Language acquisition Mechanisms of language acquisition Children construct grammars Knowing more than one language Second language acquisition Mechanisms of Language acquisition Do children learn through imitation? P314 Do children learn through reinforcement? P315 Do children learn through analogy? P. 316 Do children learn through structured input? P. 318 Motherese = child directed speech=baby talk Slowly, more clearly, exaggerated intonation, grammatical sentences. Not syntactically simpler. motherese Children prefer to listen to motherese than formal adult speech. Motherese does not significantly affect the child s language development. Motherese may be useful for getting a child s attention and holding it, but it is not a driving force behind language development. Children construct grammar The innateness hypothesis p. 318 Poverty of stimulus Impoverished input Rules children construct are structure dependent (p. 320) The child extracts from the linguistics environment those rules of grammar that are language specific such as word order and movement rules. However, he does not need to learn universal principles like structure dependency. Stages in language acquisition (p. 322) From first words to virtual adult competence takes three to four years. Babbling first word sentences. Child s language conforms to a set of rules. Dr. Jenny Kuo 1
Infant speech perception (p. 323) Infants are born with the ability to discriminate the phonetic contrasts of any of the world languages. With exposure to their own language, they begin to focus on those contrasts that are relevant for that particular language and to lose the ability to perceive certain contrasts not found in their native language. High amplitude sucking The infant is given a pacifier to suck on that is connected to a sound generating system. Each suck causes a noise to be generated. Infants suck less frequently after repetition of the same noise. They suck more in response to their interest in a new and different sound. babbling At around 6 months, the infants begins to babble. The twelve most frequent consonants in the world s languages make up 95 percent of the consonants infants use in their babbling. Early babbles: CVCV eg., mama, gaga and dada holophrase First words Acquisition of phonology First words are generally monosyllabic with a CV form. Children first acquire the small set of sounds common to all languages of the world. Nasals>glides>stops>liquids> fricative>affricates Labials> velars> alveolars >palatals Phonology continues Children can perceive more comprehend many more phonological contrasts than they can produce. Children s pronunciation are physically different sounds, though they may seem the same to the adult ear. Dr. Jenny Kuo 2
Regularity in children s renditions of adult words Feature change Cluster reductions Assimilation Voicing change Place change Cluster reduction Bottle baba Water wawa Reduplication Acquisition of word meanings (p. 328) Overextension Underextension Dr. Jenny Kuo 3
Principle and strategies shape over color principle Whole object principle Syntactic bootstrapping Acquisition of morphology (p. 330) Overgeneralization errors. Broke breaked broke Apply to novel words (Wug test) Syntactic development Several weeks after the first word, children s vocabulary grow rapidly as new words are learned every day. Young children use their words in a variety of contexts, but limit their messages by speaking one word at a time. At the latter half of the 2 nd year, they begin putting words together. Syntactic development seems to take place unnoticed, with no explicit instruction. Comprehension of syntax Preferential looking paradigm Comprehension is in advance of production Cues: prosody, semantics, syntax, environmental and social context Two-word utterances Examples on p.333 novel and unique dominated by content words telegraphic speech semantic relations consistent word order Measuring syntactic growth Mean length of utterance (MLU) average length of a child s sentences scored on transcripts of spontaneous speech. Length is determined by the number of morphemes. Rules for calculating MLU Dr. Jenny Kuo 4
Acquisition of pragmatics Children are not always sensitive to the needs of their interlocutors and they may fail to establish the referents for pronouns. Younger children have difficulty with the shifting reference. (I, you) Three year olds are likely to use definite article as the indefinite article for introducing a new referent. Dr. Jenny Kuo 5