FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQISITION

DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES

Opinions on whether L2 acquisition is similar to or different from L1

acquisition differ. Some researchers argue that L1 and L2 acquisition are

similar. Dulay and Burt (1972) for instance, maintain that errors made by

children learning a second language are similar to those that children make in

learning their native language. These errors typically involve syntactic

simplification, rule overgeneralization, and the reduction of syntactic

redundancies. These errors are explained more readily in terms of

developmental errors characteristic of L1 acquisition than in terms of

interference from the learner’s mother-tongue. The overgeneralization of regular

past tense endings on irregular verbs in English is a common error in both

children and adults and it provides a clear example of this process of syntactic

reduction. Cook (1973) also claimed that foreign adults repeated sentences in

similar ways to native children and that they followed the same stages in

learning certain deep structures as native children. Other researchers think that

the process of L2 acquisition is altogether different from the child’s language

development in the mother-tongue. Politzer (1974) for example, used a

developmental scoring test to show that the syntactic structures of foreign

children did not develop in the same way as this of native children. Dulay and
Burt (1974a) found that children acquired functions in a different order when

they were learning English as a second language and as a first language.

Behaviorists and mentalist views have influenced the direction which second

language learning and teaching has taken. This influence is reflected in what

Carroll (1966) has termed the audio-lingual habit theory and the cognitive code

learning theory, reflecting behaviouristic and mentalistic views respectively. But

it should be pointed out that although second language teaching methods have

been influenced by theoretical hypotheses put forward primarily to explain first

language acquisition this does not necessarily mean that the processes involved

in formal second language acquisition are similar to those involved in the

acquisition of a first language. This paper deals with the differences and

similarities between these two processes.

Differences

A first critical difference that confronts the investigator can be found in the

circumstances in which L1 and L2 acquisition take place. Native children and

L2 learners usually find themselves in vastly different situations. Native children

acquire their first language informally, whereas most L2 learners acquire a

second language formally in a structured teaching situation. Children learn in

direct and immediate situational context, but with L2 learners it is rarely

possible in a classroom situation to relate utterances to a real communicative

purpose. It has been suggested by Lane (1962:2) that “second language learning


is what we make it, whereas first language learning is rarely planned or

controlled”. First language acquisition has often been regarded as natural

language learning situation in the sense that the strategies are determined by the

learner, not by the teacher.

One of the major advantages of L1 learner over the adult L2 learner is that

the L1 environment setting is much richer in many respects than that of the L2

setting in a formal situation. The question which arises here is this: If by any

chance the L2 environmental setting could be manipulated in such a way as to

resemble to a certain extent that of L1, would the adult L2 learner prove to be as

efficient a learner as the L1 learner? Macnamara (1973:63) goes so far as to

claim that “we cannot prove that adults are less skilled in language learning

unless we give them opportunities equal to those of the child to learn a

language”. Since, as he says, no such experiment can be carried out, “for that

reason there are almost no grounds for the general fatalism about adults’ ability

to learn languages.”

A second difference is in the amount of time available for the child to learn

his mother-tongue and the second language learner to learn a second language.

The child normally has at his disposal all the waking hours he needs to master

his mother-tongue. During that time he can experiment with new sounds, and try

out novel structural patterns at his leisure. He constantly hears models of the

type of speech he needs to learn and can usually afford to listen or not as he


pleases. But the second language learner must learn his second language largely

at school, within the brief hours set aside in the timetable for teaching it. The

total time available varies considerably from school system to school system.

Ingram (1975:286) points out in this respect that

A typical second language learner is exposed to the target language

from four to six hours a week during the school term. This cannot begin
to approximate the amount of exposure experienced, all his waking
hours, by a child learning his first language.

It has therefore been suggested by Kennedy (1973:75) that “The second

language learner is typically a part-time learner”. But Newmark and Reibel

(1968:155) maintain that the argument that the child has much more time to

learn the language “is difficult to evaluate, since we do not have reliable

information about how much time the child actually does spend in learning a

language”. They insist that it is not the time spent that gives a child an advantage

over the adult, but his opportunity to put his knowledge to practical use.

