ENG 122 Introduction to Linguistics - Language Acquisition PDF

ENG 122 Introduction to Linguistics Language Acquisition  Language Acquisition We typically learn to understand language and to speak during the first few years of our life. Children must acquire language with all its components and rules.  The Innateness Hypothesis Lang...

ENG 122 Introduction to Linguistics Language Acquisition  Language Acquisition We typically learn to understand language and to speak during the first few years of our life. Children must acquire language with all its components and rules.  The Innateness Hypothesis Language ability is innate in humans. Babies are born with the knowledge that languages have patterns and with the ability to seek out and identify this pattern.  Language universals and universal grammar These basic features shared by all languages are called language universals. The theoretically inborn set of structural characteristics shared by all languages is known as universal grammar.  The Innateness Hypothesis Innate behaviours are present in all normal individuals of a species, whereas learned behaviours are not.  Lenneberg’s characteristics of biologically controlled behaviours 1. The behaviour emerges before it is necessary. Children learn to speak between the age of 12-24 months, long before their parents have stopped providing them with necessities of life.  Lenneberg’s characteristics of biologically controlled behaviours 2. Its appearance is not the result of a conscious decision. Children do not make a conscious choice about acquiring a native language.  Lenneberg’s characteristics of biologically controlled behaviours 3. Its emergence is not triggered by external events. While it is true that a child has to be exposed to language, it is not the case that a child’s caretakers need to make a special effort to teach the child to speak.  Lenneberg’s characteristics of biologically controlled behaviours 4. Direct teaching and intensive practice have relatively little effect. Children do not necessarily perceive (or correct) their mistakes just because an adult points them out.  Lenneberg’s characteristics of biologically controlled behaviours 5. There is a regular sequence of “milestones” as the behaviour develops, and these can usually be correlated with age and other aspects of development.  Lenneberg’s characteristics of biologically controlled behaviours 6. There is likely to be a “critical period’ for the acquisition of the behaviour. The acquisition will fail if it is attempted either before or after the critical period.  The critical period for language acquisition Birth to puberty Exposure to language is necessary in order to develop brain structures for language acquisition. Without exposure in the critical period the child will never acquire normal linguistic skills.  Example 1970s – Nicaragua State school for deaf. Most children and adults arrived with homesign gesture system. Homesign: limited lexicon without a grammar. A pidgin was created combining homesign and newly created sign. Eventually developed into Idioma de Signos Nicaragense (ISN). Critical Period for second-language acquisition Teenagers and adults have more difficulty learning languages than do children. Always have a foreign accent – imperfect acquisition of phonological rules. Syntactic and other rules difficult to master.  Critical period- related issues Feral and neglected children: Gain the ability to learn vocabulary and to understand others speech. Not able to learn to use syntax productively. Second-language learners: Can learn vocabulary and syntax, but rarely master phonology.  Imitation Theory Imitation theory claims that children learn language by listening to the speech around them and reproducing what they hear. Acquisition consists of memorising the words and sentences of some language. Helps explain the fact that children learn the language spoken around them, regardless of what language of their ancestors may have been.  Imitation theory Cannot account for how children and adults are able to produce and understand new sentences. If children learned only by imitation, the only way they could understand a sentence is if they had heard it before.  Reinforcement Theory Reinforcement theory asserts that children learn to speak like adults because they are praised, rewarded or otherwise reinforced when they use the right forms and corrected when they use the wrong forms. In the real world, correction are generally about accuracy or truth of a statement than with its grammatical form.  Reinforcement Theory Child: Nobody don’t like me Mother: No, say “nobody likes me” Child: Nobody don’t like me (repeated 8 times) Mother ( now exasperated): Now listen carefully! Say, “Nobody likes me.” Child: Oh! Nobody don’t likes me. So….. Reinforcement theory can explain neither where the child’s rule came from nor why the child seems impervious to correction.  Active Construction of a Grammar Theory Children actually invent rules of grammar themselves. The ability to develop rules is innate, but the actual rules are based on the speech children hear around them. When they think they have discovered a pattern, they hypothesize a rule to account for it. They add this rule to their growing grammar and use it in constructing sentences.  