Chapter 2: First

Language Acquisition
Introduction

- First language acquisition research dates back to the 18th century.

- In the late of 20th century, researchers paid attention to child language by analyzing it
systematically and trying to discover the nature of the psycholinguistic process that
enables every human being to gain fluent control of an exceedingly complex system of
communication.

- Some language teachers adopted the findings of such research with a view to drawing
analogies between first and second language acquisition, and even to justifying certain
teaching methods and techniques on the basis of first language learning principles.

- Even if it looks reasonable to make analogy between the 1st and 2nd languages, there
are numerous differences between them.
 All children acquire their native
language fluently and efficiently, What about learning a second
 They acquire it "naturally," without
language?
special instruction, and they acquire it
without significant effort and attention
to language.

However, issues in first language learning serves as a foundation on which you can build an understanding
of principles of second language learning. It is an essential component in the construction of a theory of
second language learning.
Children have a remarkable ability to communicate:
Small babies: children babble and coo and cry and vocally and nonvocally send messages and receive
messages.
End of first year: children start to imitate words and speech sounds they hear around them and about this time
utter their first ‘words’.

18 months: their vocabulary in terms of words has increased and are beginning to use 2-word and 3-word
utterances (known as “telegraphic utterances”). (bye-bye daddy/ there cat / gimme toy)

2 years: as time goes by, children produce far more sentences and these sentences become complex to the point
where children can form questions and negatives. (what Jeff doing? / that not red, that blue )

3 years: children can comprehend an incredible quantity of linguistic input; their production ability improves
(nonstop chatters)

School age: Children start to internalize increasingly complex structures, expand their vocabulary and sharpen
their communication skills and they also learn the social functions of their language.
Theories of language acquisition attempt to answer some questions about how people can have the amazing language
acquisition ability. There are two polarized positions in the study of acquisition. The one is an extreme behavioristic
position. It claims that children’s environment, rather than their nature, can affect the children. On the other hand, the
constructivist claims that children came into the world with very specific innate knowledge and that they learn to
function in a language through interaction. (p.26)

Three Positions in First Language Acquisition

Behavioristic Nativist Functional

Position Position Position
 Behavioral Approach

Characteristics:
- Children come into this world with a tabula rasa (a clean slate bearing no preconceived notions about the world or about
language) and that these children are then shaped by the environment and slowly conditioned through various schedules
of reinforcement.
- Language is a fundamental part of total human behavior.
- This approach focused on the immediately perceptible aspects of linguistic behavior-the publicly observable responses-
and the relationships or associations between those responses and events in the world surrounding them.
- A behaviorist might consider effective language behavior to be the production of correct responses to stimuli. If a
particular response is reinforced, it then becomes habitual, or conditioned.

- The behaviorist view imitation and practice as primary processes in language development.

- Imitation: Word for word repetition of all or part of someone else’s utterance.
e.g. Mother: Would you like some bread and peanut butter? Katie: Some bread and peanut butter
- Practice: Repetitive manipulation of form.
e.g. Michel I can handle it. Hannah can handle it. We can handle it

Children’s imitation is selective and based on what they are currently learning.
 Skinner’s Behavioral Model

- One of the best-known attempts to construct a behavioral model of linguistic behavior was embodied in B.F. Skinner's
classic, Verbal Behavior (1957).
- Skinner’s model was an extension of his general theory of learning by operant conditioning.
- Operant conditioning is the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior.
- It refers to conditioning in which the human being produces a response, or operant (a sentence or utterance). This
operant is maintained (learned) by reinforcement (e.g. a positive verbal or nonverbal response from another person).
- If a child says “want milk” and a parent gives the child some milk, the operant is reinforced and, over repeated
instances, is conditioned.

According to Skinner, verbal behavior, like other behavior, is controlled by its consequences.
 When consequences are rewarding, behavior is maintained and is increased in strength and frequency.
 When consequences are punishing, or when there is a total lack of reinforcement, the behavior is weakened and
eventually extinguished.
 Challenges to Behavioral Approaches
Skinner's theories attracted a number of critics (Noam Chomsky).

Chomsky’s Criticisms:

- Chomsky argues that the behaviorist theory fails to recognize what has come to be called “the logical problem of
language acquisition‟.
- This logical problem refers to the fact that children come to know more about the structure of their language than they
could reasonably be expected to learn on the basis of the samples of language which they hear.

- Children do not learn and reproduce a large set of sentences, but they routinely create new sentences that they have never
learned before. They internalize rules rather than strings of words (e.g. it breaked /mommy goed).

- The language the child is exposed to in the environment is full of confusing information. (e.g. false starts, incomplete
sentences, or slips of the tongue)

- Children are not systematically corrected or instructed on language points. Parental corrections are inconsistent or even
non-existent. - When parents do correct, they tend to focus on meaning and truth values and not on language itself.