Moreover, there is also the question whether the adult might not gain as much

from his ability to focus his attention over a period of time as the child gains

from longer, but less concentrated contact with the language. So it is not just the

amount of time per se which may be critical, but rather how the time is spent.

A third difference derives from the fact that the student learning a second

language begins with a highly articulate verbal repertory. It has been suggested

that the child offers a tabula rasa for language learning, whereas the adult’s


native language will interfere with his acquisition of a second language. Cook

(1977) has explained this difference in terms of the distinction between learning

language and learning a language. The child acquiring his first language has to

find out what language itself is, but the second language learner already knows

the potential of language and can go straight on to discovering how that

potential is realized in the second language. Cook (1977:2) points out here that:

Partly this gives the second language learner an advantage since he is

already aware of what language is. Partly however, it puts him at a disadvantage
since he may not be aware which parts of his knowledge are about ‘language’
and which are about ‘a language’.

This means that the second language learner may assume that all languages

are the same in general terms as well as in specific details. Thus interference

will arise.

A fourth difference between first and second language acquisition can be

related to the age of the learner. Second language learners, except in the case of

child bilingualism, are older than first language learners. The child’s brain is

different from the adult’s. Whereas the child seems to develop simultaneously in

language and cognition, the adult has already developed a sophisticated

cognitive capacity.

The popular notion that younger language learners have the best chances of

being successful is largely due to the controversial critical period theory in L1

acquisition. The idea of a critical period is actually based on studies of animal


behavior and was extended to language learning by Lenneberg (1967) among

others. Proponents of the theory maintain that there is a period during which

language learning must take place and after which a language can never be

learned in quite the same way. They cite, as evidence of a critical period for L1

learning, cases of both related children who cease their linguistic development at

puberty and children with brain damage, who recover better than adults, and

who are able to transfer the language function from one hemisphere of the brain

to the other in the event that one is damaged or removed before puberty. Thus

for Lennerberg, the idea of a critical period for L1 acquisition seems tied to the

idea that lateralization takes place in the brain at around puberty, after which

language acquisition is both different and more difficult. Lennerberg (1967:158)

thus argues that:

After puberty, the ability for self-organization and adjustment to the

physiological demands of verbal behavior quickly declines. The brain
behaves as if it had become set in its ways and primary basic language
skills not acquired by that time, except for articulation, usually remain
deficient for life.

The critical period hypothesis raises more questions than it answers. By

suggesting that once language functions become lateralized, further acquisition

is improbable, the critical period hypothesis does not specify the nature of

lateralization and whether it is a genetic predisposition or is the effect of

psychological mechanisms, environmental situations, or an overlapping

influence of all these factors taken together. Macnamara (1973:63) does not


support the concept of the critical period hypothesis which postulates that due to

the neurological development, the adolescent or the adult starts to lose the

ability to acquire a second language in a natural child-like way through much

exposure to it, without actual formal instruction. He questions the value of its

belief that language learning devices atrophies rather early in life, stating the

matter clearly that “the value of this evidence is dubious, to say the least”. Apart

from the phonological difficulties of adults which, he says, should not be

overemphasized, he finds that “there is no evidence that after adolescence one

cannot learn a language as rapidly and as well as a small child”. (Macnamara,

1973:64).

Carroll (1973) is rather cautious in his view about the critical period

hypothesis, for he talks about what he calls the language aptitude, the major

components of which are: (i) phonetic coding ability (identification and storage

of sounds); (ii) grammatical sensitivity, and (iii) inductive ability. On such

grounds, Carroll (1973:6) states that

Persons with high foreign language aptitude at puberty or beyond are

those who have for some reason lost little of the language acquisition
ability with which they are natively endowed, whereas those with poor
foreign language aptitude are those who have lost most of this innate
ability.

While recognizing certain broad similarities between the two processes in the

sense that both require the capacity to remember and produce sounds, and to

acquire and apply grammatical rules, by whatever process, Carroll considers the


learning of L2 after the critical period to be a vary different process from the

acquisition of the first language. Carroll (1973:6), therefore proposes a

somewhat modified theory of language acquisition that would apply to both

native and second languages, namely that

While there may be a ‘critical period’ in the early stages of life,

during which the individual has a heightened capacity to learn any
language (be it native or foreign), there are individual differences in the
degree to which this capacity declines, and that these individual
differences are, in effect, differences in foreign language aptitude.

