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FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

1. Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate.

This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with speech or manual as in sign.

2. Language acquisition usually refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, rather than second language acquisition, which deals with acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.

3. Caretaker speech

Baby talk, also referred to as caretaker speech, infant-directed speech or child-directed speech (and informally as "motherese", "parentese", "mommy talk", or "daddy talk" is a nonstandard form of speech used by adults in talking to toddlers and infants.

    tummy    nana    dada     sissy     yum-yum

4. Stages

5. Cooing – the first recognizable sounds

•         velar consonants such as [k] and [g]

•         high vowels such as [i] and [u]

6. Babbling (also called baby talk or twaddling) is a stage in child development and a state in language acquisition, during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering sounds of language, but not yet producing any recognizable words.

By six months the child is able to produce a number of different vowels and consonants such as fricatives and nasals.

For example:

-          mu

-          da

•         Around 9 month – the consonant and vowel combinations being produced

•         10-11 months – a child can use his/her vocalization to express emotions and emphasis

7. The one-word or holophrastic stage

•         Between 12- 18 months                                        

•         Children begin to produce a variety of recognizable single unit utterances

•         Single terms are uttered for everyday objects such as: milk, cat

8. Holophrastic  – a single form functioning as a phrase or sentence

For the most part, recognizable words are used in a context that seems to involve naming:

Ø      ‘car’ while the child looks out of the living room window at cars moving on the street

Ø      ‘ball’ but meaning „Can I have the ball?”

9. The two-word stage

•         It can begin around 18 to 20 months, as the child vocabulary moves beyond 50 words

•         By the time the child is 2 years old, a variety of combinations , similar to ‘baby chair’,  ‘Ken water’, will have appeared

•         The adult interpretetation is much tied to the context of their utterance

‘Baby chair’ as an example of possible interpretations

v     this is baby’s chair  - an expression of possesion

v     put baby in chair    -  a request

v     baby is in the chair - a statement

10. By the age of two, the child is producing 200-400 distinct words. Between 2 and 3 years old, the child will begin producing a large number of utterances which could be classified as multiple-word utterances.

11. Telegraphic speech

A stage that is characterized by strings of lexical morphemes in phrases such as:

§             ‘Andrew want ball’

§             ‘cat drink milk’

§             ‘Daddy go?’

  A child:

ü      has clearly developed some sentence-building capacity

ü      can order the forms correctly

A number of grammatical inflections begin to appear in some of the words and the simple prepositions

12. 2,5 years old

•         The child’s vocabulary is expanding rapidly

•         The child is initiating more talk

•         Increase of physial activity

•         Hundreds of words

•         Pronunciation has become closer to the form of the adult language

13. The acquisition process

The child’s linguistic production is mostly  a matter of trying out constructions and testing whether they work or not.

14. Parrot-fashion – a process of consistently imitating sb’s (adult) speech.

Children can’t acquire the language through this process.

15. Adult ‘correction’

16. Morphology

•         ‘ing’  : ‘mum reading book’ , ‘dog sitting’

•         regular plurals with the ‘s’ form :

     ‘boys’ , ‘dogs’, ‘cats’

•         the possessive inflection ‘-s’ : ‘boy’s ball’

•         different forms of ‘to be’ (are, was)

•         Regular/irregular past-tense form : wanted, came

     Overgeneralization  , eg. ‘mans’, ‘womans’,

    ‘foots’, ‘childs’ , ‘goed’

17. Syntax

Children who are asked to repeat sentences may simply leave out the determiners, modals and verbal auxiliaries, verbal infections and so on.

‘I can see a cow.’ --- > ‘I see cow.’

‘Where is the car going?’ --- > ‘Where car going?’

The child understands what the adult is saying, but he/she has his/her own way of expressing it .

18. The formation of questions and the use of negatives:

Stage I   –   18-26 months

Stage II  –   22-30 months

Stage III –  24-40 months

19. Questions

I stage:

•            add a ‘wh-’ form (where, who) to the beginning of the expression

•         utter the expresion with a rise in intonation towards the end:

          ‘Where kitty?’   „Mummy go?’

II stage:

•         more complex expressions can be formed

•         the rising intonation continues

•         more ‘wh-’ forms come into use

  You want drink?       See my book?   What cat name?

III stage:

•         inversion of subject and verb in English questions

•         the ‘wh-’ form do not always undergo the required inversion

       Will you help me?       What did you do?              Did I caught it?

20. Negatives

Stage I:

•         No/not at the beginning of any expression

                         no sit         not my dog      no fall

Stage II:

•         the additional negative forms ‘don’t’ ‘can’t’ 

•         no/not – placed in front of verb rather than at the beginning of the sentence

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