Language Acquisition
Language Acquisition
Language Acquisition
BY
SUBMITTED TO:
Samsun
1
Table of Contents
Introduction
Conclusion
References
2
INTRODUCTION
Every aspect of language is extremely complex. Yet very young children- before the
age of five- already know most of the intricate system we have been calling the grammar of a
language. Before they can add 2+2, children conjoining sentences, asking questions, using
appropriate pronouns, negating sentences, forming relative clauses, and using syntactic,
phonological, morphological, and semantic rules of the grammar. The study of the grammars
of human languages has revealed a great deal about language acquisition, about what a child
does and does not do when learning a language. First, it is obvious that 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 no dictionary can hold all the sentences, which are finite in number.
Rather they learn to construct and understand sentences, most of which they have never
Children must therefore construct the rules that permit them use their 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. Even if you
remember your early years, do you remember anyone telling you to form a sentence by
adding a verb phrase to a noun phrase, or to add (s) or (z) to form plurals? Children seem to
act like efficient linguists equipped with a perfect theory of language, and they use this theory
The acquisition of language appears simple enough for any human child to achieve
within the first three years of life. Psycholinguistic theories have tried to explain the cognitive
mechanisms underlying language acquisition and the question has been raised of whether
there is a continuous development from early to later stages of language use or whether young
children process language in a fundamentally differently way from adults. In this paper, I am
3
going to analyze theories of first language acquisition as well as the stages of it. Also the
According to Fromkin although there are theoretical approaches to child language acquisition
none can fully explain the phenomenon of child language acquisition. Therefore, at the one
pole, there are scholars who claim that language acquisition/production is a learned behavior
which is not different from general learning system and that parents teach language to their
children. At the other pole, there are scholars who assume that language is innate, that there
are universal principles which govern language acquisition which are prewired at birth. There
are many dimensions in language acquisition theories which are derived from these two poles.
-Nature or Nurture
Is language innate in the sense that it is encoded on the genes of human beings or is it
-Continuity or Discontinuity?
Is language development continuous without any transitions and stages or does it occur in
discernable stages?
Do all normal speakers of a language share the same linguistic knowledge? Does individual
knowledge vary greatly? Do all the children acquire language in the same way or is each child
-Structure or Function?
Should researchers who study language concentrate on the grammar of the language or the
-Autonomy or Dependency?
4
Is language a separate faculty of human mind which works according to its own principles or
-Rules or Associations?
1. 1 Cognitive theory
Jean Piaget views language acquisition within the context of the child's
concept, such as relative size, and only afterward do they acquire the
words and patterns to convey that concept. Simple ideas are expressed
earlier than more complex ones even if they are grammatically more
then in and on, then the plural -s, last are the forms of the verb to
tense.
Pros and cons of his theory: Clearly there is some link between
But his theory does not explain why language emerges in the first
place. Apes also develop cognitively in much the same way as young
children in the first few years of life, but language acquisition doesn't
5
ability to respond to many shades of color, but bees never develop any
popular in the 40's and 50's, but challenged, since imitation alone cannot
possibly account for all language acquisition. Even when children are
trying to imitate what they hear, they are unable to produce sentences
Reinforcement:
6
something right, and negatively reinforced when they say something
would not explain how or what children learn from such adult responses,
or how children discover and construct the correct rules. In fact, attempts
what they are doing wrong and are unable to make corrections even they
This theory we will discuss involves the belief in the innateness of certain
Chomsky, although the theory has been around for hundreds of years.
Children are born with an innate capacity for learning human language.
the child’s mind. Chomsky believes that every child has a ‘language
language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain. Children
have then only to learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures
7
from the LAD to form sentences. Chomsky points out that a child could not
languages as they all contain nouns, verbs, consonants and vowels and
native speakers are unaware of. However, all children, regardless of their
intellectual ability, become fluent in their native language within five or six
years.
8
heard the sentence before, and that we can produce and understand
• Critics of Chomsky’s theory say that although it is clear that children don’t learn
language through imitation alone, this does not prove that they must have an LAD –
Yet no one has been able to explain how quickly and perfectly all
complex, full of subtle distinctions that speakers are not even aware of.
