CHAPTER 3: LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
3.1. The linguistic capacity of children.
Children is extremely complex, yet children already know most of the grammar of their native
language(s) before they are five years old.
Children acquire language without being taught the rules of grammar by their parents.
What’s Learned, What’s Not?
Children are not taught language, but they extract the rules from the language(s) spoken around
them.
They only have to learn the language-specific aspects of grammar (the rules of phonology,
morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics).
For example, children somehow know to invert the auxiliary of the main clause when forming
a question like:
Is the boy who is sleeping dreaming of a new car?
Rather than
Is the boy sleeping is dreaming of a new car?
Stages In Language Acquisition
Children acquire language in similar stages across the world.
When children are acquiring language, they do not speak a degenerate form of adult language.
Rather, they speak a version of the language that conforms to the set of grammatical rules they
have developed at that stage of acquisition.
The Perception and Production of Speech Sounds
1. Infants display an ability to discriminate and recognize speech sounds.
They will even respond to linguistic contrasts when those contrasts are not present in the
language(s) spoken around them.
They can perceive differences in voicing, place of articulation, manner of articulation.
But they do not react to nonlinguistic aspects of speech (loudness, gender-based pitch
differences, etc.)
2. Infants appear to be born with the ability to perceive and focus on the sounds that are
important for language, so they can learn any human language.
But by 6 months, babies begin to lose to ability to discriminate between sounds that are not
phonemic in the language(s) they are acquiring.
a. Babbling
Babbling begins at about 6 months and is considered the earliest stage of language
acquisition.
Babies may babble phonemes that do not occur in the language(s) they are acquiring.
95% of babble is composed of the 12 most common consonants around the world.
Early babbles mostly consist of CV sequences but become more varied later on.
By 1 year babbles are composed only of the phonemes used in the language(s) they hear.
Deaf babies babble with their hands like hearing babies babble using sounds.
b. First Words:
- After the age of one, children figure out that sounds are related to meanings and start to
produce their first words.
- Usually children go through a holophrastic stage, where their one-word utterances may
convey more meaning.
- For example, “up” is used to indicate something in the sky or to mean “pick me up”.
This suggests that children know more language than they can express.
c. Segmenting and Speech Stream.
- A major obstacle that babies must overcome is to be able to identify where word boundaries
are.
- English-speaking children may be able to use stress as a cue for word boundaries (prosodic
boostrapping).
- Every content word in English has stress.
If a word has two syllables, the stress either falls on the first syllable (trochaic stress) or the
second syllable (iambic stress), but the vast majority of English words have trochaic stress.
- Experiments have shown that children do use stress as a cue for word boundaries since most
English words have stress on the first syllable.
- But how do children know the stress pattern of the language they are acquiring?
－ Babies may use statistical frequency of syllable sequences to determine word boundaries.
+ In one experiment, babies were able to recognize the nonsense word pabiku, tutibu, golabu,
and babupuout of strings of nonsense syllables because those strings of syllables in the “words”
occurred more frequently than the random strings of syllables.
+ Children may use statistical strategies to determine a few words, and from there may be able
to determine the rhythmic, allophonic, and phonotactic properties of the language and then can
determine even more words from this knowledge.
The Acquisition of Phonology
Children tend to acquire the sounds common to all languages first, followed by the less
common sounds of their own language.
- Vowels tend to be acquired first, and consonants are ordered:
+ Manner of articulation: nasals, glides, stops, liquids, fricatives, affricates.
+ Place of articulation: labials, velars, alveolars, palatals.
Uncommon but high frequency sounds may be acquired earlier than expected.
Children can perceive more sound contrasts than they can make in early stages.
When they cannot yet produce a sound, they may substitute an easier sound.
These substitutions are rule-governed.
Children tend to reduce consonant clusters ([pun] for spoon), reduplicate syllables ([wawa] for
water), and drop final consonants ([ke] for cake).
The Acquisition of Word Meaning
When children learn the meaning of words they must learn the relevant features of the class of
things that are referred to by that word.
－ They must learn that dog refers to pugs and Great Danes, but not cats.
When learning words, children often overextend a word’s meaning.
－ For example, using the word dog to refer to any furry, four-legged animal (overextensions
tend to be based on shape, size or texture, but never color).
They may also underextend a word’s meaning.
－ For example, using the word “dog” to refer only family pet, as if dog were a proper noun.
The whole object principle: When a child learns a new word, (s)he is likely to interpret the word
to refer to a whole object rather than one of its part.
－ This principle and others may help the child learn 5000 words per year.
The Acquisition of Morphology
The acquisition of morphology clearly demonstrates the rule-governed nature of language
acquisition.
- Children typically learn a morphological rule and then overgeneralize.
- Children go through three stages in the acquisition of an irregular form:
+ In phase 1 they use the standard irregular past tense forms because they have learned these
irregulars as separate lexical items (broke, brought).
+ In phase 2 the child has learned rule for past tense and therefore attaches the regular past
tense morpheme to the irregular verb (breaked, bringed).
+ In phase 3 the child realizes that there are exceptions to the morphological rule and bring
the standard irregular forms back into their vocabulary (broke, brought).
Children acquiring languages other than English learn subject-verb agreement very early.
Children also demonstrate their knowledge of derivation rules and can create new words
E.g: broomed (“swept”)
The Acquisitions of Syntax
At about two years of age, children start to put words together to form two-word utterances.
The intonation contour extends over the two words as a unit, and the two-word utterances can
convey a range of meanings.
E.g: mommy sock = subject + object or possessive
Chronological age is not a good measure of linguistic development due to individual
difference, so instead linguists use the child’s mean length of utterances (MLU) to measure
development.
The telegraphic stage describes a phase when children tend to omit function morphemes such
as articles, subject pronouns, auxiliaries, and verbal inflection.
E.g: He play little tune or Andrew want that.
However, while function morphemes are absent, these sentences have hierarchical constituent
structure like adult sentences.
Telegraphic utterances are not just words strung together and reveal the child’s knowledge of
syntactic rules.
A child must know the syntactic categories of words in order to apply syntactic rules.
- Semantic bootstrapping: the notion that children first use meaning of a word to figure out its
syntactic category.
- Word frames may also help children determine the syntactic categories for words.