First Language
Acquisition
Topics and Themes in Linguistics
WS 2005/6, Campus Essen
Raymond Hickey, English Linguistics
New insights from language acquisition
Some distinctions to begin with...
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First language acquisition is the term used to denote the
learning of one's native tongue in the first few years of life.
This acquisition is approximately the same with all children
and is independent of intelligence of the individual child. It
obviously has nothing to do with ethnic or social affiliation.
Non-linguists who maintain that a certain child (and later a
certain adult) has mastered his or her native language
particularly well refer - usually unconsciously - to the presence
of a large vocabulary and/or the ability to express oneself in a
stylistically differentiated manner. Only with children who
have a pathological impairment, such as deafness and/or
dumbness, do we find that first language acquisition does not
take place normally.
New insights from language acquisition
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By acquisition linguists only mean the acquisition of
the spoken language. The written language is only
learned at school, that is at a later point in time (after
the age of 5 or 6) when language acquisition has been
largely completed.
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The acquisition of one's native language has nothing
to do with the distinction between standard language
and dialect. The standard language is only a dialect
which for historical reasons came to be used in
society for the written form and which is generally
preferred in school education.
New insights from language acquisition
What can one learn?
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A child can learn any language. However, this is in general the
language of the parents, but this does not have to be the case.
The language which the child is exposed to in the first years of
life is that which is learned.
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If more than one language is spoken in the environment of the
child then the child learns these languages. Two languages are
not rare, three or more are unusual, however. What is
important for the child is that both languages are spoken to an
equal extent in the environment - for instance by each of the
parents - and that there are no major tensions in the
relationship to the persons who speak these languages,
otherwise the child will probably develop a general dislike of
the language of this individual.
New insights from language acquisition
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Second language acquisition refers to a further language which
is acquired after the first, usually after primary school. The
acquisition of a second language never reaches the degree of
proficiency of the first. The reason for this is that children start
too late, in fact they are usually teenagers before being
exposed to the second language. After puberty one cannot
learn a second language as well as a first one, no matter how
much time one invests in this. In this connection linguists
generally make the distinction between acquisition - for the
first language - and learning - for the second language after
childhood.
New insights from language acquisition
Stages in language acquisition
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For all languages one can maintain that there are certain stages
in acquisition. In general it is clear that children begin with
individual sounds and then move on to words, later to
sentences of two and more words, increasing the complexity as
their language evolves. It appears that children make 'mistakes'
in the process. These are referred to technically as errors, that
is they are systemic mistakes. They can be traced back to the
fact that a child is at a certain stage of acquisition, for instance
a child might say singed because he/she does not understand
that there are so-called strong verbs which change the vowel of
the stem, i.e. that the adult form is sang. A child might say
sanged which shows that he/she has heard the form sang but
not yet understood that it is a past tense form and thus he/she
still forms the past according to the weak verb pattern.
New insights from language acquisition
0.0 - 0.3
0.4 - 0.5
0.10 – 1
2.6
3.0
5.0
Organic sounds, crying, cooing
Beginning of the babbling phase
The first comprehensible words. After this
follow one-word, two-word and many-word
sentences. The only word stages is known as
the holophrastic stage; Telegraphic speech
refers to speech with only nouns and verbs.
Inflection occurs, negation, interrogative and
imperative sentences
A vocabulary of about 1000 words
The main syntactic rules have been acquired
New insights from language acquisition
Unconscious knowledge
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For the linguist the metaphor of the iceberg is very useful: nine
tenths of language is under the surface. For instance, none of
the present public would probably be in a position to list and
describe the sentence structures of their native language.
Nonetheless you use these hundreds of times each day in wellformed sentences. Perhaps a medical comparison might be
helpful here: you use the muscles of your body constantly in
order to move your limbs or to keep your balance while
standing. You can do that without knowing how it works. But
your central nervous system 'knows' how the muscles are
innervated.
New insights from language acquisition
One can recognise here that there are two types of knowledge:
knowledge which one can express in words - e.g. the rules of
chess - and unconscious knowledge which is activated without
reflection, for instance, when speaking your native language.
Such unconscious knowledge is based on the internalisation of
language structures which we extracted from our environment
as children.
Input
Language in our surroundings
Action by child
(i)
(ii)
extraction of structures
storage in long term memory as
unconscious knowledge
New insights from language acquisition
Language as an instinct, as an innate faculty
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An instinct is a tendency to do something which
when triggered in childhood cannot be rejected, it is
not a matter of conscious decision. For instance, there
is no adult who crawls around on all fours, we cannot
refuse to walk upright because this is an instinct. The
development of an instinct takes place immediately
after birth and is completed quickly.
New insights from language acquisition
If one applies this view to language acquisition then one can
maintain the following.
1) No child makes a conscious decision to learn a language.
2) No child has ever refused to learn the language spoken in
his/her environment.
3) Acquisition is unconscious and can be compared with the
unfolding of other instincts, for instance that of binaural
hearing or telescopic vision.
Linguists furthermore assume that we know what language is
and how we are to react to it, i.e. by acquiring it. To put it
simply: the language faculty is innate so that the child can
immediately process the language he/she hears in the
surroundings. The child must not wait for instructions from the
parents before acquiring his/her native language.
