CHAPTER 8:

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Lil Adams

Michelle Ro

Theories about how children aquire language:

• Imitation• Correction & Reinforcement

(behaviorist)• Analogy• Connectionism (behavior,

analogy, & reinforcement)• Structured Input• Innateness Hypothesis

First Language Acquisition Stages

Stage Typical Age Description

Babbling 6-8 months Repetitive CV patterns

One-word stage or holophrastic stage

9-18 months Single open-class words or word stems

Two-word stage 18-24 months

"mini-sentences" with simple semantic relations

Telegraphic stage or early multiword stage

24-30 months

"Telegraphic" sentence structures of lexical rather than functional or grammatical morphemes

Later multiword stage

30+ months Grammatical or functional structures emerge

Second Language Acquisition Stages

Stage Approx. Time Frame

Description

Preproduction 0-6 months "Silent Period," Listening, beginning to understand, points, total physical response

Early Production

6 months - 1 year

1 or 2 word responses, participates using key words/familar phrases, uses present-verb tense

Speech Emergence

1 - 3 years good comprehension, produces simple sentences, makes grammar and pronunciation errors

Immediate Fluency

3 - 5 years excellent comprehension, makes few grammatical errors

Advanced Fluency

5 - 7 yearas near-native level of speech

The Development of GrammarPhonology: 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.

The Acquisition of Morphology

Morphology: The study of the structure of words; the component of the grammar that includes the rules of word formation.

• Overgeneralization is evidence of “rule learning”, when children use terms like bringed, goed…we know they are not using imitation to acquire language.

• Children usually go through 3 phases of acquisition of irregular forms of verbs

o Phase 1 – child uses correct form (brought)o Phase 2 – when child forms rules for past tense and applies

the rule to all verbs (bringed)o 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.

The Acquisition of Syntax

• 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 sentenceso 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.

The Acquisition of Pragmatics

• Birth to 9 monthso looking/listening to speaker (eye contact)o smiles/coos/vocalizes in response to a voiceo enjoys being played witho Recognizes familiar people

• 9-1 year 1/2 monthso Shakes head no, Waves o reaches to request objectso comments by pointingo teases, scolds, warns using gestures

• 1.5 years - 3 yearso Verbal turn-takingo Expresses emotiono 2 word phrases

• 3 years - 5 yearso Pretend playo longer dialogue

CHAPTER 8: QUESTION 3FIND 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 FaithJason Raul

Faith

Faith's Grammar 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)

Jason

Jason's Grammar

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

Raul's Grammar

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)

Any questions?

ResourcesCrain, 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