First Language Acquisitio

n Da-daMa-maPaula ReyesVerónica Cedrés

language

Essentially humanLanguage itself is very complex

Intricate web of skills

What do children learn? Sounds and words, meanings and constructions; they need to know what to use, when, where and how.

The acquisition might be affected by properties of each Language, as well as by social interaction and cognitive development.

TABULA RASA?Do children have to learn everything about Language from scratch? Or do they come with certain things already pre wired?

Two theories

NATURE: Any innate capacities and structures children are born with.

NURTURE: What children gain from experience.

- Even if children are born with a learning mechanism dedicated to Language, the main proposal have focus only on syntactic structure, the rest has to be learnt.

- Errors made by over-generalization.

Language DifferDifferences: range and combination of sounds, for example single consonants to begin syllable (top), or also combination of consonants (stop); word classes; meanings.Children find all Languages about equally easy to acquire, but particular features of one Language may be more difficult to acquire.

COMPLEXITY

Conceptual complexity: the ideas being expressed in Language.

Formal complexity: the conceptual distinctions of each Language may be expressed in a variety of forms depending on the Language.

SOCIAL DIMENSIONSLanguage acquisition takes place in mid conversation.When adults talk to children they directly or indirectly offer the extensive information about language. This is called input. How adults talk to children

First adults have to make sure that children realize an utterance is being addressed to them and not to someone else.

Second they must choose the right words and the right sentences so the child is likely to understand what is said.

Third, that can say what they have to say in many different ways, talk slowly or quickly, use short to long sentences and so on.

Influenced by three things:

How necessary is adult’s speech? Experiments on these topics are difficult if not impossible to devise, but

occasionally a real life situation presents itself in a way that provides a glimpse of the answers to these

questions.Genie was a child who was not exposed to any Language while she was growing up; her parents locked her away for 13 years and seldom spoke to her. When she was discovered, she was unable to speak. A linguistic tried to teach her English, but the attempts were not successful.

A hearing child of deaf parents who only use sign language, when Jim was approximately 3 and a half, he had only small vocabulary that he had probably picked up from playmates plus a few words from television jingles. No adults had spoken to him directly on any regular basis. Once Jim was exposed to an adult who talked to him, his language improved rapidly. 

COGNITIVE DIMENSIONSThey have about 12 months of perceptual and conceptual development; they are adept at perceiving similarities, identifying objects and actions, recognizing faces, sorting like with like. They can orient objects and know where they are kept and how they are used. In summary they are setting up representations of what they see and know.Some processes are found within the stages the child goes through:

OVER-GENERALIZATION: The child takes a grammatical rule and applies it to every case. (From walk, walked to see seed. Also from dog dogs to man mans) 

OVER-EXTENSION: The child takes the name of a person or object and names all the things that look similar to it. (ball, to an apple for example.) the set of objects named in over-extensions are as varied and random as those in complexive concepts. 

Two aspects of general maturation are crucial to a child`s ability to acquire a

Language. 1st the ability to symbolize, and 2nd the ability to use tools.

GOAL OF ACQUISITIONThe goal is to become a member of a community of speakers, this means learning all the elements of a Language, both structure and usage.

Physiological Prerequisites of Sound Production

To identify sounds of their language. To produce each of this sounds and its variants. To combine sounds into larger strings of sounds (syllables and words). To decode larger strings of sounds into syllables and words when being talked to.

When children start to acquire a language, there are various things they have to learn first:

Articulatory gestures involved in producing each particular sound.

The timing between gestures.

Gain control over the muscles in their speech organs.Coordinate the execution of articulatory movements.

First vocalizations

Crying Gurgling Cooing

BabblingAt the age of four to six months or so, children in all cultures begin to babble, producing sequences of vowels and consonants.Babbling a certain sequence of sounds is not a conscious process.

Repeated or canonical babbling starts around the age of seven to ten months.

Between about ten and twelve months of age, children begin to produce a variety of speech sounds.