Active Construction of a Grammar Theory When children discover that there are forms in the language that do not match those produced by a certain rule, they modify the rule or add another to produce additional forms. In this framework, children’s mistakes are expected to occur and to follow non- random patterns.  Connectionist Theories Children learn language by creating neural connections in the brain by exposure and use of language. Through these connections, the child learns associations between words, meanings, sound sequences, and so on. – Bottle  milk  drinking  /b/  Connectionist Theories Instead of developing abstract rules, children exploit statistical information from linguistic input. Assumption: the input children receive is indeed rich enough to learn language without an innate mechanism to invent linguistic rules.  Connectionist Theories English past tense – Active construction of a grammar theory: Fring – fringed – Connectionist theory Fring – frang, frought Owing to exposure to words like sing, ring, or bring  Connectionist Theories It is possible that children both develop rules and also make use of statistical data. Thus, acquisition of grammatical rules proceeds according to a hybrid model and children actively construct a grammar by establishing and exploiting neural connections.  Social Interaction Theory Children acquire language through social interactions with older children and adults in particular. Children prompt their parents to supply them with the appropriate language experience they need.  Social Interaction Theory Mere exposure does not suffice, emphasizes on the quality of input. The ways in which older children and adults talk to infants play a crucial role.  Social Interaction Theory Very often speech to infants (child- directed speech) is slow and high-pitched and contains many repetitions, simplified syntax, exaggerated intonation, and a simple and concrete vocabulary. – A) See the birdie? Look at the birdie! What a pretty birdie Vs – B) Has it come to your attention that one of our better- looking feathered friends is perched upon the windowsill?  Social Interaction Theory Children eventually do acquire the ability to utter and understand sentences like those in B). It is unclear how long a child must be exposed to child-directed speech. Characteristics of child-directed speech vary from culture to culture.  Physiological prerequisites of sound perception and production Before children learn to speak a language, they must first master several tasks related to the form of language: – Identify sounds of the language they hear – Learn how to produce each allophone of these phonemes – Decode the larger strings of sounds into syllables and words – Learn to combine the sounds into larger strings themselves  a) Identifying sounds Once infants have figured out the important distinctions of their native languages.  b) Producing sounds A child’s first vocalizations are present at the very beginning of life. Within a few weeks after birth a child begins to coo, producing sequences of vowel-like sounds.  ….producing sounds (continued) Since an infant’s tongue is relatively large compared to the size of its vocal tract, the front of the tongue easily makes contact with the roof of the mouth. Hence a baby is very likely to produces coos that sound vaguely palatal, like the adult phonemes /j/ or /n/  ….producing sounds (continued) The young child has to practice the execution of the motor programs that underlie speech production. They have to learn to gain control over the muscles in their speech organs and to coordinate the execution of articulatory movements. Therefore, a child’s production of speech will generally be slower and more variable than that of an adult.  Babbling At the age of 4-6 months or so, children in all cultures begin to babble. They produce a sequence of vowels and consonants if they are acquiring a spoken language or by moving fingers in a repetitive rythmic ways that are similar to hand motions in sign language.  Babbling Babies babble to practice the muscle coordination needed to produce language. – Spoken language: opening and closing movement of the jaw and other articulators. – Signed language: Hand and finger coordination Repeated or canonical babbling Starts around the age of seven to ten months. The continual repetition of syllables helps the infant practice a sequence of consonant and vowel sounds.  Variegated babbling Between about ten and twelve months of age, infants begin to produce a variety of speech sounds, even sounds that are not part of the language the child is acquiring natively. At this age babbling is no longer canonical. Instead of repeating the same syllables the infant strings together different syllables.  Babbling Though babbling is far from being language, it resembles adult language in a number of important respects. Babbled sequences are not linked to immediate biological needs like food or physical comfort. Thus, they are frequently uttered in isolation for sheer pleasure.  