Carroll recognizes that this position is speculative and calls for more

longitudinal studies to confirm it.

Lamendella (1977) believes that it is unreasonable to attempt to extrapolate

the critical period for primary language acquisition to non-primary language

acquisition. Although Lennerberg (1967) has made the claim that adults do not

have the same potential as children for learning foreign languages, he has not

presented neuropathlogical evidence for the loss with age of some abstract

language learning ability that would entail the loss of a capacity to learn second

languages. The neuropathlogical evidence cited relates only to the capacity for

primary language acquisition, and most of it relates only to the disruption of

already acquired language functions. Lamendella (1977:175) therefore argues

that

Since no structural atrophy of neural systems had taken place in the

language systems of normal adults, and, since many adults clearly can


 reach high levels of second language competence, it is not legitimate to
talk about a critical period in this context.

Corder (1973:115) is also of the opinion that “if we have acquired language,

i.e. already possess verbal behavior, then there does not seem to be any

psychological impediment to the learning of a second language”. While they

recognize that the adult does not usually acquire the second language as

perfectly as a child acquires his first, Newmark and Reibel (1968:155) argues

that the differences in degree of skill is no argument for the adult and the child

being qualitatively different kinds of learners. They, therefore, submit that “the

same language learning capability exists in both child and adult, quite possibly

in different degrees”.

Cook (1973) thinks that the chief problem in comparing language acquisition

in native children and foreign adults lies in the differences between children and

adults that are not a question of language. The adult is mature in many other

aspects than language. So one can anticipate finding differences between

children and adults that reflect the adult’s superior stage of general mental

development rather than different processes of language learning. This raises the

question of what differences this cognitive advantage makes to the L2 learner.

Ausubel et al (1978:75) find that children's cognitive immaturity and lack of

certain intellectual skills preclude many approaches that are feasible for older

age groups, and that highly significant changes in cognitive readiness take place


as a result of the learner’s mastery of his native language. Having already

mastered the basic vocabulary and syntactic code of one language, the L2 adult

learner is more capable of comprehending and applying formally stated

syntactical propositions. He therefore, approaches the L2 with the mechanism of

an L1 system already fixed in his mind.

In the case of the L1 learner the development of language and that of the

cognitive capacities in general are interrelated and closely overlapped. For

reasons of incomplete cognitive maturation, children face certain difficulties in

their understanding and acquisition of some kinds of linguistic devices. For

example, some researchers (quoted in Kennedy 1973:69) have shown that

children as late as nine years of age find it more difficult to process sentences in

which the logical actor-acted upon relationship does not coincide with subject-

object relationship (passive rather than active sentences). Similarly, Kennedy

(1973:69) points out that “comprehension of the linguistic devices used for

comparing quantities has been shown to be significantly affected by the

conceptual categories of equality, superiority and inferiority”.

Generally speaking, Ausubel et al. (1978:251) find that adults have a

tremendous advantage over children in learning, because

They are able to draw on various transferable elements of their overall

ability to function at the abstract level of logical operations. Hence, in their
initial contact with a new discipline, they are able to move through the concrete-
intuitive phase of intellectual functioning very rapidly.


 While this is regarded as an asset by a number of investigators because it can

facilitate easy assimilation of rules and structure, it is at the same time believed

to be a hindrance to the automatization process which is as significant in

language learning as that of the reasoning process. James (1977:15) for example,

believes that the cognitive maturity of the adult L2 learner while it can facilitate

easy assimilation of particular structures and rules; it creates on the other hand,

an even greater discrepancy between knowledge and the ability to use it. This

means that automatization which requires a particular time factor may therefore,

lag behind.

