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”

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

What you know when you know a language.

Summary 3

Language, learning and teaching.

Summary 2

1. What is a permanent struggle in teaching / learning?

The permanent struggle is to reach beyond the confines of your first language and into a new language, a new culture, a new way of thinking, feeling, and acting.

2. Are we equipped with a do-it-yourself-kit to acquire languages?

Acquire language is not a kit of easy steps that can be programmed.

3. Why do people learn or fail to learn a language?

Many variables are involved in the acquisition process; total commitment, total involvement, a total physical, intellectual, and emotional response are necessary to successfully send and receive messages in a second language.

4. Name the issues to consider in second language acquisition

The issues to consider in SLA are a multitude of questions that are being asked about this complex process:

Who?

What?

How?

When?

Where?

Why?

5. What are the motivations to learn a language?

The motivation to learn a language is understand the system and functioning of the second language, speak and understand a language, its phonemes and morphemes, words and sentences and discourse structures.

6. What is a PARADIGM?

Paradigm is an interlocking design, in this case is a theory of second language.

7. Give 3 definitions for LANGUAGE.

1.- Language is systematic

2.- Language is a set of arbitrary symbols

3.- Language is used for communication

8. What is the relation between language and cognition?

-Explicit and formal accounts of the system of language on several possible levels (most commonly phonological, syntactic, and semantic)

-The symbolic nature of language; the relationship between language and reality; the philosophy of language; the history of language.

-Phonetics, phonology; writing systems; kinesics, proxemics, and other “paralinguistic” features of language.

-Semantics; language and cognition; psycolinguistics.

-Communication systems; speaker-hearer interaction; sentence processing.

-Dialectology; sociolinguistics; language and culture; bilingualism and second language acquisition.

-Human language and nonhuman communication; the physiology of language.

-Language universals; first language acquisition.

9. Which are some LEARNING definitions?

1. - Learning is acquisition or “getting”

2. - Learning is retention of information or skill

3. - Learning is a change in behavior

10. Can we define TEACHING apart from learning?

Teaching cannot be defined apart from learning. Teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to learn, setting the conditions for learning.

11. What is the importance of our PEDAGOGICAL PHILOSPHY?

Is very important, because is how I see the learner learns, my own teaching styles, my approach, my methods, and my own classroom techniques.

12. Refer to the 3 schools of thought in SLA? 

1. - Behaviorism, description, observable performance, scientific method, empiricism, surface structure, conditioning, reinforcement.

2. - Cognitive Psychology, generative linguistics, acquisition, innateness, interlanguage systematicity, universal grammar, competence, deep structure.

3. - Constructivism; interactive discourse, sociocultural variables, cooperative group learning, interlanguage variability, interactionist hypotheses.

13. Describe the GTM

A classical method, focus on grammatical rules, memorization of vocabulary and of various declensions and conjugations, translation of texts, doing written exercises.