Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition

General Language acquisition Language learning First language (L1) learning instead of Second language (L2) or Foreign language learning 2

Innateness Language learning is gifted Nobody is taught language. Before children can add 2+2 they learn a grammar of a language You can t prevent the child from learning it. (Chomsky 1994) The capacity to learn language is deeply ingrained in us as a species, just as the capacity to walk, to grasp objects, to recognize faces. (Slobin 1994) 3

In learning a language What a child does not do: Storing all the words and all the sentences in the mental dictionary The number of words is finite The number of sentences is infinite What a child does: Constructing the rules themselves from very noisy data 4

5 Mechanisms of Language Acquisition Based on behaviorism Focusing on people s behaviors which are directly observable Language verbal behavior Children learn through Imitation, Reinforcement, and Analogy.

6 Imitation Children just listen to what is said around them and imitate the speech they hear. However: Children produce utterances they never hear holded, tooths, two foot, a my pencil see more on P.344 Children unable to speak for neurological or physiological reasons learn the language spoken to them and understand it. When they overcome their speech impairment, they immediately use the language for speaking.

7 Reinforcement Children learn through positive/negative reinforcement Correction of bad grammar and reward for good grammar However: Reinforcement seldom occurs, and when it does, it s usually for correcting pronunciation or incorrect reporting of facts. (Brown 1973) examples) (see more on P.345) Her curl my hair uncorrected Walt Disney comes on Tuesday corrected

8 Analogy Learning by hearing a sentence and using it as a sample to form other sentences example hearing) I painted a red barn analogy) I painted a blue barn However, consider false analogy example) also hearing) I painted a barn red analogy) two words switching possible application) * I saw a barn red But this sentence is not produced. Connectionism

9 Structured Input Learning through simplified language eg) motherese, child directed speech (CDS), babytalk However: Motherese is not syntactically simpler. examples question) Do you want your juice now? embedded) Mommy thinks you should sleep now. imperative) Pat the dogs gently. negative tag Q) We don t want to hurt him, do we?

Therefore Analogy, imitation, and reinforcement cannot account for language development. These are based on the assumption that what the child acquires Is a set of sentences of forms rather than a set of grammatical rules. Structured input theory also places too much emphasis on the environment 10

Rules & Grammar Theory Language learning is not really something that the child does; it is something that happens to the child placed in an appropriate environment. (Chomsky 1988) Language acquisition is a creative process; they must extract rules of the grammar from the language they hear around them. Innateness Hypothesis 11

Innateness Hypothesis We end up knowing far more about language than is exemplified in the language we hear around us Poverty of the stimulus An answer to the logical problem of language acquisition by Chomsky: What accounts for the ease, rapidity, and uniformity of language acquisition in the face of impoverished data? easy: they need not be taught. rapid: major part of grammar learned at around 3. uniform: children of all languages go through the same stages. Impoverished data: the language they heard is incomplete, noisy & unstructured. 12

(cntd.) Example of impoverished data The rules children construct are structure dependent (1) *Is the boy who sleeping is dreaming of a new car (2) Is the boy who is sleeping dreaming of a new car. They do not produce questions by moving the 1 st auxiliary as in (1). Instead, they correctly invert the auxiliary of the main clause, as in (2) 13

14 Stages in Language Acquisition Linguistic competence develops by stages Language acquisition is fast but not instantaneous Those stages are universal In different languages In spoken languages or in sign languages Scientific studies of child language acquisition earlier: diaries kept by parents recent: various techniques

15 Stages (cntd.) Stages First Sounds Babbling stage First words The two-word stage Telegraphic stage Infinity

The First Sounds Newborn ~ 6 months Prelinguistics stage: earliest cries, whimpers, of newborn, or neonate The sounds produced are noises involuntary responses to stimuli eg) hunger, discomfort 16

17 (cntd.) Infants are highly sensitive to certain subtle distinctions in their environment Newborn infants respond to phonetic contrasts Sucking rate experiment [pa] [pa] [pa] [pa] [ba] They can learn contrasts of any language Japanese(Korean) children distinguish between [r] & [l] But they don t respond to sounds that never signal phonemic contrasts Eg) intermediate sounds between [pa] & [ba] They ignore non-linguistic aspects Eg) gender differences

(cntd.) Children can learn any human language natural ability After 6 months, they begin to lose the ability Eg) Japanese infants no longer can distinguish bet [r] & [l] They begin to lern the sounds of the language of their parents 18

19 Babbling Around 6 months old Learn to distinguish bet right & wrong sounds of their language Is this stage necessary? Earlier: not required for lg. acq. Recently: the earliest stage in lg. acq. Babbling is not linguistic chaos The 12 most frequent consonants in the world s languages make up 95 % of the consonants of babbling Earlier babbles: repeated Cs and Vs sequences Eg) mama, gaga, dada Deaf infants produce babbling sounds different from babbling sounds produced by hearing children.

