Language

Learning in Early
Childhood / First
Language
Acquisition

2nd Week

Samed Yasin ÖZTÜRK,

Ph.D.
Most of us teach as
we were taught or
in a way that
matches our ideas
and preferences
about how we learn.
Let’s
Discuss
LOREM
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 First Language Acquisition

• What enables a child • Does child

not only to learn language
words, but to put them develop
together in meaningful similarly around
sentences? the world?
• What pushes children • How do
to go on developing bilingual
complex grammatical children acquire
language even though more than one
their early simple language?
communication is 6

successful for most

MILESTONES OF DEVELOPMENT

• Holophrastic
• Crying
stage: from
3 ½ to 4:
• Cooing: 12 to 18 filling in
between 6 months: One the missing
and 8 weeks word grammatic
• Babbling: utterances:
around 6-8 gone, dada, al
months: teddy elements,
Consonant- • Telegraphic asking
vowel speech: two questions,
sounds:
bababa,
years old: adapting
50-Word
dadada vocabulary.
speech to 7
Prenatal studies
Language learning starts before the baby is born
Hear as early as 16 weeks
Pick up rhythm and cadences of L1 from mother’s voice

Phonetic discrimination studies

Can hear subtle phonetic differences very early
Lose the ability to hear differences that are not
phonemic
Babies in bilingual environments retain the
discrimination ability longer
For example, by the time they are a year old, babies who will
become speakers of Arabic stop reacting to the difference
between ‘pa’ and ‘ba’ which is not phonemic in Arabic.

Babies who regularly hear more than one language in their

environment continue to respond to these differences for a
longer period (Werker, Weikum, and Yoshida 2006).
• One important finding is that it is not enough for babies to hear
language sounds from electronic devices. In order to learn—or
retain—the ability to distinguish between sounds, they need to
interact with a human speaker (Conboy and Kuhl 2011).

• L1 acquisition is universal
• Similarities in L1 acquisition across the world’s languages→
Universal stages (e.g. crying, pointing, and responding to
frequently heard words)
• Most people ‘know’ and have a pretty good grasp of their L1
(in contrast to their L2, where there is more variability).
• Children can use most syntactic patterns and grammatical
rules of their L1 before they reach school age.
 GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES
Developmental sequence & order of acquisition

• 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 simple present -s (she runs)
• auxiliary be (he is coming)

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 Vocabulary Development:
overextension

A word is ‘extended’ to apply to other objects

that share a certain feature such as a common
property of shape, color, or size.

Example: ‘Dog’ is applied to other animals, or

‘moon’ to other round objects.
Vocabulary development: underextension

• In this case, the word is used with a narrower meaning than it has in the adult
language.
Vocabulary development: mismatch
Calculating MLU

 Hi Mommy 2
 Hi truck s 3
 Yeah 1
 Hi man 2
 Pick that up 3
 It dropp ed 3
 I runn ing 3
 TOTAL NUMBER OF MORPHEMES = 17
 TOTAL NUMBER OF UTTERANCES = 7
 Divide the number of morphemes by the number of utterances
 MLU = 2.43
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Calculating MLU

 Up to about MLU of 4.0, this is a good index of

development. Beyond that length, the child has more
flexibility and the length of sentences is less indicative of
what the child is capable of than of what she chooses to
say.

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Negation: stages of acquisition
• Stage 1: ‘No’ alone or first word in sentence
• No. No bath.
• Stage 2: Negative word appears before the verb as
utterances become longer
• Mommy no eat cookie. Don’t close that!
• Stage 3: Other forms of negative are added (e.g.
‘can’t’, ‘don’t’) without tense/person agreement
• He don’t want that. We can’t eat it.
• Stage 4: Negative element attached to correct form
of auxiliary verb (e.g. ‘do’ and ‘be’) but difficulty
continues with features related to negatives
• He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t have no more
cookies.
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Asking Questions

• Adults ask questions about the immediate environment

(What? Who?) before they ask about more abstract things
(When? How?). Children begin using the question words in
an order that reflects what they are asked and their own
cognitive development.
• An exception is ‘why’. Children start asking ‘why’ before
they understand the answer, but they know it elicits a
response.

20
Questions: Stages of acquisition
• Stage 1: Formulaic questions & words/sentences
with rising intonation
• Cookie? Daddy car? What’s that?
• Stage 2: Declarative word order + rising
intonation
• You drink this? Doggie go bed?
• Stage 3: Fronting: put an element at the
beginning of a sentence without changing the
internal word order.
• Is the doggie is hungry? Are you are tired?
• Why he don’t have one? What that one does?

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Questions: Stages of acquisition

• Stage 4: Subject-auxiliary inversion for yes/no questions

• Is he going to eat now? Does he like spinach?
• Stage 5: Subject-auxiliary inversion in wh- questions
• Where did he go? Does the dog have a bone?
• Stage 6: Embedded questions; negative questions
• Ask him where is he going?
• Why doesn’t he play with the other ones?