Babbled sequences have many physical characteristics of adult speech. Only later does the child come to associate word meanings to vocal noises.  Children with narrow vocal passages Because of swelling caused by various diseases that they were in danger of choking to death. Breathing was accomplished by inserting tubes in the trachea. However, they produced babbling sounds as typical of their age as soon as the tube was removed. Babbling is possible when the brain is ready, despite other physical limitations.  Phonological Acquisition 18 months old child - /wawa/ for ‘water’. All children, regardless of what language they are acquiring, make such mistakes. However, the mistakes are systematic, or rule-governed. First attempts at word production show tremendous variability in pronunciation.  Phonological Acquisition Children initially appear to regard an entire word as if it were a single sound. Between 15-20 months, keeping track of a large store of independent sounds becomes difficult to manage. Hence children must begin to break words into smaller and simpler units. Thus, they arrive at the idea of a word as a sequence of phonemes whose pronunciation is systematic and predictable.  Phonological Acquisition When children learn phonemes of a language, they first master sounds that differ maximally from one another. CV-syllable structure appears to be preferred in young children’s productions. Final consonants are often omitted. Consonant clusters come in much later.  Phonological Acquisition They must master – Fine muscle co-ordinations to produce rich variations in sounds – Learn combinations of sounds are associated with particular meanings – Realize that their pronunciations should consistently match that of adults.  Acquisition of morphology- One-word stage First stage of morphological acquisition – child produces single words in isolation Around one year – typically name people, pets and other familiar and important part of its environment. Phrases used by adults will also become single words – All-gone, whasat? (What’s that?) This level of development has been called holophrastic stage.  Acquisition of morphology- Two-word stage 18-24 months – two-word utterances Not any two words in any order They adopt a consistent set of word orders that convey an important part of the meaning of their utterances.  Acquisition of morphology- Two-word stage Word order is used to express semantic relationships like: – Agent + action baby sleep – Action + object kick ball – Action + location sit chair – Entity + location teddy bed – Possessor + possession Mommy book – Entity + attribute block red – Demonstrative + entity this shoe  Acquisition of morphology- Two-word stage Some children at this stage of development, also use pronouns. For the most part, their speech lacks function morphemes and function words. Because of the omission of function words, the speech of young children is often called telegraphic.  Acquisition of morphology- Later stages Three-word utterances are initially formed by combining or expanding two-word utterances. Two-word strings with a common element may be combined – Daddy cookie and eat cookie  Daddy eat cookie Two word utterances may also be expanded from within – Throw ball  throw red ball  Acquisition of Morphology- Function Morphemes Plurals – Usually one of the very first function morphemes to appear, along with in, on, and –ing – In some cases this involves over- generalization of the rule of plural formation. Man becomes mans  Acquisition of Morphology- Function Morphemes Negatives – At first they simply put the word no in front of a sentence to negate it. No baby sleep, no I drink milk – Next they insert a negative word between a subject and the verb of a sentence baby no sleep, I no drink milk  Acquisition of Morphology- Function words Interrogatives – Very young children produce questions only by using a rising intonation, rather than by particular syntactic structure. – At around 3 years, children begin to use can, will and other auxiliary verbs in yes-no questions – At this stage they follow the question word with a sentence in normal declarative order Why you are sad?  The Acquisition of word meaning When children hear a word for the first time, they don’t know what makes the use of the word appropriate. Children produce their first word at age 1, and by age 6 they have a vocabulary approaching 14,000 words.  The Acquisition of word meaning Acquisition of word meaning does follow certain patterns. – The order in which the words are learned reflects the intrinsic complexity of the concepts involved. – Initial definitions of words do not deviate randomly from those of adults, but rather are related to and progress towards adult definitions.  Complexive Concepts Sometimes, not only will a child associate wrong or incomplete set of unifying characteristics to a word, but will also seem to try out different characteristics each time he/she uses the word. – Doggie furry things  things that move by themselves  Complexive Concepts When a child associates different characteristics with the meaning of a word on successive uses, thereby creating a set of objects that do not have any particular unifying characteristic, we say that he/she has produced a complexive concept. Complexive concepts serve to form a loose bond between items associated in the child’s experience and represent a primitive conception of word meaning.  