A born actor?
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Age and Acquisition
Instructor: Dr. Chinfen Chen
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Age and Acquisition
L1
L1
L2
L2
acquisition
learning
acquisition
learning
Child
A
B
C
D
Adult
E
F
G
H
Logical comparison: A — C
Rare cases: B,E,F
Implication: D,H
C—G
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Age and Acquisition
Linguistic Considerations
 Bilingualism:
1. Coordinate bilinguals: two meaning systems. One
for the first language, one for the second
language.
2. Compound bilinguals: one meaning system from
which both languages operate.
e.g. 法語：pain(
英語： bread(麵包）
3. Code switching: a change from one language to
another one.
e.g. I like to eat 臭豆腐.
4. Bilingual children are more facile at concept
formation and have a greater mental flexibility.
(see Reynolds 1991; Schinke-Llano 1989)
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Age and Acquisition
Linguistic Considerations

Interference Between First and Second
Languages
In a child’s case :
Hansen-Bede(1975) examining a 3-year-old
English-speaking child moving to Pakistan -Urdu
The child’s acquisition did not appear to show L1
interference and, except for negation, showed similar
strategies and rules for both L1and L2
 similar linguistic structures: possession, gender, word
order, verb forms, questions, except for negation.
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Age and Acquisition
Linguistic Considerations
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Interference in Adults
More cognitively secure, more solid foundation of L1
→more interference, however, may be more readily
used to bridge gaps between L1and L2 by
generalization
The first language can be a facilitating factor, not just
an interfering factor.
Order of Acquisition
The acquisition order of eleven English morphemes
L1 acquisition-Roger Brown(1973)
L2 learning- Dulay and Burt (1976)
Children learning a second language use a creative
construction process, just as they do in their first
language.
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Age and Acquisition
Linguistic Considerations

Order of Acquisition
Thomas Scovel(1999:1)
Dispelling "The younger, the better“ myth
--fueled by media hype and junk science
--the only potential advantage : accent
--on at least several planes –literacy, vocabulary,
pragmatics, schematic knowledge, and even
syntax – adults have been shown to be
superior learners.
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Age and Acquisition
Issues in L1 Acquisition Revisited

Issues in L1 Acquisition Revisited
1.competence and performance
2.comprehension and production
3.Nature or nurture
4.Universals
5.systematicity and variability
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Age and Acquisition
Issues in L1 Acquisition Revisited
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
Issues in L1 Acquisition Revisited
6.Language and thought
7.imitation
8.Practice
9.Input
10.Discourse
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Age and Acquisition
Issues in L1 Acquisition Revisited
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Age and Acquisition
Children might have some secrets of success in
language learning:
-not monitoring themselves too much
-not analyzing grammar
-not being too worried about their egos
- shedding inhibitions
-not letting the native language interfere much
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Age and Acquisition
Questions for discussion:


Do you think it is worthwhile to teach children a
second/foreign language in the classroom? If so,
how might approaches and methods differ between
a class of children and a class of adults?
Do you think you might have some advantages
over children in learning a foreign language?
Speculate on what those advantages might be.
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Thank you for your listening!
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Competence and Performance

Competence: one’s underlying knowledge of
the system of a language—its rules of
grammar, its vocabulary…

Performance: all the actual production
(speaking, writing) or the comprehension
(listening, reading) of linguistic events.
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Comprehension and Production
A child may understand a sentence with
an embedded relative in it but not be
able to produce one. W.R. Miller(1963)
e.g., The ball that’s in the sandbox
is red.
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Nature or Nurture
Nature: A child is born with an innate
knowledge of a language. This innate
property (the LAD or UG) is universal
in all human beings.
 Nurture: the behavoristic notion that
language is a set of habits that can be
acquired by a process of conditioning.

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Universals


A claim that language is universally acquired in the
same manner, and the deep structure of language at
its deepest level may be common to all languages.
The universal linguistic categories under
investigation.
word order
morphological marking tone
agreement
reduced reference nouns and noun classes
verbs and verb classes
predication
negation
question formation
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Systematicity and Variability
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
One assumption of current
research on child language is
the systematicity of the
process of acquisition.
Eversince Berko’s(1958)
In the midst of all this
systematicity, there is an
equally remarkable amount of
variability in the process of
learning! (perceiving regular
and irregular verbs)
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Language and Thought



Piaget(1972)that language is dependent upon and
springs from cognitive development.
Vygotsky(1962,1978) claimed that social interaction,
through language, is a prerequisite to cognitive
development.
Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development is the
distance between a child’s actual cognitive capacity
and the level of potential development.(1978)
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Language and Thought


Language helps to shape thinking and thinking helps to
shape language. What happens to this interdependence when
a second language is required?
The second language teacher needs to be acutely aware of
cultural thought patterns that may be as interfering as the
linguistic patterns themselves.
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Imitation

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While children are good deep-structure imitators
(centering on meaning, not surface features), adults can
fare much better in imitating surface structure (by rote
mechanisms) if they are explicitly directed to do so .
Sometimes the ability to center on surface distinctions is
a distracting factor, at other times it is helpful.
Implication: meaningful contexts for language learning
are necessary; second language learners ought not to
become too preoccupied with form lest they lose sight of
the function and purpose of language.
u
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Practice

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Most cognitive psychologists agree that the
frequency of stimuli and the number of times
spent practicing a form are not highly
important in learning an item. What is
important is meaningfulness.
Contextualized, appropriate, meaningful
communication in the second language seems
to be the best possible practice the L2 learner
could engage in.
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Input

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Input is as important to the second language
learner as it is to the first language learner
Input should foster meaningful communicative
use of the language in appropriate contexts.
Teacher input might do well to be as deliberate,
but meaningful , in their communications with
students as parental input is to the child.
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Discourse


As we search for better ways of teaching
communicative competence to second
language learners, research on the acquisition of
discourse becomes more and more important.
Issues: communicative competence, language
functions, functional syllabuses, discourse
analysis, pragmatics, styles and registers,
nonverbal communication.
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Age and Acquisition
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The critical period hypothesis
Neurological considerations
The significance of accent
Cognitive considerations
Affective considerations
Linguistic considerations
Issues in first language acquisition revisited
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