It would appear that this position with its emphasis on empirical observation and the scientific method only began to explain
the miracle of language acquisition. It left untouched genetic and interactionist domains that could be explored only by
approaches that probed more deeply.
 Nativist Approach

The term nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that language acquisition is innately determined,
that we are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic perception of the language around
us, resulting in the construction of an internalized system of language.

Noam Chomsky claims that children are biologically programmed for language and that language develops
in the child in just the same way that other biological functions develop. Children are born with a special
ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules of a language system.

The environment makes a basic contribution in this case - the availability of people who speak to the child. The
child, or rather, the child’s biological endowment, will do the rest.
 The Language Acquisition Device (LAD):

 For the LAD to work, the child needs access only to samples of a natural language. These language samples serve
as a trigger to activate the device. Once it is activated, the child is able to discover the structure of the language to
be learned by matching the innate knowledge of basic grammatical relationships to the structures of the particular
language in the environment.
 LAD is the imaginary “black box” which exists somewhere in the brain. It is thought to contain all and only the
principles which are universal to all human languages.
 P. 28

 More recently, Chomsky and his followers no longer use the term LAD, but refers to the child’s innate endowment
as Universal Grammar (UG)
 Chomsky drew attention to the fact that children seem to develop language in similar ways and on a similar
schedule.
 Environmental differences may be associated with some variation in the rate of acquisition.
 Jean Berko (1958) demonstrated that children learn language not as a series of separate discrete items, but
as an integrated system.
 Using a simple nonsense-word test, Berko discovered that English-speaking children as young as four years of age
applied rules for the formation of plural, present progressive, past tense, third singular, and possessives.
 She found, for example,
- If a child saw one "wug" he could easily talk about two "wugs;’
- or if he were presented with a person who knows how to "gling," the child could talk about a person who
"glinged" yesterday, or sometimes who "glang."

So, The three most important contributions of the nativist framework to our understanding of the first language
acquisition:
1. Freedom from the restrictions of the so-called “scientific method” to explore the unseen, unobservable, underlying,
abstract linguistic structures being developed in the child;
2. Systematic description of the child’s linguistic repertoire as rule-governed;
3. The construction of a number of potential properties of Universal Grammar.
 Functional Approach

There has been a shift in patterns of research; it was a move even more deeply into the essence of language
(constructivist).

a. Researchers began to see that language was one manifestation of the cognitive and affective ability.

a. Moreover, the generative rules that were proposed under the nativistic framework were abstract, formal, explicit,
and quite logical, yet they dealt specifically with the forms of language and not with the deeper functional levels
of meaning constructed from social interaction.

*Forms: Morphemes, words, sentences, and the rules that govern them.
*Functions: The meaningful, interactive purposes, within a social (pragmatic) context, that we accomplish with the
forms.
 The emphasis of the functional perspective was on Social Interaction & Language Development.

 Since language is used for interactive communication, some research (BerkoGleason, 1988; Lock, 1991)
looked at the communicative functions of language:

 What do children know and learn about talking with others? the interaction between hearer and speaker?
conversational cues?

Within such a perspective, the very heart of language - its communicative and pragmatic function - is being
tackled.

 This kind of research renewed interest in the performance level of language.

Issues in First Language
Acquisition
 Competence and Performance

• Competence means one’s underlying • Performance is the overtly

knowledge of a system, event, or fact. observable and concrete
It is the non-observable ability to do manifestation or realization of
something, to perform something. competence. It is the actual
• Competence & language: it is one's production (speaking, writing) or the
underlying knowledge of the system of comprehension (listening, reading)
a language-its rules of grammar, its of linguistic events.
vocabulary, all the pieces of a
language and how those pieces fit
together
 Comprehension and Production
• These two aspects should not be confused with the competence/performance distinction; they are aspects
of both performance and competence.

• In child language, most observational and research evidence points to the general superiority of
comprehension over production:
 children seem to understand "more" than they actually produce.
 Even adults understand more vocabulary than they ever use in speech, and also perceive more syntactic
variation than they actually produce.
 Nature or Nurture?

• Nativists claim that a child is born with an innate knowledge of a predisposition toward language, and
that this innate property (the LAD or UG) is universal in all human beings.

• Environmental factors cannot by any means be ignored.

• For years psychologists and educators have been embroiled in the "nature/nurture" controversy:
- What are those behaviors that "nature" provides innately, in some sort of predetermined biological
timetable? - and what are those behaviors that are, by environmental exposure - by "nurture,” by teaching -
learned and internalized?
• Language acquisition is universal; every child acquires language. But how are the efficiency and success of that
learning determined by the environment the child is in? or by the child's individual construction of linguistic reality
in interaction with others?

