First language acquisition by Yule

First language acquisition by Yule

Summary 4

Basic requirements:

-Interaction with other language users.

-Cultural transmission: language is not genetically inherited, but is acquired in a language-using environment.

-Physical conditions: to send and receive messages.

Acquisition schedule:

Language acquisition schedule has the same basis as motor skills.

It is very tied to brain’s maturation and lateralization process.

Children are seen as actively acquiring the language.

Some controversies:

- “The early environment of a child differs from one culture to the next”:  it is not applicable to every culture, to every child.

- The Innate Theory (by Chomsky): “language process is genetically pre-determined in the human species”.

Language development should be described as “language growth” because language organs grow like any other human body organ. Some others theories:

-Cognitive Theory (by Piaget): “language originates from thought”

-Interactional Theory (by Vygotsky) “people are the result of their own cultural transmission exchanges”.

Caretaker speech:

Simplified speech style adopted by someone who spends a lot of time interacting with a child. Also called “motherese” Some features: frequent questions, exaggerated intonation, simple sentence structures and repetition.

The prelinguistic sounds:

Cooing: the first sound we can recognize around 3 months olds is called cooing, it is a prelinguistic sound in which children reproduce consonants sound such as k and g and high vowel sounds such as i and u.
Babbling: it is the second prelinguistic sound around 6 month old and children are able to produce a different number of vowel and consonants sounds such as nasals and fricatives including syllables like mu and da, around 9 months in the later babbling stage there are intonation patterns in the production of oral utterances.
Between 10th and 11th months children produce vocalizations to express emotions and emphasis.

"We must consider that there is a substantial variation according to the time of each stage, so we must understand that it is not something that determines the development of the child".

The one word stage or the holophrastic stage:

Between 12 and 18 months; this stage is characterized by the usage of holophrastic terms or a holophrase which is basically one word functioning as a phrase or sentence.

The two word stage:

This stage begin between 18 and 20 months, at this stage the child is able to produce a huge amount of combinations which can be understood by the adult people as phrases that can take possession, request or statement. So we could say that depends on the context were the child is treated as a partner by the principal caretaker.

The telegraphic speech:

Between 2 and 3 years old; this stage is characterized by the usage of lexical morphemes in phrases like “this shoe all wet”, at this level the child is able to order the forms correctly so we could say that he has developed the sentence building capacity. At the end of this stage the child is able to talk.

The acquisition process:

Children construct themselves possible ways of language by themselves. It is not possible for the child to acquire language only by imitating adult speech (parrot speech).

Morphology:

Use of inflectional morphemes. 

The first inflectional morpheme to appear is ing form.

Eg: bird flying, mummy reading book

Overgeneralization:

Use of non- standard plural eg: mouses for mice or catched for caught.

Syntax:

Formation of questions and negatives form three stages

Stage one between 18- 23 months

Begins with WH form (what, where) and a rise intonation at the end.

The negative form use of NO or NOT should be stuck at the beginning.

Stage two between 23-30 months

Use of more complex expressions, rising intonation continues.

Negative DON’T and CAN´T are used and NO and NOT are placed in front of the verb rather than at the beginning

Stage three 26- 40 months

Invention of subject and verb.

Negative incorporation of other auxiliary form such as DIDN´T and WON´T.

Semantics:

Extend words is known as overextension and the most common pattern is for the child to overextend the meaning of a word on the basis of similarities of shape, sound and size.

e.g.: the word ball is extended to all kinds of round objects.

In terms of hyponymy children will almost always use the middle level. On the other hand antonyms are acquired fairly late (after the age of five) and distinctions between a number of other pairs such as before and after buy or sell are late acquisitions