20 First Words Sometime after 1 year Begin to use the same string of sounds repeatedly to mean the same thing Realize that sounds are related to meanings Discover where one word begins and another word ends Produce their 1 st true words

Reviving Sonus 21 (cntd.) Called holophrastic stage One-word utterances convey a more complex message. Eg) Say down to mean put down the toy has fallen down from the shelf Developing use of language for social purposes Naming function and meaning extension Cheerios can mean The box of cereal in front of him Asking for some Cheerios They use universal sounds first [b, m, d, k] [a]

Reviving Sonus 22 Two words Around 2 years old Begin to put two words together Two-word sentences Acquisition of syntax begins Examples Byebye boat, allgone sticky, sweater chair, (see p.364) Grammatical characteristics No grammatical inflections Rare use of pronouns (except me ) Ambiguity Eg) Mommy Sock to mean A. subj+obj relation: mom is putting the sock on the child B. possessive: Mommy s sock

23 From telegraph to infinity No 3-word sentence stage Mean Length of Utterances (MLU) Frequently used for comparing children s progress Biological age is not indicative anymore, as it varies Eg) Grammatical acquisition stage MLU 2.3-3.5 morphemes length Characteristics of telegraphic speech Function words/morphemes missing Sounds as if reading a Western Union message

24 Development of Grammar (Linguistic Knowledge) Acquisition of phonology Acquisition of word meaning Acquisition of morphology Acquisition of syntax Acquisition of pragmatics

Acquisition of phonology Children first acquire the small set of sounds common to all languages of the world Eg) [p, s, b, m, d, k] but not [ ] Order of acquisition Manner: nasals>glides>stops>liquids>fricatives>affricates Place: labials>velars>alveolars>palatals Voicing In early stages children may not distinguish voicing of consonants If they distinguish bet p/b, they also distinguish others like t/d, s/z 25

26 (cntd.) Errors are rule governed, not random Children perceive or comprehend many more phonological contrasts than they can produce Eg) they hear light[lait] although they say yight[jait]

27 Acquisition of Word Meaning Children learn approximately 14 words a day until 6 years old 5000 words/year Frequent meaning extension Eg) Up (get up), dog (animals), papa (all men) Syntactic bootstrapping Syntax helps the child acquire meaning A child shown a picture of a funny animal jumping up and down hearing see the blicking or see the blick Will jump up and down when asked to show a blicking Will point to the funny animal when asked to show a blick

28 Acquisition of Morphology Morphological errors in morphology: another evidence of rules Eg) overgeneralization: bringed, goed, singed, foots, sheeps Later they learn exceptions to the rules Plural formation experiments (Berko- Gleason 1958) Children applied the regular plural-formation rule to words never heard before a wug two wugs

Acquisition of Syntax In the holophrastic stage, children have knowledge of some syntactic rules. 17-month-old children distinguish between Ernie is tickling Bert and Bert is tickling Age 2;0 Ernie. relying on word order rules (syntax) Begin to put words together Age 3;0 consistent use of function morphemes complex sentence structures such as coordinated sentences and embedded sentences of various kinds 29

Acquisition of Pragmatics Pragmatic aspects (knowing contexts) are acquired relatively late Wrong use of pronouns (3 or 4-yr-olds) He hit me when mommy doesn t know who he is. Difficulty in shifting reference You want to take a walk meaning I Wrong use of articles Use of the definite article as the indefinite article for introducing a new referent They assume that his listener knows who he is talking about 30

31 Parameter Setting Two aspects of Language principles: language universal components parameters: language particular components Examples Head parameter (order of VP) VO in English / OV in Korean Verb movement Moving Verb in Dutch & Italian but moving Aux in English Parameters are set early in development and cannot be undone

Knowing more than one Language Second language (L2) acquisition The acquisition of a second language by someone who (child or adult) has already acquired a first language Bilingual language acquisition The simultaneous acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy (before the age of 3 years) 32

Bilingualism Bilingual children sometimes mix the two languages in the same sentences Eg) English words & French syntax His nose is perdu (His noise is lost) A house pink (A pink house) That s to me (That s mine) Some amount of language mixing Is a normal part of the early bilingual acquisition process, and not necessarily an indication of any language problem. 33

34 Theories of Bilingual Development Unitary system hypothesis A bilingual child initially constructs only one lexicon and one grammar Evidence: mixing of words However, there is enough overlap of vocabulary Separate systems hypothesis A bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language Evidence using different word order for each language, Setting up two distinct sets of phonemes and phonological rules

35 Second Language Acquisition Fundamental difference hypothesis L2 acquisition is something different from L1 acquisition 9 differences

36 (cntd.) Interlanguage grammars The intermediate grammars that L2ers creat on their way to the target Native language influence in L2 acq. Transfer of grammatical rules Example) Korean L2ers confusion of [l] and [r] French L2ers confusion of [z] and German L2ers saying [haf] for have English L2ers confusion of Italian ano and anno

Critical period for L2 acquisition? Age is an important factor in achieving nativelike L2 competence Sensitive period instead of critical period There is a gradual decline in L2 acquisition abilities with age The sensitive period for phonology is the shortest To achieve nativelike pronunciation of an L2 generally requires exposure during childhood. Other aspects of languages, such as syntax, may have a larger window. 37

L2 teaching methods Grammar-translation Students memorize words, inflected words, syntactic rules, and use them to translate from L1 to L2 and vice versa Direct method Simulating L1 acquisition Abandoning memorization L1 is never used in class Comparison & difference is not discussed Audio-lingual method Based on imitation, repetition & reinforcement Combination of many methods is required 38

Reviving Sonus 39 Can Chimps Learn Human Language? Recently, much effort has been expended to determine whether nonhuman primates can learn human language. Limitations Highly stereotyped limited number of messages Vocabularies occur primarily as emotional responses to particular situations It is still controversial whether they have the capacity to acquire complex linguistic systems similar to human language