yet not be able to produce the right utterance due to physiological immaturity, etc. In other
word’s we judge by the children’s production. An often cited example is the ‘FIS’ phenomenon:
A child pronounced fish as fis, but objected to an adult imitating the fis pronunciation. ‘This is
your fis?’ the adult asked. ‘No,’ said the child: ‘my fis’. When the adult eventually said ‘Your
fish?” the child concurred: ‘Yes, my fis’!
•
- Not only that, but we often judge by our perception of their production! Take the word ‘pig’. It
is often said that children do not distinguish voiced from voiceless initial stops, pronouncing
‘pig’ and ‘big’ alike. However, the fact is that even adults anticipate the voicing of the vowel in
‘pig’ and thus pronounce something like ‘pbig’. The crucial point is that the voicing is delayed
enough for us to perceive it as voiceless, as opposed to ‘big’. Laboratory analyses show that
some children have the same delaying of voicing but it is simply not long enough for adults to
perceive it!
WUG Test
In 1958, J. Berko conducted a study that has now become a
classic in our understanding of child language acquisition. She
showed her child subjects a drawing of a nonsense animal and
gave the animal a nonsense name. She would then elicit the
plural form for the animal’s name. She showed that the children
used the regular English plural marker to make the plural.
Moreover, while the plural for wug would be wug[z], the plural for
bik would be bik[s].
Please see videos at : http://www.ling.umd.edu/labs/acquisition/videos/index.html
Second Language Acquisition
Our focus in this part is on a second language acquired/learned
by an adult. Important concepts:
-As opposed to first language acquisition, second language
acquisition is very difficult, very slow and (arguably) nonuniform. Why? What is essentially different? Does a L2 learner
have access to UG? Three different approaches: 1. No access.
2. Direct access. 3. Indirect access.
• Interlanguage: An interlanguage in that form of the target language that a
learner has internalized. Some researchers view second-language learners
as developing a series of interlanguages in their progression towards
mastery of the target grammar. The interlanguage contains: rules of the
first language, overgeneralizations, rules of the target grammar and some
rules of neither lanuage.
• Fossilization: For various reasons, the second language-learning process
slows down or stops at some point, leading to an interlanguage with
features that differ from that of the target language. This is called
fossilization.
Methods in Second language teaching (see textbook page 193)
Input and output (see textbook page 196)
Communicative competence (see textbook page 197)
• Next week : read textbook pages 175-201 ;
Study for QUIZ 2 : Chapters : 9, 10, 11, 15, 16,
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