Babbled sequences are not linked to immediate biological needs like food or physical comfort.The fine motor movements necessary for accurate articulation are exercised extensively during babbling.DA-DA

Phonological acquisitionWhen an eighteen month-old attempts to pronounce the word water, he or she might say [wa-wa], differences in pronunciation like this may persist for some time.All children, regardless of what language they are acquiring natively, make mistakes like these before they have mastered the phonological system of their native language. Errors reveal that they have already learned a great deal, because the errors are systematic, rule-governed, rather than random.There is much variation in the age range during which children acquire words or fundamental cognitive concepts.

First wordsA major task in the acquisition of phonology involves understanding the word as a link between sound and meaning.Around the age of eighteen months, children learn and ask for many new names for objects in their environment.When children first acquire the concept of a word, these first words show great variability in pronunciation. Some may be perfect adult productions, while others may be so distorted that they are comprehensible only to the child's closest companions.

Acquisition of phonological structuresChildren initially regard the entire word as if it were a SINGLE SOUND. As their vocabulary expands between fifteen and twenty-one months old, it becomes very difficult for them to manage. So in order to learn more words, children must begin to break words into a small number or SIMPLER UNITS OF SOUNDS.

but

Sounds used in different combinations to make up many other words

Children must acquire the complete set of phonemes as well as the set of phonological

processes found in the language.

They first master sounds that differ maximally from one another. Often, consonant -vowel structures such as [ma] and [pa].

This kind of CV-syllable structure appears to be the preferred structure in young children's productions.

Only later will they produce consonant clusters such as [sp] or [tr] as in spill and tree.

deletion of consonant and vowel sequences

bananagranola potatoWhy do children leave out the first syllable in these examples?In these words the second syllable is stressed, which means it's the most prominent syllable in comparison to the other two syllables.

When young children listen to speech being produced around them, there is a good chance that they will not pay attention to those unstressed syllables.

[__næna] [__owə] [__dedo]

How do children know where one word starts and where it ends in connected

speech?A subconscious strategy might be to look for the stresses syllable within an utterance to divide a continuous string of sound and find the beginning of new words.

Once infants have figured out how to identify these prominent syllables, they are able to dissect the continuous string of speech a little easier.

However, children tend to unconsciously look for the most stressed syllable and over generalize, as in the examples of banana, granola and potato.

The one-word stageThe first words uttered by a one-year old child typically name people, objects and pets.

Soon the child includes verbs and other useful words like: no, gimme and mine.

Phrases used by adults become a single word in the speech of the child, such as: algone and whasat?

The two-word stageBetween approx eighteen and twenty-four months of age, children begin to use two-word utterances. Most of the utterances produced at this stage will express a semantic relation like one of the following:

agent+action baby sleepaction+object kick ballaction+locative sit chairentity+locative teddy bedpossessor+possesion mommy bookentity+attribute block reddemonstrative+entity this shoe

Later stages of developmentThree-word utterances are originally formed by : combining two-word utterances expanding

two-word

utterances

‘Daddy cookie’ and ‘cookie eat’, may be combined to form ‘Daddy eat cookie’.

‘Throw ball’, becomes ‘throw red ball’.

PluralsThe plural morpheme -s is acquired quite early by children, in fact, it is usually one of the very first function morphemes to appear, along with in, on, and -ing.

overgeneralization of the rule

For example the plural of man, becomes mans. Also at this stage, the child often leaves nouns ending in sibilants (nose, house, church), in their singular form.

negativesVery young children can produce questions using only rising intonation, rather than a particular syntactic structure.

Later, at around the age of three, children begin to use can, will, and other auxiliary verbs in yes-no questions, using the appropriate word order.

interrogativesVery young children can produce questions using only rising intonation, rather than a particular syntactic structure. Later, at around three years, children begin to use can, will, and other auxiliary verbs in yes-no questions, using the appropriate word order.At this stage, children fail to adult word order in wh-questions. They follow a question word with a sentence in normal declarative order: Why you are sad?.

Finally they learn to invert the subject and the verb in these constructions.