How Languages are Learned (Lightbown & Spada, 4ed)

Dr. Leema Alahmad

§ Language Acquisition: is the process by which humans (children) acquire the
capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use
words and sentences to communicate. It involves structures, rules and
representation.
§ Acquiring a language is an amazing feat- one that has attracted the attention of
linguists and psychologists for generations.
§ how do children accomplish this?
§ What enables a child not only to learn words, but to put them together in meaningful
sentences?
§ What pushes children to go on developing complex grammatical language even though
their early simple communication is successful for most purposes?
§ Does child language develop similarly around the world?
§ How do bilingual children acquire more than one language?
§ One remarkable thing about first language acquisition (FLA) is the high degree of
similarity in the early language of children all over the world (crying, cooing, gurgling
sounds)
§ Not only do they distinguish the voice of their mothers from those of other speakers,
children also seem to recognize the language that was spoken around their mother
before they were born.
§ auditory discrimination: infants make distinctions between phonemic sounds in the
language spoken around them (‘pa’ and ‘ba’)- phonemic in English not phonemic in
Arabic. In order to learn- or retain- the ability to distinguish between sounds, they need
to interact with a human speaker. Whether they are becoming monolingual or bilingual
children, however, it will be months before their own vocalizations begin to reflect the
characteristics of the language or languages they hear and longer still before they
connect language sounds with specific meaning. However, at the end of their first year,
most babies understand quite a few frequently repeated words in the language or
languages spoken around them. At 12 months, most babies will have begun to produce
a word or two that everyone recognize.
§ By the age of two, most children reliably produce at least 50 different words or
more. They begin to combine words into simple sentences such as (Mommy juice).
These sentences are called ‘telegraphic’ because they leave out such things as
articles, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs. These sentences reflect the word order
of the language they are hearing and have a meaningful relationship (e.g kiss baby
vs. baby kiss).
§ Children’s progress through the discovery of language during their first three
years goes through many language features. Some of them have been described in
terms of developmental sequences or stages. These stages can be related to the
children’ cognitive development (e.g. temporal adverbs). In other cases, the
developmental sequences seem to reflect the gradual acquisition of the linguistic
elements for expressing ideas that have been present in children’s cognitive
understanding for a long time (e.g. plurality).
§ Grammatical morphemes: in the 1960s, several researchers have found that
children mastered grammatical morphemes in observed developmental sequence
or ‘order of acquisition’. However, they do not acquire the morphemes at the same
age or rate (Brown and his colleagues’ study)
§ present progressive –ing (Mommy running)
§ Plural –s (two books)
§ Irregular past forms (baby went)
§ Possessive –s (Daddy’s hat)
§ Copula (Mommy is happy)
§ Articles –the- and –a-
§ Regular past –ed (she walked)
§ Third person singular –s (she runs)
§ Auxiliary –be (he is coming)

§ Why these grammatical morphemes are acquired in this order. No simple

satisfactory explanation for the sequence, and most researchers agree that the
order is determined by an interaction among a number of different factors.
§ Negation
§ Children learn the functions of negation very early. That is, they learn to comment on the
disappearance of objects, to refuse a suggestion, or to reject an assertion, even at the single word
stage. The following stages in the development of negation have been observed in the acquisition
of English and other languages. (Wode, 1981)
§ Stage 1 (No)
§ Negation is usually expressed by the word ‘no’, either all alone or as the first word in the utterance
(No. No cookie)
§ Stage 2 (longer utterance)
§ The negative word appears just before the verb- often use ‘don’t’ (Daddy no comb hair. Don’t
touch that)
§ Stage 3 (complex sentence)
§ Children may add forms of the negative other than ‘no’, including words like ‘can’t’ and ‘don’t’.
These sentences appear to follow the correct English pattern of attaching the negative to the
auxiliary or model verb. But, they do not vary these forms for different persons or tenses (I can’t
do it. He don’t want it)
§ Stage 4 (attachment to correct auxiliary)
§ Children begin to attach the negative element to the correct form of verbs, ‘do’ and ‘be’ (You
didn’t have supper. She doesn’t want it). However, some other negative features might be difficult
for them (I don’t have no more candies)
§ Questions
§ There is a remarkable consistency in the way children learn to form questions in
English.
§ Stage 1
§ Children’s earliest questions are single words or simple two- or three word sentences with
rising intonation (Cookie? Mommy book?
§ At the same time, they may produce some correct questions because they have been learned
them as chunks (Where’s Daddy? What’s that?)
§ Stage 2
§ Children use the word order of declarative sentence, with rising intonation (You like this? I
have some?). They continue to produce the correct chuck learned forms (What’s that?)
§ Stage 3
§ Gradually, children notice the structure of questions is different and begin to produce
questions such as: Can I go? Are you happy?
§ However, this stage is called ‘fronting’ because the child’s rule seems to be that questions are
formed by putting something (a verb or question word) at the ‘front’ of a sentence, leaving the
rest of the sentence in its statement form
§ Is the teddy is tired?
§ Do I have a cookie?
§ Why you don’t have one?
§ Why you catched it?
§ Stage 4
§ In stage 4, some questions are formed by subject-auxiliary inversion. The questions are
resemble those of stage 3, but there is more variety in the auxiliaries that appear before
the subject (Are you going to play with me?)
§ At this stage, children can even add ‘do’ in questions in which there would be no auxiliary
in the declarative version of the sentence (Do dogs like ice cream?)
§ Also, children seem to be able to use either inversion or a WH-word, but not both (Is he
crying? But not ‘Why is he crying’)
§ Stage 5
§ At stage 5, both WH- and yes/no questions are formed correctly. However, there is still one
more hurdle. When WH-words appear in subordinate clauses or embedded questions,
children ‘overgeneralize’ the inverted form that would be correct for simple questions and
produce sentences such as:
§ Ask him why can’t he go out.

