LIGHTBOWN & SPADA
HOW LANGUAGES ARE
LEARNED
CHAPTER 1
LANGUAGE LEARNING IN
EARLY CHILDHOOD
What is this chapter about?
• How do children learn their first language?
• What enables a child not only to learn words, but to put
them together in meaningful sentences?
• What pushes children to develop complex grammatical
language?
• Does child language develop similarly around the
world?
The First Three Years
• high degree of similarity in the early language of
children all over world
• there are developmental sequences of first language
acquisition
The First Three Years (cont.)
(early weeks of life)
◦ involuntary crying
◦ cooing and gurgling
◦ babies can hear very little differences between the sounds of
human language
◦ Babbling (few months later)
The First Three Years (cont.)
• By the end of first year:
◦ understanding many frequently
repeated words
• e.g. waving when someone says ‘bye-bye’
• At twelve months:
◦ producing one or two words that everyone recognizes
The First Three Years (cont.)
• By the age of two:
◦ producing at least fifty different words
◦ beginning to combine words into simple sentences
(e.g. ‘mommy juice’ ‘baby fall down’).
• ‘telegraphic sentences’
• leave out articles, prepositions, or auxiliary words.
◦ What makes them ‘sentences’?
• the word order reflects the word order of the language children are
hearing
• combined words have a meaning relationship, not just a list of
words
The First Three Years (cont.)
(grammatical morphemes)
• predictable patterns (developmental
sequences/stages)
• these stages are related to children’s
◦ cognitive development
◦ their gradual mastery of linguistic elements (plurality)
• see ‘wug test’ on p. 2 (grammatical morp.) Gleason,
1950s
• see the study on p. 4 (developmental seq.) Brown, 1973
Acquisition of
Grammatical morphemes
Roger Brown’s study (1973):
- approximate order of acquiring grammatical
morphemes
◦ Present progressive –ing (running)
◦ Plural –s (books)
◦ Irregular past forms (went)
◦ Possessive -’s (daddy’s hat)
◦ Copula (am/is/are)
◦ Articles (a/an/the)
◦ Regular past –ed (walked)
◦ Third person singular simple present –s (he runs)
◦ Auxiliary ‘be’ (He is coming)
8
Overgeneralization
• Child will generalize grammar rules
so they apply the rules too broadly.
• Example: “I dugged in the sandbox”
rather than “I dug in the sandbox”
Overgeneralization
The First Three Years (cont.)
Negation & Questions
• see Pages 5-6 for the stages in the development of
‘negation’
• see Pages 6-9 for the developmental stages ‘questions’
Acquisition of Negation
Lois Bloom’s study (1991) – four stages
◦ Stage 1: ‘no’ – e.g., “No go”. “No cookie.”
◦ Stage 2: subject + no – e.g., “Daddy no comb hair.”
◦ Stage 3: auxiliary or modal verbs (do/can) + not
(Yet no variations for different persons or tenses)
e.g., “I can’t do it “, “He don’t want it.”
◦ Stage 4: correct form of auxiliary verbs
(did/doesn’t/is/are) + not
e.g., He didn’t go. She doesn’t want it.
But sometimes double negatives are used
e.g., I don’t have no more candies.
12
Acquisition of Questions
Lois Bloom’s study (1991):
Order of the occurrence of wh- question words
• “What” - Whatsat? Whatsit?
• “Where” and “who”
• “Why” (emerging at the end of the 2nd year and
becomes a favorite at the age of 3 or 4)
• “How” and “When” (yet children do not fully
understand the meaning of adults’ responses)
e.g., Child: When can we go outside?
Mother: In about 5 minutes.
Child: 1-2-3-4-5! Can we go now?
13
Acquisition of Questions
Lois Bloom’s study (1991):
Six stages of children’s question-making
◦ Stage 1: using single words or single two- or three-word
sentences with rising intonation
(“Mommy book?” “Where’s Daddy?”)
◦ Stage 2: using the word order of the declarative sentence
(“You like this?” “Why you catch it?”)
◦ Stage 3: “fronting” - putting a verb at the beginning of a
sentence
(“Is the teddy is tired?” “Do I can have a cookie?”)
14
Acquisition of Questions
Lois Bloom’s study (1991) – six stages (II)
◦ Stage 4: subject-auxiliary inversion in yes/no questions
but not in wh-questions
(“Do you like ice cream?” “Where I can draw?”)
◦ Stage 5: subject-auxiliary inversion in wh-questions, but
not in negative wh-questions
(“Why can he go out?” “Why he can’t go out?”)
◦ Stage 6: overgeneralizing the inverted form in embedded
questions
(“I don’t know why can’t he go out.”)
15
The First Three Years (cont.)
• What do all these examples of developmental
sequences mean?
