First Language Acquisition: A Comprehensive Overview - Prof. Laayadi, Lecture notes of English Language

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First Language Acquisition

Semester 4 - Introduction to Language

Prof. Noamane

Introduction

You will learn about first language acquisition. More specifically, you will become

familiar with:

● The acquisition schedule

● The acquisition process

● The development of basic linguistic knowledge

Basic observation - FLA does not require extensive use of conscious grammatical

rules, and does not require tedious drill.

Background - Operant conditioning

● Behaviorism - Learning is a long-term change in behavior that is based on experience.

● Operant conditioning explores how consequences lead to changes in voluntary behavior. >> So how does operant conditioning work?

● There are two main components in operant conditioning: reinforcement and punishment.

● Reinforcers make it more likely that you will do something again.

● Punishers make it less likely that you will do something again.

● Both reinforcers and punishers can be either positive or negative.

Background - Verbal behavior (1957)

● Language is a set of habits just like playing the guitar, walking, drawing, etc.

● Nothing is innate - the mind is a blank slate - tabula rasa.

● Systematic observation of events in the external world

● Nature vs. nurture: language is acquired through experience alone

● Trial-and-error learning: operant conditioning

○ The essential idea would be that reinforcement and punishment would apply to language use, so that if you learn to say the words correctly you get reinforced and if you don’t you get punished or ignored. As a result, it’s reinforcement and punishment that allow language to be developed.

Background - Universal Grammar

UG refers to those features that all languages have in common and that therefore do not need to be mentioned in grammars of particular languages

“Grammar is not the grammar of any single language: it is the prespecification in the brain that permits the learning of language to take place. So the grammar-acquiring capacity is what Chomsky claims is innate. If the child is not exposed to language, language will not develop. Perhaps the term “Universal Grammar” is misleading and Chomsky should have called it “metagrammar” or “the seeds of grammar.” But in order to preserve historical continuity, we are more or less forced to stick with this term, whatever incorrect connotations it invites.” (Foundations of Language, Ray Jackendoff)

So what is universal to humans is the ability, in the appropriate conditions, to learn a language, any language.

Background - Language Acquisition Device

The Innateness Hypothesis >> Chomsky’s hypothesis that humans have a

cognitive specialization for learning language.

“It seems clear that many children acquire first or second languages quite successfully even though no special care is taken to teach them and no special attention is given to their progress. It also seems apparent that much of the actual speech observed consists of fragments and deviant expressions of a variety of sorts. Thus it seems that a child must have the ability to “invent” a generative grammar that defines well-formedness and assigns interpretations to sentences even though the primary linguistic data that he uses as a basis for this act of theory construction may, from the point of view of the theory [“grammar”] he constructs, be deficient in various respects.” (Chomsky 1965: 200–1)

Evidence >> Poverty of Stimulus or Impoverished input

Background - Competence vs. Performance

● Chomsky also distinguishes between the speakers’ actual knowledge of the language, which is termed Competence (or I-Language) , and the use of that knowledge, which is termed Performance (or E-language).

● Any piece of text (spoken or written) represents a performance of language, which will match the speaker’s competence more or less inaccurately.

● Thus performance is often taken as a poor guide to competence, but competence is the object of study for the linguist.

Chomsky on Language Design

Input

Under normal circumstances, adults provide language samples, or input , for the child.

This input is often characterized by child-specific words, the frequent use of questions, using exaggerated intonation, extra loudness and a slower tempo with longer pauses.

This style is more generally known as “Caregiver or Child Directed Speech.” (or motherese)

Caregiver speech is also characterized by simple sentence structures and a lot of repetition and paraphrasing, with reference largely restricted to the here and now.

Language Acquisition milestones

Cooing (1-5 months)

The earliest use of speech-like sounds has been described as cooing.

During the first few months of life , the child gradually becomes capable of producing sequences of vowel-like sounds, particularly high vowels similar to [i] and [u].

By four months of age , the developing ability to bring the back of the tongue into regular contact with the back of the palate allows the infant to create sounds similar to the velar consonants [k] and [ɡ] , hence the common description as “ cooing ” or “ gooing ” for this type of production.

Babbling (6-12 months)

Between six and eight months , the child is sitting up and producing a number of different vowels and consonants, as well as combinations such as ba-ba-ba and ga-ga-ga.

This type of sound production is described as babbling.

In the later babbling stage, around nine to ten months , there are recognizable intonation patterns to the consonant and vowel combinations being produced, as well as variation in the combinations such as ba-ba-da-da.

Nasal sounds also become more common and certain syllable sequences such as ma-ma-ma and da-da-da are inevitably interpreted by parents as versions of “mama” and “dada” and repeated back to the child.

The one-word stage (12-18 months)

Between twelve and eighteen months , children begin to produce a variety of recognizable single-unit utterances.

This period is characterized by speech in which single terms are used for objects such as “milk,” “cookie,” “cat,” “cup” and “spoon” (usually pronounced [pun]).

During this stage, then, the child may be able to refer separately to Karen and bed , but isn’t ready yet to put the forms together in a more complex phrase.

Holophrastic stage

The two-word stage (18 months - 2 years)

The two-word stage can begin around eighteen to twenty months , as the child’s vocabulary moves beyond fifty words.

By the time the child is two years old , a variety of combinations, similar to baby chair, mommy eat, cat bad , will usually have appeared.

The adult interpretation of such combinations is, of course, very much tied to the context of their utterance.

The phrase baby chair may be taken as an expression of possession (= this is baby’s chair), or as a request (= put baby in chair), or as a statement (= baby is in the chair), depending on different circumstances.

The child not only produces speech, but also receives feedback confirming that the utterance worked as a contribution to the interaction.