A fifth difference between the acquisition of a first language and a second

language pertains to the question of motivation and attitude of the L1 and the L2

learner. It is believed that the child is much more strongly motivated to learn his

first language than the adult is to learn a second language. Motivation and the

desire to identify with a cultural group seem to contribute to the uniform success

of children in learning their native language. The child’s most basic drives urge

him to communicate. His very existence depends on his ability to make his

needs known in some way to those upon whom he is utterly dependant. The use

of the first language therefore, goes hand in hand with the child’s needs and

interests. The parallel between this and the situation in which the L2 learner

finds himself is limited. The learner does not need the language in order to

regulate his behavior and his mental processes or to organize his perception.


When he comes to learn a new language his modes of behavior are already set in

the ways that are appropriate to his first language culture. Because the L2

learner already possesses a human language, he may have a much less urgent

motivation to communicate. In other words, while he may need a second

language for a particular educational or vocational purpose, he can still use his

first language to communicate with family and friends if necessary. Lack of

motivation in L2 learner may result from negative attitudes towards the target

language and its culture. Prator (1969:101) illustrates such attitudes towards the

second language by saying that

Instead of being a tool for the satisfaction of immediate needs, it may

seem more like a questionable superfluity. It may be associated with
unsympathetic foreigners or an objectionable social group rather than with the
learner’s family, peers, and favorite people.

So absence of motivation and positive attitudes towards the target language

may prevent the L2 learner from acquiring a native speaker competence. The

evidence provided by Gardner and Lambert (1972), and Nida (1971) indicates

not only that positive affective variables may be necessary to acquire native

speaker competence, but also that they function independently of aptitude and

intelligence.

In discussing the relationship of affective factors to L2 acquisition,

Schumann (1978:107) maintains that in children empathy, motivation and

attitudes “are generally favorably tuned or at least sufficiently neutral so that


when exposed to the target language, the child’s cognitive process will function

to produce language learning”. In adults, however, the development of firm ego

boundaries, attitudes and motivational orientations which are concomitant with

social and psychological distance from the TL group such that the cognitive

processes may be blocked or at least inhibited from operating on the target

language data to which the adult learner is exposed. But when the learner has

empathic capacity and motivation and attitudes which are favorable both to the

target language community and to language learning itself, the psychological

distance between the learner and the target language group will be minimal and

the learner’s cognitive processes will automatically function to produce

language acquisition.

In view of the above affective differences between children and adults, it

seems likely that affective psychological variables may constitute the major

reason why adults are not always as successful as children in language

acquisition.

Similarities

The above discussion has listed a number of features in which the

circumstances of first and second language acquisition are different. But this

does not necessarily mean that the actual processes of acquisition are different.

Corder (1973:113) points out in this respect that


 The processes of relearning sometimes are not necessarily different
from the original learning process, and indeed, inasmuch as the child’s
grammar is constantly changing and developing, he could be regarded
as in a constant process of relearning.

The discussion that follows will deal with some of the arguments that have

been put forward for taking first and second language acquisition to be similar

processes.

Researchers who argue that L2 acquisition is similar to L1 acquisition claim

that L2 learners actively organize the L2 speech they hear and make

generalizations about its structure as children acquiring their first language do.

This claim is supported by studies designed to compare aspects of L2

development with native language acquisition. Ravem (1974:154) for example,

studied the development of wh-queations in first and second language learners

and found that “the similarities are quite striking and not necessarily what one

would expect”. It is also supported by studies of error analyses which have

shown that L2 learners’ errors are similar to those that children make in learning

their mother-tongue. Richards (1973:97) for example, refers to this kind of error

as intraligual and developmental errors and points out that “they may occur with

children acquiring English as a mother-tongue”. These errors reflect the

learner’s competence at a particular stage and illustrate some of the general

characteristics of language acquisition. Jain (1974:191) points out that

generalizations of several inflections based on a fairly high degree of regularity


in the surface structure of English are common both for foreign learners and

native children. He maintains in this respect that "In any learning situation from

that of a child learning his native language to that of an adult learning a second

language the strategy to reduce speech to a simpler system seems to be

employed by every learner."