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Metalinguistic Development
 The ability to treat language as an object, for
example, being able to define a word, or to say
what sounds make up a word

◦ Children under the age of five do not understand that

words are made up of separate sounds. Ask them,
“What’s the first sound in your name?” or “If you take
the ‘s’ sound off ‘scream’ what’s left?” and they are
mystified.

◦ Children tend to believe that words are mystically

connected to the things they name – a cat for instance,
has to be called ‘cat’; it would be unthinkable to call it
anything else. Interestingly bilingual children tend to
learn earlier than monolinguals that the name is not
inherent in the object. 23
Child-directed speech

In the past this has been referred to as motherese and

later, as caretaker speech. The characteristics of child-
directed speech that have been observed in some
communities include:
• slower rate of delivery
• higher pitch
• more varied intonation
• shorter, simpler sentence patterns
• frequent repetition and paraphrase
• topics related to the child’s experience

24
Child-directed speech (cont.)

Child-directed speech is not observed in all societies.

Children are not considered ‘conversation partners’ in
some societies and their early attempts at language are
ignored. They learn by listening and observing.

25
Language development of young children

• Pre-school children have substantial control over their L1

• Children of three, four, and five already understand what
language is for and know a good deal about how their
first language works. They have:
• an extensive vocabulary
• ability to use all basic grammatical structures
• begun to learn when, where, and with whom it is appropriate to
use certain language forms

26
 The behaviourist perspective

• Language learning is the result of imitation,

practice, feedback on success, and habit
formation.
• Child is rewarded for correct imitation.
Stimulus-response theory: stimulus of praise,
approval, provokes response of more &
better imitation.
• The data seem to contradict this simple
hypothesis, as shown in the examples on the
next slide.

27
Feedback and L1 Learning
• Child: Nobody don’t like • C: Want other one spoon,
me. daddy.
• F: You mean, you want « the
• Mother: No, say « Nobody other spoon ».
likes me » • C: Yes I want other one
• Child: Nobody don’t like spoon, please, daddy.
me. • F: Can you say « the other
spoon »?
• (dialogue repeated eight • C: other … one… spoon.
times) • F: Say « other »
• Mother: Now, listen • C: other
carefully « nobody likes • F: spoon
me » • C: spoon
• Child: Oh! Nobody don’t • F: other … spoon
likes me. • C: other … spoon. Now give
me other one spoon.
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‘The logical problem’
of language acquisition

Chomsky (1959), in an early critique of

behaviourism, argued that:
• Input is limited and can be misleading.
It contains false starts, incomplete
sentences, slips of the tongue.
• Parental corrections are either non-
existent or inconsistent.

29
The innatist perspective

• The basic structure of language is inborn (LAD or UG).

Language acquisition is the triggering of what the child
already ‘knows’. Input is needed only to trigger language
acquisition.
• The fundamental structural properties of all human
languages are ‘hard-wired’ into the infant brain and
emerge through maturation.
• What needs to be learned? Properties peculiar to
individual languages (e.g. vocabulary, inflectional
endings). Chomsky sees these as relatively minor aspects
of language.
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Innatism: Language acquisition is based on internal,
language-specific cognitive abilities

Input LAD = UG Language acquisition

LAD = Language acquisition device

UG = Universal Grammar

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Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH)

• There is a specific and limited time period

when languages can be learned by the
‘language acquisition device’.
• Evidence from ‘wild child’ studies were
once used to support this hypothesis. p.31

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Interactionist perspective

• Differs from Innatists’ view

• Emphasis on development not end state
• Hypothesizes that language learning is based
on the same cognitive processes as the
learning of any other knowledge or skill
• Language develops as a result of the
interaction between internal (general
cognitive) characteristics of the child and the
external environment.
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Interactionist positions

• Piaget – Language development has close ties to the

child’s cognitive development acquired through
interaction with the world. As child comes to understand
the world, the language follows.
• Vygotsky – Language development is tied to social
interaction. Language is acquired through dialogue.

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Connectionism/Usage-based Perspectives

• Language acquisition is the result of exposure to input.

Input frequency is powerful predictor of what will be
learned.
• Language acquisition is based on the same cognitive
mechanisms that allow the child to learn many other
things. There is no dedicated ‘language acquisition
device’.

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Connectionism/Usage-based Perspectives

• Child’s language behaviour looks rule-governed but it

mainly reflects the ability to learn language in chunks and
formulas and to combine those appropriately.
• In acquiring language, the child’s brain makes
connections between things that go together—whether
those ‘things’ are language form and meaning or different
language forms that go together.

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 FIRST REFLECTION
PAPER
on Behaviorist, Innatist, and
Interactionist Perspectives
- considering the process of child
language acquisition, include your
perspective & opinion 40
400-500 words
NO PLAGIARISM !
41
THANK YOU

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