Chapter 13 First Language Acquisition


1 Acquisition

Young children in the first 3 years need to interact with people who talk to learn a specific language like English.


For example, the case of Genie child who does not hear or is not allowed to use language will learn no language


Cultural transmission is also important because kids don't inherit a specific language like English from their parents. They learn it by being around people who speak it.


Input 

Linguistic environment plays an important role in language acquisition of a child 


Caregiver Speech

The way caregivers talk to young children often encourages them to take part in the conversation, even before they can actually speak. 

E.g:


Caregivers talking to young children by using short, easy sentences. They often repeat things and explain things in different ways to help them understand. They mostly talk about things that happen right in front of the child


2 The Acquisition Schedule

All children seem to develop language at the same time because it is linked to the brain development of a child. The same as doing basic physical activities like sitting and crawling needs the development of physical milestones. 

Before a baby can talk it needs to figure out the language they hear all around them. In the first few months, babies light up with big smiles when they see someone talking to them, and they start making their own unique sounds


Cooing


Def: the earliest use of speech-like sounds by an infant in the first few months


In the first few months baby can produce particularly high vowels similar to [i] and [u]. By four months of age, babies develop the ability to bring the back of the tongue into regular contact allowing them to produce the velar consonants [k] and [ɡ]. By five months old babies recognize the difference between sounds like [i] and  [a] and can distinguish between syllables like[ba] and [ɡa]. 


Babbling

Def: the use of syllable sequences (ba-ba) and combinations (ma-ga) by young children in their first year

Throughout the time from 6 to 11 months old. Baby produces the sound by repeating combination of vowel and consonant sounds and mix these words together, e.g:   

  • Around 6-8 months: babies can produce a number of different vowels and consonants such as ba-ba-ba and ga-ga-ga

  • Later babbling (9-10 months):  ba-ba-da-da (combine 2 words “ba” and “da”), nasal also can be used at this time such as  ma-ma-ma and da-da-da

  • Late babbling (10-11 months):  Their babbling becomes even more complex with combinations like "ma-da-ga-ba," lots of playful sounds

This  “pre-language” give babies some experience of the social role of speech.


Important note: There's a wide range of normal development in children, some children develop their language skills slower or faster than the others 

 

The One-Word Stage 


Between twelve and eighteen months, children start saying real words that people can understand. 


Babies begin to produce single words that familiar to them such as: milk, cookie, cat, cup


The term holophrastic(a single form functioning as a phrase or sentence in the early speech of young children) describes an utterance that could be a word, a phrase, or a sentence. During this stage the child can say "Karen" and "bed" but can't combine them to say something like "Karen bed" or "Karen is in bed"

The Two-Word Stage


Around eighteen to twenty months children can combine words. For example:  baby chair, mommy eat, cat bad 

 

Telegraphic Speech

Def: strings of words (lexical morphemes without inflectional morphemes) in phrases (daddy go bye-bye) produced by two-year-old children


Between two and two and a half years old, the child begins producing a large number of utterances that could be classified as “multiple-word” speech. For example: this shoe all wet, cat drink milk and daddy go bye-bye. At this stage, the child can put words together to form sentences and knows the correct order for the words. At this time,  child’s vocabulary is expanding rapidly, and the seen more active at this time. At 3 year old, children typically know hundreds of words and can say them clearly  


3 The Acquisition Process

It seems like babies are being taught the language but actually research shows that babies not only learn language by being taught   



Learning through Imitation?

Research shows that “imitation” is not the major source of children's speech production. They may repeat single words or phrases but not whole sentence structure 


  

Learning through Correction?

“Correction” is not effective in teaching language to children. Research shows that children still use incorrect grammar structure after being corrected, because they want to express by their own way 



4 Developing Morphology

By the time a child is two and a half years old, children can develop telegraphic speech form and combine using inflectional and functional morphemes through time. 


5 Developing Syntax   

The process of developing syntax can be divided to 3 stage 

  • Stage 1 ( between 18 and 26 months)

  • Stage 2 (between 22 and 30 months)

  • Stage 3 (between 24 and 40 months)

Forming Questions

  • Stage 1: adding Wh-form to the beginning or rising intonation toward the end of the expression 

  • Stage 2: can make more complex expressions like raising intonation strategy, using more Wh-form 

  • Stage 3: can do an inversion, and not use Wh-form automatically anymore 



Forming Negatives  

  • Stage 1: putting No or Not at the beginning. but they don’t change the utterance, both No and Not can be attached to nouns and verbs 

  • Stage 2: star using don’t and can’t, No, and Not are used in front of the verb rather than at the beginning of the utterance. don’t be used as a single unit and not connected with do not

  • Stage 3: not using No and Not like how they were in Stage 1 anymore and start using auxiliary forms like didn’t and won’t, they learn how to use isn’t very late and keep using negative form of stage 2 for a long time   


6 Developing Semantics

This process may be different between children and children because it is based on children's own experience

Children often use overextension ( using a word to refer to more objects than is usual in the language, e.g.: ball used to refer to the moon) because they lack of vocabulary to express their experience.  

Later Developments

Anonymous relations are developed quite late. children need more time to understand opposites like "more" and "less." They might confuse these words it also with "before" and "after," or "buy" and "sell" 

Research shows that at the age of 5 children seem to have mastered their first language and it is a good time to learn the new language. However, a lot of people didn’t get this chance.


The question that always arises is that acquiring the first language is so easy but why learning the second language is so hard?


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Chapter 1 The Origin of Language

Chapter 3 The Sound of Language

Chapter 5 Word Formation