Some innate feature of the mind must be responsible for the universally
speech.
constraints, rules that dictate what cannot be in any language rather than
the main clause, etc. It is assumed that something about the structure of
our brain causes languages to be somewhat limited in how they can differ
9
syntactically. This built in limitation aids the child in acquiring the
350-351)
More recent studies show that language spoken around child is not as
might believe. It has been found that mothers use a special register of
each language group has its own structured set: expressive element
doggy, kitty, ducky, (Berber suffix: sh/sht, Russian -ik, ichiko, itsa). Such
10
There is also a social register called fatherese: It is more demanding
talk to infants and very small children using special baby talk. The special
social registers that developed from the need to speak to small children
The pre-linguistic sounds of the very early stages of child language acquisition are simply called
cooing’ and ‘babbling’. The period from about three months to ten months is usually
characterized by three stages of sound production in the infant’s developing repertoire. The first
recognizable sounds are described as cooing, with velar consonants such as (k] and [g] usually
present, as well as high vowels such as [i] and [uJ. These can normally be heard by the time the
child is three months old, although many of the child’s vocal sounds are very different from those
which occur in the speech of mom and dad. By six months, the child is usually able to sit up and
can produce a number of different vowels and consonants such as fricatives and nasals. The sound
production at this stage is described as babbling and may contain syllable-type sounds such as
mu and da. In the later babbling stage, around nine months, there are recognizable intonation
patterns to the consonant and vowel combinations being produced. As children begin to pull
themselves ‘standing position through the tenth and eleventh months, they are capable of using
Between twelve and eighteen months, children begin to produce a variety of recognizable
single unit utterances. This period, traditionally called the 'one-word stage', is characterized
by speech in which single terms are uttered for everyday objects such as ‘cat and cup'.. other
forms such as /Ʌ / may occur in circumstances which suggest that the child is producing a
11
version of what is that, so the label 'one-word' may be misleading. Some terms like
Depending on what one counts as an occurrence of two separate words, this stage can begin
around eighteen to twenty months, as the child’s vocabulary moves beyond fifty distinct words.
By the time the child is two years old, a variety of combinations, similar to baby chair, mommy
eat, cat bad, will have appeared. The adult interpretation of such combinations is, of course, very
Telegraphic speech
Between two and three years old, the child will begin producing a large number of utterances
which could be classified as multiple-word utterances. The salient feature of these utterances
ceases to be the number of words, but that variation in word-forms which begins to appear.
phrases such as cat drink milk. The child has clearly developed some sentence-building
capacity by this stage and can order the forms correctly. By the age of two and a half, the
child's vocabulary is expanding rapidly and the child is actually initiating more talks. By the
age of three, the vocabulary has grown to hundreds of words and pronunciation has become
closer to the form of the adult language, so that even visitors have to admit that the little
As the linguistic repertoire of the child increases, it is often assumed that the child is, in some
sense, being ‘taught’ the language. This view seems to underestimate what the child actually does.
For the vast majority of children, no one provides any instruction on how to speak the language..
A much more realistic view would have children actively constructing, from what is said to them,
possible ways of using the language. The child’s linguistic production, then, is mostly a matter of
trying out constructions and testing whether they work or not. It is simply not possible that the
12
child is acquiring the language through a process of consistently imitating adult speech. Of course,
the child can be heard to repeat versions of what adults say and are in the process of adopting a lot
of vocabulary from their speech. However, adults simply do not produce many of the types of
Morphology
By the time the child is three years old, he or she is going beyond telegraphic speech forms and
incorporating some of the inflectional morphemes which indicate the grammatical function of the
nouns and verbs used. The first to appear is usually the -ing form in expressions such as cat
sitting and mommy reading book. Then comes the marking of regular plurals with the -s form, as
in boys and cats. The acquisition of this form is often accompanied by a process of over
generalization. The child over generalizes the apparent rule of adding -s to form plurals and will
talk about foot and mans. When the alternative pronunciation of the plural morpheme used in
houses (i.e. ending [-az) comes into use, it too is given an over generalized application and forms
such as boyses or footses can appear. At the same time as this overgeneralization is taking place,
some children also begin using irregular plurals such as men quite appropriately for a while, but
then try out the general rule on the forms, producing expressions like some mens and two fees, or
The use of the possessive inflection - occurs in expressions such as girls dog and Mummys book
and the different forms of the verb to be’, such as are and was, turn up. The appearance of forms
such as was and, at about the same time, went and came should be noted. These are irregular past-
tens forms which one would not expect to appear before the more regular forms.
