CHAPTER 8:

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Lil Adams Michelle Ro

T HEORIES ABOUT HOW CHILDREN AQUIRE LANGUAGE :

• •

Imitation Correction & Reinforcement (behaviorist)

• •

Analogy Connectionism (behavior, analogy, & reinforcement)

• •

Structured Input Innateness Hypothesis

F IRST L ANGUAGE A CQUISITION S TAGES

Stage

Babbling One-word stage or holophrastic stage Two-word stage

Typical Age Description

6-8 months Repetitive CV patterns 9-18 months Single open-class words or word stems Telegraphic stage or early multiword stage Later multiword stage 18-24 months 24-30 months 30+ months "mini-sentences" with simple semantic relations "Telegraphic" sentence structures of lexical rather than functional or grammatical morphemes Grammatical or functional structures emerge

S ECOND L ANGUAGE A CQUISITION S TAGES

Stage Approx. Time Frame

Preproduction 0-6 months Early Production Speech Emergence Immediate Fluency Advanced Fluency 6 months 1 year 1 - 3 years 3 - 5 years 5 - 7 yearas

Description

"Silent Period," Listening, beginning to understand, points, total physical response 1 or 2 word responses, participates using key words/familar phrases, uses present-verb tense good comprehension, produces simple sentences, makes grammar and pronunciation errors excellent comprehension, makes few grammatical errors near-native level of speech

T HE D EVELOPMENT OF G RAMMAR

Phonology

: The sound system of a language; the component of a grammar that indicates the inventory of sounds (phonetic and phonemic units) and rules for their combination and pronunciation; the study of the sound systems of all languages. • • • • • • First words are generally monosyllabic with CV (consonant-vowel) form.

Children acquire the small set of sounds that are common to all languages before the sounds that are specific to child ’s language.

Acquisition begins with vowel sounds Manner of articulation: Nasals (m, n), glides (j, w), stops (p,t,k), liquids (l,r), fricatives (f), and affricates (t,d).

Place of articulation: labials (lips), velars (back part of the tongue against the soft palate), alveolars (tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge ), and palatals (tongue raised against the hard palate ).

Can comprehend more phonological contrasts than they can produce. (wabbit – ring, wing)

THE ACQUISITION OF WORD MEANING

• • • • • • Intuitively we know children learn words when we label objects.

Children

overextend

words by calling all men daddy.

After child acquired about 75-100 words, begin to narrow the meanings.

Underextension

– when children apply a word like “bird” only to family pet but not to animals in trees outside.

Children learn about fourteen words a day for the first six years of life!

Syntactic bootstrapping

is when children use syntax and context clues to determine word meaning.

T HE A CQUISITION OF M ORPHOLOGY

Morphology

: The study of the structure of words; the component of the grammar that includes the rules of word formation. • Overgeneralization is evidence of to acquire language.

“rule learning”, when children use terms like bringed, goed…we know they are not using imitation • Children usually go through 3 phases of acquisition of irregular forms of verbs o Phase 1 – child uses correct form (brought) o o Phase 2 – when child forms rules for past tense and applies the rule to all verbs (bringed) Phase 3 – child understands past tense and knows there are exceptions to the rule. They use (brought) again but now understand the root of the word is bring.

Children acquiring other language may also have to learn number and gender rules.

T HE A CQUISITION OF S YNTAX

• • • • In a study done on children, infants tend to look longer at videos of the sentences they hear. Results show that children as young as 17 months can understand the differences between sentences o i.e. "The dog is chasing the cat." vs."The cat is in the tree." Around the age of 2, children start to put words together.

o These 2 word sentences have clear syntactic and semantic relations.

 i.e. "mommy sock" (noun noun) expresses a subject + object relation [Mommy has my sock] Telegraphic speech occurs as children create multiword utterances. During this stage, they tend to leave out auxiliaries, function words, and determiners. But the sentences contain the required words for basic understanding. o i.e. "Daddy build house." Between ages 2 years 6 months and 3 years 6 months, a "language explosion" occurs.