Overextensions When a child extends the range of a word’s meaning beyond that typically used by adults, we say he/ she has produced an overextension. – Ticktock » Clocks » Watches » Parking meters » A dial on a set of scales  Overextensions Children of age two or so frequently have overextensions and complexive concepts in their speech at the same time. Concept defined in overextensions do not shift from one occasion to another. The common properties included in overextensions are perceptual features like shape, size, colour, or taste.  Underextensions An underextension is the application of a word to a smaller set of objects than is appropriate. Underextensions also occur among older children when they encounter category names like fruit or mammal. – Peacock- a bird? – Olive – a fruit?  Acquisition of word meanings Complexive concepts are the most basic and are present in a child’s speech for only a short time before being replaced by overextensions and underextensions. Psychologists have determined that a child overgeneralizes a word to make the most out of a limited vocabulary. With underextensions, children attempt to be as conservative as possible and hence perceive restrictions not imposed by adults.  Acquisition of word meanings The mastery of a working vocabulary in any human language requires a wide range of intellectual skills. – Proper nouns: One must simply point out an individual and attach a label. – Relational term: the correct use of this requires that two things be kept in mind: the absolute size of the object in question and position on a scale of similar objects. Acquisition of word meanings – Deictic expressions, which are words referring to personal, temporal, or spatial aspects of an utterance, and whose meaning depends on the context of the word used. – Since there are no absolute distances involved in the correct use of these deictic expressions, children have difficulty determining when the “near” terms are to be preferred over “far” terms.  Acquisition of word meanings Many verbs are conceptually more complex than most nouns. – Every time someone gives something, someone takes something.  Bilingual Language Acquisition There are different ways a person may become bilingual. Some people may learn more than one languages from birth – Simultaneous bilingualism. Some others may begin learning their second language as young children – Sequential bilingualism.  Bilingual Language Acquisition Another way of becoming bilingual is to learn a second language not as a young child but rather later in life. This is called second-language acquisition. Late learners are often people who learned a second, third etc., language through formal education and/or travel.  Bilingual first-language acquisition Any child who receives sufficient input from two languages, from birth, or early childhood, will grow up fully bilingual. They will have native like control over two languages. Children learn languages by interacting with speakers of those languages.  Bilingual first-language acquisition One typical feature of bilingual children’s speech is language mixing or code- switching: using more than one language in a conversation or even within a phrase. Earlier researchers had suggested that mixing in young children shows that their language is fused into one system. That is children have not yet figured that they are using two different languages.  Bilingual first-language acquisition More recent research has shown that bilingual children can differentiate their languages by the time they are four months old – long before they utter their first word. Bilingual first-language acquisition So, why do they mix languages? – We can observe that children don’t randomly mix two languages. – They seem to use some content words of one language in what is essentially a sentence in another language. – Alternatively, a child may mix his languages because he knows that people he is talking to understand both languages. – Finally, children’s mixing can be a strategy to avoid words that are difficult. Bilingual vs monolingual acquisition Early research: Learning two languages from birth would exceed the limitation of the child’s brain. Bilingual children will lag behind their monolingual peers. Bilingual vs monolingual acquisition Current research: Bilingual language acquisition displays a more balanced view. Even if they lag in terms of the size of their vocabulary, they catch up by the time they reach puberty. This does not mean they cannot communicate ideas in any of the two languages, but just that some concepts can be easily expressed in a particular language. Bilingual vs monolingual acquisition Sometimes children who grow up bilingually do not become functional bilinguals. Usually they are confronted by negative attitudes towards bilingualism, or one of their languages is not valued in their community. It is not a limitation of the child’s brain, but rather a negative social environment.