• An interesting line of research on innateness was pursued by Derek Bickerton (1981), who found evidence, across a
number of languages, of common patterns of linguistic and cognitive development.
• He proposed that human beings are "bio-programmed" to proceed from stage to stage. Like flowering plants, people
are innately programmed to "release" certain properties of language at certain developmental ages. Just as we cannot
make a geranium bloom before its "time," so human beings will "bloom" in predetermined, preprogrammed steps.
 Universals

• It is a controversial area of study: the claim that language is universally acquired in the
same manner, and that the deep structure of language at its deepest level may be
common to all languages.
• Research on Universal Grammar continues to this day.
• One of the keys to such inquiry lies in research on child language acquisition across
many different languages in order to determine the commonalities.
• Areas of study: word order, morphological marking tone, agreement (e.g., of subject and
verb), reduced reference (e.g., pronouns, ellipsis) nouns and noun classes, verbs and
verb classes, predication, negation, and question formation.
 Systematicity and Variability

• One of the assumptions of a good deal of current research on child language is the systematicity
of the process of acquisition.
• From pivot grammar … to full sentences of almost indeterminate length, children exhibit a
remarkable ability to infer the phonological, structural, lexical, and semantic system of language.
• But in the midst of all this systematicity, there is an equally remarkable amount of variability in
the process of learning.
• Researchers do not agree on how to define various "stages" of language acquisition, even in
English.
• In both first and second language acquisition, the problem of variability is being carefully
addressed by researchers. One of the major current research problems is to account for all this
variability.
 Language and Thought

• For years, researchers have examined the relationship between language and cognition.
• Behaviorists think that cognition is too mentalistic to be studied by the scientific
method.
• Piaget (1972) gives an opposing position. He claimed that cognitive development is at
the very center of the human organism and that language is dependent upon and springs
from cognitive development.
• Vygotsky (1962, 1978) claimed that social interaction, through language, is a
prerequisite to cognitive development.
• Thought and language were seen as two distinct cognitive operations that grow
together. (Schinkle-Llano 1993).
• One of the champions of the position that language affects thought was Benjamin
Whorf, who with Edward Sapir formed the well-known Sapir Whorf hypothesis of
linguistic relativity-namely, that each language imposes on its speaker a particular
"world view.“
• The issue at stake in child language acquisition is to determine how thought affects
language, how language affects thought, and how linguists can best describe and
account for the interaction of the two.
 Imitation

• It is a common informal observation that children are good imitators. So we might think
that imitation is one of the important strategies a child uses in the acquisition of
language.
• There are two types of imitation:
- Surface structure imitation: where a person repeats or mimics the surface strings,
attending to a phonological code rather than a semantic code.
- Deep structure imitation: where a person concentrates on language as a meaningful and
communicative tool.

* See (P. 44) for examples

 Practice
• Do children practice their language? If so, how? What is the role of the frequency of
hearing and producing items in the acquisition of those items?
• A behavioristic view would claim that practice – repetition and association – is the key
to the formation of habits by operant conditioning.
• Practice is usually thought of as referring to speaking only. But one can also think in
terms of comprehension practice (the frequency of linguistic input to the child).
• Is the acquisition of particular words or structures directly attributable to their
frequency in the chil’s linguistic environment?
• Brown and Hanlon (1970) found that the frequency of occurrence of a linguistic item in
the speech of the mothers was a strong predictor of the order of emergence of those
items in their children’s speech.
 Input

• The role of input in the child's acquisition of language is undeniably crucial. Whatever
one's position is on the innateness of language, the speech that young children hear is
primarily the speech heard in the home, and much of that speech is parental speech or
the speech of older siblings.
• Children react very consistently to the deep structure and the communicative function of
language, and they do not react overtly to expansions and grammatical corrections. Such
input is largely ignored unless there is some truth or falsity that the child can attend to.
• What many researchers have showed is that in the long run, children will, after
consistent, repeated models in meaningful contexts, eventually transfer correct forms to
their own speech and thus correct past mistakes.
 Discourse
• A subfield of research that is occupying the attention of an increased number of child language researchers,
especially in an era of social constructivist research, is the area of conversational or discourse analysis.
• While parental input is a significant part of the child's development of conversational rules, it is only one
aspect, as the child also interacts with peers and, of course, with other adults.
• While it used to be generally held that mere exposure to language is sufficient to set the child's language
generating machinery in motion, it is now clear that, in order for successful first language acquisition to
take place, interaction, rather than exposure, is required. Children do not learn language from overhearing
the conversations of others or from listening to the radio and must, instead, acquire it in the context of being
spoken to.
• While conversation is a universal human activity performed routinely in the course of daily living, the
means by which children learn to take part in conversation appear to be very complex.
• How do children learn discourse rules? What are the key features children attend to? How do they detect
pragmatic or intended meaning? How are gender roles acquired? These and other questions about the
acquisition of discourse ability are slowly being answered in the research.
End of chapter 2