§ Stage 6
§ At this stage, children are able to correctly form question types, including negative and
complex embedded questions. However, developmental sequences do not always follow
a steady uninterrupted path. Children appear to learn new things and then fall back on
old patterns (when stressed or using other new elements). But the overall path takes them
toward a closer approximation of the language this is spoken around them.
§ By the age of four, it is generally accepted that children have acquired the basic
structures of the language and languages spoken to them. Three- and four-year-olds
continue to learn less frequent and more complex linguistic features such as passive
and relative clauses.
§ Much of children’s language acquisition effort in the late pre-school years is their ability
to use language in a widening social environment and in a greater variety of situations
(interacting with unfamiliar adults, talking to their toys)
§ In the pre-school years, children also begin to develop ‘metalinguistic awareness’, the
ability to treat language as an object separate from the meaning it conveys (drink the
chair. Cake the eat).
§ Children in pre-school years have spent thousands of hours interacting with language,
participating in conversation, eavesdropping on others’ conversations, being read to,
watching television etc.
§ Despite that, the school setting requires new ways of using language and brings new
opportunities for language development.
§ During school years, children expand their ability to use language to understand
others and to express their own meanings. Learning to read gives a major boost to
metalinguistic awareness. Seeing words represented by letters and symbols on a
page leads children to understand that language has form as well as meaning.
Metalinguistic awareness also include ambiguity (jokes, trick questions and
riddles)
§ Also, children enter school with the ability to understand and produce several
thousand words, and thousands more will be learned in school (spoken and
written). Vocabulary growth depends mainly on how much and how widely children
read (variety of texts; assignments or for pleasure, narrative or non-fiction)
§ Another important development in the school years is the acquisition of different
language ‘registers’ (written vs spoken, standard vs slang, scientific vs narrative)
§ Since the middle of the 20th century, three main theoretical positions have been
advanced to explain language development
§ Behaviorist perspective
§ Innatist perspective
§ Interactional / developmental perspective
§ Behaviourism is a theory of learning that was influential in the 1940s and 1950s
particularly in the United States. The best-known proponent of this psychological
theory was B. F. Skinner (1957) – ‘Verbal Behavior’.
§ It hypothesized that when children imitate the language produced around them,
their attempts to reproduce what they hear receive ‘positive reinforcement’,
reflected by praise or just successful communication. Thus encouraged by their
environment, children would continue to imitate and practise these sounds and
patterns until they formed ‘habits’ of correct language use. According to this view,
the quality and quantity of the language the child hears, as well as the consistency
of the reinforcement offered by others in the environment, would shape the child’s
language behavior. So, the environment is the source of everything the child needs
to learn.
§ What is your intake on this theory??
§ That is not completely true. Many things children would say show that they are
using language creatively, not just repeating what they have heard. Thus, imitation
and practice alone cannot explain some of the forms created by children
(overgeneralization, creation of new forms, new uses of words).
§ Although behaviourism seems to offer a reasonable explanation of how children
learn some of the regular and routine aspects of language, especially during
earlier stages, research shows that children who do little imitation acquire
language as fully and rapidly as those who imitate a lot. Also, behaviourism failed
to provide a satisfactory explanation for the acquisition of the more complex
grammar acquired.
§ These limitations led researchers to look for different explanations for language
acquisition. In his 1959 review of B. F. Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior, Neom
Chomsky challenged the behaviourist explanation for language acquisition. That
was the beginning of Chomsky’s introduction of the ’Innatist perspective’.
§ The Innatist perspective is related to Chomsky’s hypothesis that all human
languages are based on some innate universal principles. He argued that children
are biologically programmed for language and that language develops in the child
in just the same way that other biological functions develop. Like ‘walking’, most
children learn to walk at about the same age, and walking is essentially the same in
all normal human beings.
§ Unlike the behaviourists, Chomsky believed that the behaviourist theory failed to
account for the logical problem of language acquisition. Children are exposed to
false starts, incomplete sentences, and slips of the tongue, and yet they learn to
distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
§ He hypothesized that children are born with a specific innate ability to discover for
themselves the underlying rules of a language system on the samples of natural
language they are exposed to. This innate endowment was seen as a sort of
template, containing the principles that are universal to all human languages (The
Universal Grammar ‘UG’)
§ If children are pre-equipped with UG, then what they have to learn is the ways in
