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Chapter 2 First Language Acquisition

From Sound to Word

• Babies manage to communicate in very vocal and physical ways, through various forms and
intensities of crying, cooing, other sounds, and by using physical movements and gestures.
• By 12 months of age many children are already uttering their first words.
• Research has shown that infants appear to come into the world equipped to acquire the language
they are exposed to in their environment.
• For linguists, they are “pre-wired” to acquire / learn the language.

• According the Chomsky, the child does not need to be taught to walk, he or she simply begins to
put one foot ahead of the other.
• Acquisition-wise, children do not need to be deliberately “taught” to speak, they simply begin to do
so.

• Substantial evidence supports the idea of a genetic predisposition for language.

• Infants showing preference to human’s voice, especially that of the mother, as young as
three days old.
• In High Amplitude Sucking (HAS) technique, which is used to measure the sucking rate on
pacifier, the rate increases when babies hear sound.

• Another remarkable finding is that young children from many different cultures and languages of
origin are able to perceive a multitude of sound differences, even those not occurring in the
language of their environment, an ability known as ‘sound” or “auditory discrimination”, before
the age of 10 or 12 months.
• /V/ & /W/ sound contrast.

• Another argument that children come “prewired” for language is the fact that babies all over the
world appear to go through similar linguistic stages and reach linguistic milestones.
• The first recognizable pre-linguistic stage is that of “babbling,” occurring as early as three to four
months of age, usually taking the form of a consonant-vowel sequence, such as “ma ma” or “pa
pa”.
• Between seven and ten months, children seem able to comprehend their first word.
• A landmark in linguistic development occurs at approximately 1 year of age.

From Word to Sentence

• At about 18 months old, children often begin to put two words together in the same intonational
phrase unit  “Mama juice” or “Baby up”…
• At about 18 months, some children have been observed to go through a “word spurt” period,
during which new words spring up in the child’s vocabulary on an almost daily basis.
• One proposed explanation for the word spurt is “fast mapping”; that is, children are able to
remember a word after very limited exposure to that word.

• Another important stage occurs when children begin to link together more than two words, and
enter what has been termed the “telegraphic stage.”
• Children may produce strings of two-, three-, and even four- or more words long unit.
• “Baby Allison comb hair.”

• Charles Darwin used “Mean Length of Utterance” (MLU) to measure the early linguistic
development of “Morphemes”.
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• In a longtitudinal study carried out by Roger Brown, between the ages of 20 and 36 months,
children acquired grammatical morphemes in a strikingly similar order, regardless of the forms in
the input.

• In other studies, evidence points to the fact that children are able to generalize rules to items they
have never been exposed to.
• In the “Wug” test, designed by Jean Berko, children were asked to pluralize the item, along with its
image.
• At least, 76% of them were able to provide the correct answer.
• This shows that children are able to apply underlying rules to new exemplars.

• Studies also reveal that children reorganize their growing grammatical knowledge in systematic
ways.
• For instance, children may produce a correct irregular form, such as “went,” early on, then
overregularize or over-generalize the form as “goed,” only to finally produce once again the correct
target form “went.”
• This instance of U-shaped Development is evident that children restructure their knowledge to
make it more fine-tuned.

• By the age of five or six, complex syntactic constructions and virtually the entire phonological
repertoire of their language are well in place in most children.

Theoretical Views of L1 Acquisition

Behaviorist View
• B.F. Skinner was the best known proponent.
• The child as a passive recipient, subjected to environmental influences.
• In this view, language was considered as “verbal behavior,” and only what was observable
and measurable was accepted as a means to evaluate language acquisition.
• Made use of “Classical Conditioning” or the pairing of a stimulus and a response  milk
associated with nutritive substance.
• In “Operant Conditioning”, which is used for productive vocabulary, When the child utters
a word that produces the desired effect, then the child is more likely to reproduce that word
and, in contrast, words that do not trigger hoped-for responses tend to disappear.

Universal Grammar (UG) or The Nativist Approach

• UG views the environment as serving essentially only as a trigger for language development.
• It suggests that humans possess what can be considered as a “language faculty,” i.e., a
universal set of underlying principles, which allows children to form hypotheses /
understanding about language when they are exposed to a finite set of examples from their
environment.
• Children cannot be exposed to all input of a language; hence, something else must be
helping children induce the rules of the language, and that something is the proposed
“Universal Grammar” they are born with as part of their genetic endowment.

Interactionist Approach
• Gives explicit acknowledgment to the contribution of both innate structures and the role of
the environment
• Social interactionists give importance to the interplay between linguistic structures,
cognitive abilities, and the social and linguistic environment.
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• Interactionists point out that a crucial aspect of the linguistic environment is the speech
adaptations to which children are exposed, known as child-directed speech (CDS).
• CDS’s characteristics include shorter utterances, more stress on certain words or syllables,
substantial repetition, use of paraphrases, heavy reliance on questions, and marked
intonation contrasts. (Please refer to an example on Page 16.)