◦ Children’s language develops systematically.
◦ Their language is not just a list of
memorized word pairs.
◦ In order to create new forms and structures,
children go beyond what they have heard.
The pre-school years
• mastering the basic structures of the language
• asking questions, giving commands, reporting real
events, and creating stories
• using correct word order and grammatical markers most
of the time
• learning several new words a day
• beginning to acquire more complex linguistic features
(e.g. passives).
The pre-school years (cont.)
• developing the ability to use language in a social
environment
• using the language in various social environments
The pre-school years (cont.)
• ‘metalinguistic awareness’
◦ the ability to treat language as an object separate from the
meaning it conveys
“drink the chair vs. cake the eat”
◦ knowing ‘about’ the language
The school years
• the language abilities expand and grow
• more sophisticated metalinguistic awareness is
developed
• an astonishing growth of vocabulary
• the acquisition of different language ‘registers’
i.e. a style or way of using language that is typical of or appropriate for a
particular setting
Explaining First Language
Acquisition
• Three main theoretical positions to explain first
language acquisition:
◦ The behaviourist perspective
◦ The innatist perspective
◦ Interactionist / developmental perspectives
The Behaviourist Perspective
◦ Children imitate the language and receive positive
reinforcement
• The reinforcement may be:
• praise
• just successful communication
◦ They imitate and practice until they form ‘habits’ of correct
language use (see examples on page 10).
The Behaviourist Perspective
◦ Important factors:
• quality and quantity of the language the child hears
• the consistency of the reinforcement
◦ Environment is the source of everything the child
needs to learn
The Behaviourist Perspective
• Fallacies of the behaviorist perspective:
◦ Children imitate selectively.
• They imitate what is new and useful to them, not simply what is
‘available’ in the environment (see example on Page 11).
◦ Many of the things children say show that:
• they use language creatively (overgeneralizing)
• not just repeat what they have heard (see examples on Pages 13-14)
The Behaviourist Perspective
• Therefore:
◦ Imitation and practice alone cannot explain some of the forms
created by children.
◦ Children pick out patterns and generalize them to
new contexts.
◦ They create new forms or new uses of
words.
◦ Classical behaviorism is not a satisfactory
explanation for the acquisition of complex
grammar.
The Innatist Perspective
• All human languages are fundamentally innate and the
same universal principles underlie all of them.
• Children are biologically programmed for
language.
• The environment makes the basic
contribution, and the child will do
the rest.
The Innatist Perspective
• Behaviorism cannot explain language acquisition because:
◦ Children know more about the language than they hear from the
environment.
◦ Children are sometimes exposed to incorrect use of language (e.g.
false starts, incomplete sentences) but they learn the correct use of
language.
The Innatist Perspective
• Therefore:
◦ Children’s minds are not blank plates to be filled
by imitation.
◦ Children are born with a specific innate ability
to discover the underlying rules of the language
they are exposed to.
◦ Children are born with a template which contains the principles
that are universal to all human languages –
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (UG).
The Innatist Perspective
• Critical Period Hypothesis
◦ There is a critical period for first language acquisition.
◦ Children who are not given access to language in infancy
and early childhood will never acquire language (see
examples on p. 19-21).
Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives
• Language learning is just another remarkable learning
ability of human beings.
• There is no need to think that there are specific brain
structures devoted to language
acquisition.
• Even though there is a powerful learning mechanism in
human brain, environment is also very important.
Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives
• Piaget:
◦ Children’s language is built on their
cognitive development.
◦ Their cognitive development would
determine how they use language.
◦ Language can be used to represent knowledge that children
have acquired through physical interaction with the
environment.
Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives
• Vygotsky:
◦ Language develops primarily from social interaction.
◦ Zone of Proximal Development
• In a supportive interactive environment:
• children can do more than they are
capable of doing independently
• they can advance to a higher level of
knowledge and performance
Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives
• Child-directed Speech:
◦ slower rate of delivery
◦ higher pitch
◦ more varied intonation
◦ shorter, simpler sentences
◦ stress on key words
◦ frequent repetition and paraphrase
• Child-directed speech is not universal, but in every
society children hear language that is meaningful to
them.
Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives
• The importance of interaction:
◦ See the example of Jim on Page 25
◦ One-to-one interaction gives the child access to language
that is adjusted to his or her level of comprehension.
Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives
• Connectionism:
◦ When children hear a word, a connection is created in the
child’s mind between the word and what it represents.
◦ Language acquisition is a process of
associating
• words with objects
• words with other words
• words with grammatical morphemes.
◦ All this is possible because of the child’s general ability to
develop associations
Childhood Bilingualism
• Simultaneous Bilinguals
• Sequential Bilinguals
• Subtractive Bilinguals