New insights from language acquisition
The decline in the ability to learn language
In general one can maintain that after puberty the ability to acquire a language
- in the technical sense of learning with native speaker competence - drops
off radically and is never gained again. There are two major hypotheses
about why this should be the case. The hypotheses may well be related to
each other.
1) Due to the lateralisation of the brain - shortly before puberty - the brain
loses flexibility and receptiveness, at least for unconscious learning. By
lateralisation one means the fixing of functions of the brain to one half
only.
2) With sexual maturity at puberty strong hormonal changes take place with
humans. These lead to a reduction of the playful element which is typical of
children. The spontaneous behaviour of children decreases drastically with
the onset of puberty. A certain rigidity is characteristic of adults vis a vis
children and this also affects the ability to learn languages.
New insights from language acquisition
What do we know at the end of the day?
Now we can view the stages of native language acquisition in
more detail.
1) Children hear fragments of language in their environment.
They then abstract the underlying structures behind what they
hear.
2) Children then internalise the structure they gained - for
instance the structures of sentences - and later on they use
these when they wish to form new sentences without
considering whether they have heard an actual sentence before
or not. This process is called sentence generation in
linguistics.
New insights from language acquisition
The internalised native language is the competence of
a human being and is the basis for linguistic
intuitions, for instance supplying native speakers with
the ability to judge the production of their language
by others. This language is then used in daily
communication. Here we are dealing with
performance, with the use of language. That this use
succeeds so well despite occasional slips - when we
are tired or nervous - is testimony to the extraordinary
achievement of language acquisition in early
childhood.
Contrasting features of first and second
language acquisition
FLA
no conscious choice
very rapid
no instruction
high competence reached
SLA
choice made by learner
relatively slow
instruction is usual
competence attained varies greatly
Possible reasons for differences between FLA and SLA
SLA occurs against the background of FLA (interference hypothesis)
FLA takes place before puberty (adulthood)
FLA takes place before lateralisation of brain (just before puberty)
Language pathology

Language impairment can result from a number of causes all
of which mean that individuals suffer a reduction – from slight
to severe – in language performance. Common reasons for
such impairment are the following.
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1) Injury to the head, typically in an accident
2) The growth of a tumour in the brain
3) A stroke resulting from an interruption of blood supply to
a part of the brain, e.g. due to a clot or a bursting vessel.
4) Severe loss of brain tissue with Alzheimer’s disease
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The shrinkage of the brain with Alzheimer’s disease
typically affects the hippocampus which is why loss
of memory is an obvious symptom. Language
impairment is not always present but an increased
occurrence of anomia (difficulty in finding words or
in remembering names of people or places) can be
observed. Alzheimer’s disease is progressive and
invariable leads to death, typically within 5 to 15
years. Note that the other brain disease which can
affect older people, Parkinson’s disease, does not
stem from a loss of brain tissue but results from the
degeneration of the basal ganglia (nerve cells at the
base of the brain) with the attendant deficiency of
dopamine, a neuortransmitter in this area.
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Injury to the head from an external source is most
common as a result of an accident, which in today’s
world is most commonly a traffic accent. The most
benign type of injury leads to concussion which may
lead to a temporary loss of consciousness after which
the individual may suffer from nausea and headache.
The lasting effects of concussion usually affect
memory, in some cases leading to loss (amnesia). The
language faculty is not usually affected in such cases.
When injury to the head has been more severe,
particularly to the left side of the head, language and
other functions can be seriously impaired. Because of
the wide range of injury from external sources,
individual speech therapy is necessary after initial
recovery.
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The general term for linguistic impairment is aphasia,
lit. ‘lack of speech’, though other terms such as
dysphasia ‘disorder of speech’ have been suggested
as a cover term. Aphasiac disorders typically involve
damage to some part of the brain as outlined above.
Typically they involve either the speech production
(Broca) or speech understanding (Wernicke) areas in
the brain or perhaps the arcuate fasciculus or the
supplementary motor area (see section The structure
of the brain above).
When discussing aphasia, scholars use the
modifier fluent for any kind of language impairment
in which the motoric aspect of speech production is
not affected. Where this is the case, the term nonfluent aphasia is used.
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Broca aphasiacs, those suffering from motor
aphasia, have typical disturbances in their speech. It
is slow and difficult, such speakers seem not to
manage grammatical rules, though their vocabulary is
normally intact. The type of aphasia where speakers
show a lack or confusion of grammatical words by
e.g. omitting formatives and often inflectional
endings is termed agrammatism.
Speakers with disturbances in the Wernicke area,
those suffering from sensory aphasia, can speak
normally though what they say often makes little
sense. Their sentences are semantically incongruous.
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Further types of language impairment
dementia A decline in cognitive ability due to brain
damage or as a result of old age (senile dementia).
This usually entails a general decline in language
performance which can be labelled global aphasia.
dyslexia A condition in which individuals often fail to
connect the written and the spoken word. Such
persons have difficulty with reading and spelling,
irrespective of their level of education. The diagnosis
of dyslexia is problematic as it occurs to varying
degrees and it is notoriously difficult to determine
when it is pathological. Also called alexia or word
blindness (an inability to recognise words from their
written form). Dyslexia may be an acquired condition
with individuals who were previously literate.
dysgraphia Difficulties with writing after damage to
the brain. The equivalent to dyslexia in writing.