Emergentism – Connectionist View

• In Connectionism, language development is no longer seen as a process of acquiring
abstract rules.
• A language-specific learning device is not considered to be innately specified, as proposed
by the UG approach.
• Instead, language emerges out of a complex network of interconnections between neurons.
• Connectionism proposes that language is learned through exposure to language in the
environment, the input.
• This exposure allows the construction of associations among units, i.e., sound sequences,
words, sentence patterns, etc.
• The L1 develops therefore through ongoing exposure to language in the environment with
increasing exposure to certain units leading to greater associative strengths
• When the associations are strong enough, the units and patterns become permanently
acquired, an instance of which can be the acquisition of past tense.
• In U-shaped Development, the correct irregular past tense form “went” appeared first,
followed by the incorrect over-regularization “goed” or “wented,” finally returning to the
correct form “went.”
• The connectionist viewpoint therefore suggests overregularization behavior can be
explained by the child’s sensitivity to the frequency of the forms in the input

L1 and L2 Acquisition - Contrasts

Age
• All L1 learners are exposed to their first language in the earliest stages of life at a time when
many other developmental processes are just beginning to appear.
• The development of the brain and cognition are at an early stage.
• Hence, infants are incapable of advanced reflective thinking and planning.
• As the child develops, basic cognitive capacities increasingly emerge, an example of which is
Object Permanence.
• Means-ends awareness is conceptualized at the age of 1, among children.
• Symbolic play emerges during the second year and indicates that the child is capable of
increasing mental abstraction in representing objects.

• L2 learners, on the other hand, have already gone through a number of fundamental cognitive
stages, with basic concepts (object permanence, means-ends awareness) already attained.
• Their cognitive development allows them metalinguistic awareness.
• Hence, L2 learners are more equipped to deal with language learning tasks.
• For instance, some L2 learners may and often do prefer to learn through explicit exposure to the
grammatical rules of the target language.
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One linguistic system already in place

• For L1 learners, learning an L1 is essential to satisfying a person’s basic needs for food, as well as
ensuring other basic care and security.
• For the older learner of an L2, one linguistic repertoire is already in place to ensure efficient
communication to satisfy basic needs and desires.
• While the child’s crucial first events and emotions are accompanied by communication in the L1,
for individuals learning an L2 those deeply embedded feelings are already linked with their native
language and as a result similar feelings are less tightly linked to the L2.

• L2 learner language illustrates the ubiquitous phenomenon of transfer or interference that

occurs when aspects of the L1 are used in the L2, an instance of which can be found in the use of
Tenses.

• From the perspective of the social context, expectations are very different in the two cases.
• The child learning to speak his first words is not expected to carry on a conversation easily with
interlocutors.
• For the older L2 learner, particularly adults learning a language in a new country, social
expectations may be relatively high: it is expected that an adult should normally be able to
communicate accurately and fluently.

• The context of learning also contributes to the significant difference between learning the first
language and learning a second.
• A young child normally learns his first language in the home, as well as through interactions with
caregivers outside the home.
• For the older learner, school age and above, most often L2 learning is at least partly carried out in
an instructional setting, such as in a public school language class or private language school
classroom.

• The amount of exposure time to both languages is also significantly different.

• The young child learning her L1 is commonly exposed to a significant amount of that
language.
• For the second language learner, apart from cases of total immersion in the target language
environment.

• In term of the form of language, children learning their native language are exposed to particular
linguistic and paralinguistic (prosodic) adaptations, also known Child-directed speech.
• Older children and adults, however, learning a second language are not systematically exposed to a
significant amount of adaptation in the L2 input they hear.

• Finally, the level of language attainment in both L1 and L2 acquisition is noticeably remarkable.
• While the L1 acquirer invariably becomes a fluent speaker of the language spoken in the
environment, it is rare for an adult L2 learner to be able to pass for a native speaker in all respects

L1 and L2 Acquisition - Parallels

• One immediately obvious parallel in both L1 and L2 acquisition is that the learner needs to be
exposed to the target language, also known as Input.
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• Another similarity is the amount of repetition in the production of the language.

• A related similarity is the way in which both L1 and L2 learners use prefabricated language units
as formulaic sequences or expressions
• The two language acquirers act similarly is that both young children and older L2 learners tend to
understand much more than they can produce.
• For both types of language learners, typical errors occur that indicate that learners are attempting
to increase their mastery by relying on information they already know, or overgeneralization.

• Lastly, there is an observable sequence of acquisition between young and adult learners, beginning
with speaking and listening followed by literacy-based skills