Handouts for Language Acquisition by Jenny Kuo

Chapter 2: First Language Acquisition

I. Child language development

1. Infant speech perception
•Infants are born with the ability to discriminate the phonetic contrasts of any of the
world languages.
•With exposure to their own language, they begin to focus on those contrasts that are
relevant for that particular language and to lose the ability to perceive certain contrasts
not found in their native language.
2. Accuracy of perception
•Children who fail to pronounce particular sounds correctly may have failed to perceive
them correctly.
•But, usually children with normal hearing are able to discriminate sounds. Child A
might be able to point correctly to a coat and a goat even while calling them both “goat.”
3. Syntactic development
•Children usually utter their first words at around 12 months of age.
•Young children use their words in a variety of contexts, but limit their messages by
speaking one word at a time.
•At the latter half of the 2nd year, they begin putting words together.
•Syntactic development seems to take place unnoticed, with no explicit instruction.
Two-word utterances
•novel and unique
•dominated by content words
•telegraphic speech
•consistent word order
•semantic relations
Limited scope formula vs. semantic relation formula

•Child 1 •Child 2
•My dog •Kendall chair
•My shoe •Bill house
•My hat •Bill book
•My hand •Mommy hand
•My chair •Lady hat
•My house •My penny
•My book •Our car

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II. Theories of first language acquisition
1. Behavioristic Approaches
receptive vocabulary learning ---classical conditioning
• productive speech--operant conditioning
Children’s speech that more closely approximates adult speech is rewarded, whereas
meaningless or inappropriate speech is ignored or punished.
•Word combinations
---shaping and imitation training, rewarding
Contrary evidence
•Results with adults cannot be generalized to children.
•Shaping and reinforcement do not exist in children’s natural home environment.
•Parents respond to the content rather than grammaticality of children’s utterances.
•The failure of careful tutoring.
2. The Nativist Approach
•Language has a structure or grammar that is independent of language use.
•This independent rule system specifies the sentences that are grammatical or permissible
in any particular language.
•Language is innate in humans.
•Universal Grammar
LAD and Development
•Language acquisition device bestows upon the child information about grammatical
classes, d-structure, and possible transformations.
•The LAD is assumed to be a physiological part of the brain that is a specialized
language processor.
•Early formulation: children are innately endowed with strong linguistic universals,
which were necessary for the proper development of a grammar.
•Recent formulation: inherent constraints and biases to treat the language environment in
special ways.
Supporting Evidence
•All children successfully learn their native language at a time in life when they would
not be expected to learn anything else so complicated.
•Children master the basic structure of their native language in a variety of conditions.
•Poverty of input
•Species specific
•No negative evidence
3. Functional Approaches
General assumptions
•Social, linguistic, maturational / biological factors affect language acquisition, and these
factors are mutually dependent upon, interact with, and modify one another.
Piaget’s cognitive approach

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•similarities with the linguistic approach
•Emphasize internal structures as the ultimate determinants of behavior
•Language as a symbolic system for expressing intention or meaning
•Distinctions between competence and performance and between underlying and surface
structure.
Social interactionist approach
•Agree with nativists who stress that language has a structure and follows certain rules
that make it somewhat unique from other behaviors.
•Shares with the behaviorists an emphasis on the role of the environment in producing
such structure.
•The structure of human language may have arisen out of the social-communicative
functions language plays in human relations.
• Vygotsky’s Zone of proximal development
•Meaning negotiations between the child and the mother
•Some early language may be taught by the parents and learned through rote or imitations
by the children.
•Process of mapping meaning onto language is assisted when the code provided closely
parallels the child’s attention.
•Children might notice the difference between their own immature sentences and more
mature versions if the two closely co-occur.

III. Issues in first language acquisition

1. Competence and performance
2. Comprehension and production
3. Nature or nurture?
4. Universals--- language, language acquisition
5. Systematicity and variability
6. Language and thought
Behaviorism: cognition is too mentalistic to be studied
Piaget: cognitive development influences language development
Jerome Bruner: language influences cognitive development
Vygotsky: social interaction through language is a prerequisite to cognitive
development.

7. Imitation—surface imitation, deep immitation

8. Practice (frequency effects)
9. Input
Adult speech is semigrammatical.
Speech addressed to children is carefully grammatical and lack of the usual
hesitations and false starts common to adult-to-adult speech.
10. Discourse

IV .The Direct Method