T HE A CQUISITION OF P RAGMATICS

• • • • Birth to 9 months o o o o looking/listening to speaker (eye contact) smiles/coos/vocalizes in response to a voice enjoys being played with Recognizes familiar people 9-1 year 1/2 months o o o o Shakes head no, Waves reaches to request objects comments by pointing teases, scolds, warns using gestures 1.5 years - 3 years o o o Verbal turn-taking Expresses emotion 2 word phrases 3 years - 5 years o o Pretend play longer dialogue

CHAPTER 8: QUESTION 3

FIND A CHILD BETWEEN TWO AND FOUR YEARS OLD AND PLAY WITH THE CHILD FOR ABOUT THIRTY MINUTES. KEEP A LIST OF ALL WORDS AND/OR “SENTENCES” THAT ARE USED INAPPROPRIATELY. DESCRIBE WHAT THE CHILD ’S MEANINGS FOR THESE WORDS PROBABLY ARE. DESCRIBE THE SYNTACTIC OR MORPHOLOGICAL ERRS (INCLUDING OMISSIONS). IF THE CHILD IS PRODUCING MULTIWORD SENTENCES, WRITE A GRAMMAR THAT COULD ACCOUNT FOR THE DATA YOU HAVE COLLECTED.

Faith Raul

Faith

F AITH ' S G RAMMAR

Mel: asked Faith to repeat "can you say Mel-Mel? Auntie? Elmo?

F: repeats "Elmo" (using imitation to increase word knowledge, Mel using mohterease to ask for only one word sentences) Faith is wining, Mel says "what do you want?

F: Looks at cousin playing with her toy and says: "Sa Sa mine" (missing verb) Amber is asking Faith about dinosuar that scared her at birthday party: F: Repeats "bye bye" until mother cues her by saying "dinosaur went bye bye" Faith repeats "dinosaur bye bye" (missing verb, mother uses correction) Faith's Mommy: Tell me about the birds.

F: Points and uses gestures instead of words..

Faith uses two word utterances such as " Tika out?, blue table, fire hot and pool bad" (uses gestures and two word utterances - telegraphic speech)

J ASON

J ASON ' S G RAMMAR

M: Can you tell me about the picture that you made?

J: he.. He Spiderman, him (Missing verb, unnecessary use of an extra pronoun) M: Alright, well tell me about the Avengers.

J: this guy the bad guy. here comes the one with the hammer. this Hulk. this Iron Man. he flying away. and this is Captain America.

(missing verb in all sentences, except last one) M: Captain America. Ok , so why are they fighting?

J: because they don't like to be friends (semantics [like] error) M: So what happens in the end?

J: Um, he go friends... he got friends again.

(verb error)

Raul

R AUL ' S G RAMMAR

M: Can you tell me what happened?

R: The baby is stuck in the tree. (number error) M: and then?

R: and the mamma come (number error, verb tense error) M: well, why were they stuck in the tree? What happened?

R: they climbing (missing verb) M: what happened on this page?

R: mom come back. two momma back. the g, the r, the j (number errors) M: So what happened at the end?

R: it get out and the momma come. the end (pronoun error, verb tense error)

A

NY QUESTIONS

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R ESOURCES

Crain, S. & Pietroski, P. (2001). Nature, Nurture and Universal Grammar.

Linguistics And Philosophy, 24

(2), 139-186.

Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2007).

An Introduction to Language.

Boston, MA: Wadsworth Publishing.

Hill, J. D. & Flynn, K. M. (2006). Classroom Instruction That Works with English Language Learners. [Retrieved] 5/28/2012, [from] http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/106009/chapters/The-Stag es-of-Second-Language-Acquisition.aspx.

Stages of Language Acquisition in Children. (n.d). [Retrieved]5/28/2012 [from] http://www.ling.upenn/edu/courses/ Fall_2003/ling001/acquisition.html