which the language they are acquiring makes use of these principles. The Innatist
perspective emphasizes the fact that almost all children successfully acquire their
native language- or more than one language if they live in a multilingual
community. Even deaf children will learn sign language if they are exposed to it in
infancy.
§ Children acquire the basic syntax and morphology of the language spoken to them
in a variety of conditions. For example, caring and attentive parents who focus on
the child’s language will help their children enhance their language. However,
abusive and rejecting parents will not.
§ The Innatist perspective is often linked to the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH).
The hypothesis that humans are programmed to acquire certain kinds of
knowledge and skill at specific times in life. Beyond those ‘critical periods’, it is
either difficult or impossible to acquire those abilities. Thus, CPH suggests that
children who are not given access to language in infancy and early childhood, will
never acquire language if these deprivations go on for too long. The most famous
cases are ‘Victor’ and ‘Genie’.
§ Although ‘Victor’ and ‘Genie’ appear to provide evidence in support of the CPH, it
is difficult to argue that the hypothesis is confirmed on the basis of evidence from
such unusual cases. It is not possible to determine whether either of them suffered
from brain damage, developmental delays, or a specific language impairment.
§ A more appropriate test of CPH is the case of children of caring parents, yet they
do not have access to language at the usual time. for example, deaf children who
have hearing parents. Hearing parents may not know that their child cannot hear
them. Thus, this child’s may have normal childhood but he is devoid of language
that is accessible to him (sign language). Such cases were subject of some
important research related to CPH (Elissa Newport, 1990)
§ The researchers found out that there is a critical period for first language
acquisition, whether that language is oral or gestural.
§ To conclude, the Innatist perspective is based on evidence that there is a critical
period for language acquisition. It is also seen as an explanation for the logical
problem of language acquisition, that is, the question of how adult speakers come
to know the complex structure of their first language on the basis of the limited
samples of language to which they are exposed.
§ Developmental and cognitive psychologists have focused on the interplay between
the innate learning ability of children and the environment in which they develop.
They argue that the innatists place too much emphasis on the competence of adult
native speakers and not enough on the developmental aspects of language
acquisition.
§ In their view, language acquisition is (but one) example of the child’s ability to
learn from experience. There is no need to assume that there are specific brain
structures devoted to language acquisition. What children need to know is
essentially available in the language they are exposed to. They see language
acquisition as similar to and influenced by the acquisition of other skill and
knowledge and it is very much dependent on child’s experience and cognitive
development.
§ One of the earliest proponents supporting the view that children’s language is built
on their cognitive development was Jean Piaget (1951). As he observed infants and
children in their play and interaction with objects and people, he noticed the
development of their cognitive understanding of such things as object
permanence, the stability of quantities, and logical inferencing.
§ For Piaget, language was a system of symbols that is developed in childhood
(through developmental stages). Language can be used to represent knowledge
that a child has acquired through physical interaction with the environment. For
example, the use of certain terms as ‘bigger’ or ‘more’ depends on the child’s
cognitive understanding of the concepts they represent.
§ Another influential psychologist was ‘Lev Vygotsky’ (1978). He argued that
language develops primarily from social interaction. He believed that in a
supportive interactive environment, children are able to advance to higher levels of
knowledge and performance. He referred to a metaphorical place in which
children would do more than they are capable of ‘Zone of proximal development’
(ZPD)
§ Vygotsky observed the importance of conversations that children have with adults
and with other children and saw in these conversations the origins of both
language and thought. The conversations provide the child with ‘scaffolding’, that
is, a kind of supportive structure that helps them make the most of knowledge they
have and also acquire new knowledge. Vygotsky’s views have become increasingly
central in research on second language development.
 Piaget Vygotsky

Development occurs before learning Learning predates development. In order for a

(cognitive development determines a child’s child to develop, learning must occur
learning)
Piaget has a strong emphasis on stages Vygotsky did not believe there were stages for
(discrete hierarchal stages of the child). development. Learning is like a ramp as he
Piaget’s stages are like a set of stairs, each stair believes it is continuous.
represent a stage.
Knowledge is constructed individually Knowledge develops as a result of
participation and social interaction
The role of adults in a child’s life is to support Adults’ role is to establish opportunities
him to explore his world and discover (guidance) for children to learn and explore
knowledge along side their help (ZPD)