First Language Acquisition By Brown

First Language Acquisition By Brown

Summary 5

Theories of first language acquisition

As small babies, children babble and coo and cry and vocally or nonvocally send of messages and receive messages. About 18 months of age appear in two-word and three-word “sentences” as telegraphic” utterances.

By two years of age, children are comprehending language and their production repertoire is mushrooming.

By about age 3, comprehend linguistic input, increases the generators of nonstop chattering and incessant conversation. Their creativity alone brings smiles to parents and older siblings.

This fluency and creativity continues into school age as children internalize increasingly complex structures, expand their vocabulary, and communicative skills.

One could adopt one of two polarized positions, an extreme behaviorist position would claim that children come into the world with a tabula rasa, a clean slate bearing no preconceived notions about the world or about language, and the these children are then shaped by their environment and slowly conditioned through various schedules of reinforcement. Constructivist position not only the cognitivist claim that children come into this world with very specific innate knowledge, predispositions, and biological timetables, but that children learn to function in a language chiefly through interaction and discourse.

Behaviorist:

-Tabula rasa

-Stimuli: linguistic responses

-Conditioning

-Reinforcement

Nativist:

-Innate predispositions

-Systematic, rule-governed acquisition

-Creative construction

-pivot grammar

Parallel distributed processing

Functional:

-Constructivist

-Social interaction

-Cognition and language

-Functions of language

-Discourse

Competences: Refers to one’s underlying knowledge of a system, event, or fact. It is the nonobservable ability to do something, to perform something.

Performance. Is the overtly observable and concrete manifestation or realization of competence. It is the actual doing of something: walking, singing.

Comprehension and production:

Can be aspect of both performance and competence. One of the myths that has crept into some foreign language teaching materials is that comprehension (listening, reading) can be equated with competence, while production (speaking, writing) is performance.

Nature: provides innately, in some sort of predetermined biological timetable

Nurture: learned and internalized.

Universal:

Closely related to the innateness controversy is the claim that language is universally acquired in the same manner:

-Word order

-Morphological marking tone

-Agreement

-Reduced reference nouns and noun classes

-Verbs and verbs classes

-Predictation

-Negation

-Question formation

Systematicity: is the one of the assumptions of a good deal of current research on child language.

Variability.

Language and Thought

Cognitive development is at the very center of the human organism and that language is dependent upon and springs from cognitive development.

Imitation

The Imation is one of the important strategies a child uses in the acquisition of language. Indeed, research has shown that echoing is a particularly salient strategy in early language learning and an important aspect of early phonological acquisition. Imitation is consonant with behavioral principles of language acquisition.

Practice: is usually thought of as referring to speaking only.

Frequency issue may be summed up by nothing that nativists who claim that “the relative frequency of stimuli is of little importance in language acquisition”