Ling 101 Introduction to Linguistics
Chapter 8: Language Acquisition
I. Some General Ideas
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Human language is unique and species specific.
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Children are not born with a mind that is like a blank slate, but we are
prewired to learn language.
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Children do not start with a fully formed grammar or with knowledge of
social and communicative intercourse.
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Linguistic competence develops by stages. Observations of children in different
language areas of the world reveal that the stages are similar possibly
universal.
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Some of the stages last for a short time; others remain longer.
II. Basic Issues:
The two major questions that are basic to the study
of first language acquisition are
1) What do children do when they acquire their first language?
: Stages of language development
This is simply a data question: what are the facts
about children’s linguistic behavior? This can be answered by careful observation
and testing of children at different stages of acquisition. The data is
obtained by watching children in a natural setting (while at play, etc)
and recording their linguistic behavior. Linguists may use various experiments
to test children’s linguistic skills in very controlled and specific ways.
2) What can that information tell about how human language works?
: different theories of language acquisition will attempt to explain
how human language works.
- Innateness Hypothesis
- Imitation Theory
- Reinforcement Theory
- Critical Age Hypothesis
III. What a child does and does not do when acquiring
a language
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Children do not learn a language by storing all the
words and sentences.
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Children learn to understand and produce novel sentences.
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Children must learn the "rules" to use their language
creatively.
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No one teaches them these rules.
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Children also learn communicative competence.
IV. Learning Styles
C. E. (Concrete Experience)
R. O. (Reflective Observer)
A. C. (Abstract Conceptualizer)
A. E. (Active Experience)
e.g., study directions before working on something (whole -->
Part)
Field Independent:
part --> whole
V. Three Ego States (Eric Berne, M.D.)
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Adult (e.g., don’t like to make mistakes in public)
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Parental (inhibitive/prohibitive)
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Child (careless about making mistakes in public)
VI. What infants (1-10 months) CAN and CANNOT do
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Infants
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ignore the nonlinguistic aspects of the speech signal, i.e. the difference
in physical sound
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ignore the difference in pitch
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ignore own/other voice
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ignore the difference in speed of speech production ignore the intensity
and the voice quality (they ignore a different physical sound when
produced by male, female, or child).
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respond to phonetic contrast found in some human language even when
these differences are not phonemic in the language spoken in the
baby’s home, e.g. [p] vs. [b] / [r] vs. [l] ( Japanese
infants) aspirated stops vs. unaspirated stops
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can discriminate between sounds that are phonemic in other languages and
nonexistent in the language of their parents. e.g. Hindi: retroflex [t]
and alveolar [t] attend to the differences in manner and place of articulation
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categorize speech sounds in terms of features (perceptually/productively)
Perception comes before production!
e.g., even when children hear the errors when their parent
say ‘poon’ for ‘spoon’, or ‘tuck’ for ‘truck, they still produce
the words as ‘poon’ or ‘tuck’. ( Or ‘duck’ for ‘tuck’/
‘duck’ for ‘guck’ pp. 333-334)
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do not merge the speech sound when they hear them (do not hear 'hello'
as 'hello' but as h-e-l-o)
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produce only what relevant to their native language
VII. Stages of language development
1. The first sounds (from birth)
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Responses to stimuli
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"Prewired" mind
- Babies ignore the nonlinguistic aspects of the speech signal. They seem
to be born with the ability to perceive just those sounds what are phonemic
in some languages.
- They can discriminate between sounds that are phonemic in other languages
as well as their native language. Infants are universal listeners, while
adults have difficulty in discriminating nonnative contrasts. For example,
Japanese infants can distinguish between [r] and [l] while their parents
cannot.
- They can learn any language to which they are exposed.
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Experiments: sucking rate, looking time, and head turn paradigm
- The sucking rate will decrease when the same stimuli are presented over
and over again, and the sucking rate will increase when stimuli(visual
or auditory) are varied.
- Infants turn their head toward a loud speaker when the stimuli are
varied. They also look at the speaker or stimuli longer when the stimuli
are varied than they do when the stimuli are not varied.
2. Babbling (6 mths - 1;0)
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Development of linguistic ability related to the child’s native language
- Children are learning to distinguish between the sounds of their language
and the sounds that are not part of the language.
- They lose the ability to discriminate between sounds that are not
phonemic in their language.
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Babbling is the earliest stage in language acquisition, not the prelinguistic
stage.
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7-month-old infants can learn rules (Gary Marcus et al, 1998).
- Training: 2 minutes of "ABB" pattern syllables
ga ti ti
li ti ti
bo du du
- Testing same pattern
Testing different pattern
wo fe fe
wo fe wo
ba go go
ba go ba
- Infants listen longer to the ‘novel’ pattern than to the pattern
that they have heard before, indicating that after just 2 minutes of exposure
they have made a generalization about the pattern.
3. One-word or holophrastic stage (1;0 - 1;6)
- Holo "complete," and phrase "phrase or sentence" (one-word sentence)
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Single words for various meanings - naming, commenting, requesting, inquiring
or conveying emotion
- "Dada" (Here comes Daddy!; This is for Daddy.; That is where Daddy sits.;
This shoe is Daddy’s.)