Syntax
Similar evidence against ‘imitation’ as the basis of a child’s speech production has been found in
studies of the syntactic structures used by children .One two-year-old child, specifically asked to
repeat what she heard, would listen to an adult say forms such as the ow/who eats candy runs fast,
13
and then repeat them in the form owl eat candy and he run fast. It is clear that the child
understands what the adult is saying. She just has her own way of expressing it.
Questions
In forming questions, the first stage has two procedures. Simply add a wh- form (where, who) to
the beginning of the expression or utter the expression with arise in intonation towards the end.
In the second stage, more complex expressions can be formed, but the rising intonation strategy
continues to be used. It is noticeable that more wh forms come into use, as in these examples:
In the third stage, the required inversion of subject and verb in English questions has appeared,
but the wh- forms do not always undergo the required inversion. In fact, children entering school
may still prefer to form wh- questions (especially in negatives) without the type of inversion fond
Negatives
In the case of negatives, Stages seems to have a simple strategy which that no or not should be
stuck on the beginning of any expression. Examples are: no mitten, not a teddy bear, no fall no sit
there. In the second stage, the additional negative forms don’t and can ‘t are used and with no and
not , begin to be placed in front of the verb rather than at the beginning of the sentence. Some
examples are:
Semantics
14
This process is called overextension and the most common pattern is for the child to overextend
the meaning of a word on the basis of similarities of shape, sound and size, and, to a lesser extent,
of movement and texture. Thus, the word ball is extended to all kinds of round objects, including
a lampshade, a doorknob and the moon. Or, a tick-tock is initially used for a watch, but can also
be used for a bathroom scale with a round dial. On the basis of size, presumably, the word fly was
first used for the insect, and then came to be used for specks of dirt and even crumbs of bread.
Apparently due to similarities of texture, the expression size was first used by one child for
scissors, and then came to be used for all metal objects. The semantic development in a child’s
narrowing down the application of each term as more words are learned. Although overextension
has been well documented in children’s speech production, it isn’t necessarily used in speech
comprehension. One two- year-old child, in speaking, used apple to refer to a number of other
round objects like tomatoes and balls, but had no difficulty picking out the apple, when asked,
With some exception, adults do not simply “pick up” a second language. It usually
requires conscious attention, if not intense study and memorization, to become proficient in a
second language. Again with the exception of some remarkable individuals, adult second
language learners do not often achieve native like grammatical competence in the L2, especially
with respect to pronunciation. They generally have an accent and they may make syntactic or
morphological errors that are unlike the errors of children acquiring their first language. For
example, L2ers often make word order errors, especially early in their development, as well as
morphological errors in grammatical gender and case. L2 errors may fossilize so that no amount
Unlike L1 acquisition, which is uniformly successful across children and languages, adults
vary considerably in their ability to acquire an L2 completely. Some people are very talented
15
language learners. Success may depend on range factors, including age, talent, motivation, and
whether you are in the country where the language is spoken or sitting in a classroom five
mornings a week with no further contact with native speakers. For all these reasons, many people,
including many linguists who study L2 acquisition, believe that second language acquisition is
something different from first language acquisition. This hypothesis is referred to as the
CONCLUSION
All the theories are probably correct to a degree; each describes particular facets of a
development. In addition to this, repetition, imitation, structured input are all a part of
language acquisition. Greater exposure to language might speed language acquisition up but
is not essential. All children exposed to language, regardless of environmental factors and
differences in intelligence, are able to acquire very complex grammars at a very early age.
Something innate to the child--the LAD--allows for such rapid and successful language
acquisition by children.
All of the above studies have revealed a few universally accepted facts about child
human society. All children exposed to language acquire it naturally without deliberate
efforts of teaching or learning. Secondly, the outcome of first language acquisition will be the
same regardless of individual differences in intelligence. Two children with quite different
intellectual abilities will both acquire a highly complex native language by age six. Thirdly,
although the basic ability to acquire language is innate to the child, no specific structural
property of language has yet been proven to be innate. Therefore, any infant is equally
capable of acquiring any language. Infants born of different racial stocks will acquire the
same form of language if raised in the same linguistic environment. There is no such a thing
16
as a Russian language gene or a Swahili language gene. An infant born of Russian parents
and adopted into an American family will acquire the same form of English as his step
REFERENCES
Edition: 2003
Ingram, David. 1989. First Language Acquisition: method, description, and explanation.
17