- mama, dada, up, doggie, sa(sock), no, hi, bu(book), bye-bye
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Extension of the meaning of a word from a particular referent to encompass
a larger class.
- "Dog" is first used when pointing to a real dog but later is used for
pictures of dogs in books.
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More comprehension than production: Children can perceive or comprehend
many more phonological contrasts than they can produce themselves.
4. Two-word stage (1;6 - 2;0)
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No syntactic or morphological markers like determiners, prepositions, auxiliaries
or inflectional affixes
allgone milk
baby sleep
more wet
byebye boat
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Expressing a number of different grammatical relations
"Mommy sock"
subject + object (when mother is putting the sock on the child)
possessive relation (when the child is pointing to Mommy’s
sock)
"Mommy, this is my sock"
"Mommy, I want to wear socks"
5. Telegraphic stage (2;0 - 2;6)
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Lack of functions words (like determiners, prepositions, inflectional affixes,
or auxiliaries), and use of content words
What that?
Daddy like book
Cathy build house
No sit there
- There utterances are called telegraphic speech since people leave
out any word that was not required for the meaning of the sentences when
they send telegrams.
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Very few word order errors
subject-verb "chicken eat"
verb-object "eat chicken"
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Use of syntactic and grammatical function words at the later stage
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A child’s mean length of utterances(MLU) rather than chronological age
is used in the study of language development.
VIII. Theories of Child Language Acquisition
1. Imitation Theory
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Children produce what they hear.
Child: My teacher holded the baby rabbit and we patted them.
Adult: Did you say that your teacher held the baby rabbit?
Child: Yes.
Adult: What did you say she did?
Child: She holded the baby rabbit and we patted them.
Adult: Did you say she held them tightly?
Child: No, she holded them loosely.
Problems
- Non-imitation of parents
- Systematic errors across children and languages
ex) hitted, goed (overgeneralization), no drink (He does not want a
drink), dog toy (That’s the dog’s toy)
- Acquiring complex rules and producing novel sentences
2. Reinforcement Theory
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Children learn by positive reinforcement when right, and negative reinforcement
when wrong.
Child: Nobody don’t like me.
Mother: No, say "Nobody likes me."
Child: Nobody don’t like me.
(dialogue
repeated eight times)
Mother: Now, listen carefully, say "Nobody likes me"
Child: Oh, nobody don’t like me.
Problems
- Seldom occurrence of reinforcement
- Corrections of accuracy or truth of statement rather than syntactic
well-formedness
ex) The ungrammatical sentence "Her curl my hair" (She was curling
my hair) was not corrected, while the syntactically correct sentence "
Walt Disney comes on Tuesday" was corrected since the program on television
was shown on Wednesday.
3. Innate Hypothesis
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Humans are born ‘ready’ for languages.
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Acquisition is rapid: only two years from the time the child produces her
first word at around the age of one until the major part of the grammar
is acquired at around three.
- Input is unrealistic: speech errors, false starts, ungrammatical
and incomplete sentences
- Some information is extremely infrequent.
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Exposure combined with general grammatical principles helps children construct
a grammar
4. Critical-age Hypothesis
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Lennerberg (1967) first proposed that the ability to learn a native language
develops within a fixed period, from birth to puberty.
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"Wild" children or children in isolation
- Amala and Kamala (1920) were found in India, having been reared with
wolves.
- Genie(1970) had been confined to a small room under conditions of
physical restraint from the age of eighteen months until fourteen years.
- These cases show that innate ability to acquire language must be
triggered by language.
- The children in isolation were not able to acquire language after
exposure with deliberate linguistic teaching.
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Beyond the critical age humans cannot acquire much of syntax and inflectional
morphology.
5. Analogy Theory
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Children learn language by hearing a sentence using it as a sample for
another sentences.
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However, analogy does not work.
I painted a red barn. I painted a barn red.
I saw a red barn. I
saw a barn red ???
sun ? sunny
moon ? moony???
IX. Universal Grammar
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The set of core characteristics common to all languages.
- Language acquisition is guided by innate universal
- Children’s mistakes are expected to occur and to follow non-random
patterns
- The different syntactic rules at any stage in acquisition govern
the construction of the child’s sentences at that period of development.
ex) negatives
stage1: single word: no, allgone
stage 2: ‘no’ is added to another word
or sentence: no want food, no heavy,
no Daddy drink all tea
stage 3: negative elements are inserted
inside the sentence: He no bite you, I
can’t catch you, I don’t want any food
ex) past tense marking
stage 1: perfection (almost)
stage 2: overregularization: bringed,
goed, singed
stage 3: perfection
X. Second Language Acquisition
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The stages in second language acquisition are similar to those in first
language acquisition.
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The acquisition of grammatical morphemes (both bound and free) in learning
English as a second language proceeds in similar order as in children’s
acquisition, no matter what the system is in the native language of the
learner.
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However, interference from one’s native phonology, morphology, and syntax
can create difficulties that persist as a foreign accent in phonology and
in the use of nonnative syntactic structures.
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Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is alive and well in learning a second
language.
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There is the distinction between Acquisition and Learning (Krashen, 1982).
Acquisition is a process by which children unconsciously
acquire their native language
Learning is a conscious knowledge of a second language,
knowing the rules, being aware of them, and being able to talk about them.