In looking at second language development in children, Dulay snd Burt

(1974b) postulate that the language learner possesses a specific type of innate

mental organization which causes him to use a limited class of processing to

produce utterances in a language, and that language learning proceeds by the

learner’s exercise of these processing strategies in the form of linguistic rules

which he gradually adjusts as he organized more and more of the particular

language he hears. Dulay and Burt show from recent research that children’s

approximative systems in L2 learning demonstrate these propositions and that

their errors follow the developmental sequence of first language development.

Cook (1973:21) performed an experiment in which he compared the

imitation and comprehension of relative clauses by native children and foreign

adults. He found that his results did not confirm the belief that foreign adults

would approach a second language in a way fundamentally different from native

children:

So far as the imitations were concerned, adults made much the same kind of
alternations as the children. Indeed it was surprising to find that many of the
mistakes one had long accepted as typically foreign were also made by the


children-one such example is the omission of ‘s from the third person
singular form of the verb.

In another experiment, Cook (1973:26) compared the comprehension of

sentences such as “the suck is happy to bite” and “the duck is hard to bite”. He

found similarities in the ways that native children and foreign adults perceived

the structure of these sentences, and concluded that both learners

Start with the strategy that the surface structure subject is the
subject of the deep structure; both go on to a period in which they
interpret and surface structure on a hit-or-miss basis; both finally enter a
period when they are fully aware of deep and surface structure.

Cook reaches the general conclusion that second language acquisition is like

first language acquisition to the extent that mental processes other than those

involving language are not concerned. Any differences that may exist between

native children and foreign adults can be explained in terms of the adult’s

increased memory span and the by products of teaching rather than in terms of

different processes of language acquisition. Taylor (1974:23) stresses this point

of view and argues that the differences which exist between first and second

language learners are more quantitative than qualitative. He furthermore,

suggests that these differences "Can be discovered by a shift of attention from

the cognitive domain to the affective domain and to the psychological variables

of attitude, motivation, and permeability of ego boundaries."


 Accordingly, the second language learner’s previous linguistic experience

and advanced cognitive maturity affect the language acquisition process only in

a quantitative way. From a qualitative point of view, however, the fact that both

first and second language learners appear to use many of the same kinds of

learning strategies as evidenced by the similarities in the kinds of errors that

they make, indicates that, at a process level, first and second language learning

seem to be identical.

From the study of the linguistic forms of both L1 and L2 learners, it has now

been realized that both of them follow more or less a similar course of

development. This similarity manifests itself in the operation of certain

cognitive capacities of the two types of learner in the direction of seeking out the

most economical path in their complex task of learning the grammatical and the

speaking rules of the language concerned. The economical procedure which is

used as a strategy for recognizing sentences in terms of a finite set of rules is

explained by Corder (1973:119) as

Taking up the least possible ‘mental’ storage space. This means

that we must use ‘rules’ rather than lists. In other words, we do not
match the incoming data against some infinitely set of object-
hypotheses, but rather match the rules which could produce the data
against some learned set of rules.

The interplay of the language complexity factor, the learning complexity

factor, and the extra-linguistic factor, however, leads to another strategy of a

different kind, i.e. both the L1 and L2 learners, after constructing their own


grammar, tend to stretch the application of the limited number of rules which

they have acquired to do the maximum amount of work. Both the child and the

adult, at the initial stage of linguistic development at least, show this tendency of

extending the range of application of certain rules, increasing in this way their

generality.

Both processes have been described by Corder (1978:7) as “movements

along a developmental continuum”. This description is based on the belief that

the sequence of development whereby both learners move towards mastering the

basic rules of the language concerned shows common developmental patterns.

Kennedy (1973:71) points out that “instead of viewing the child’s utterances as

abbreviated adult utterances plus errors, psychologists now tend to approach the

child’s language as a system in its own right”. By regarding the child’s

competence at a given age as a self-contained internally consistent system not

dependant on the full adult system, the ides of interim grammars has emerged.

The child is believed to make a series of hypotheses about the structure of the

language which he tests and abandons or preserves. The last hypothesis is the

final adult grammar of competence in the language. In some way, a second

language learner is believed to possess a set of cognitive structures acquired by

data-processing hypothesis formation in which the making of errors is evidence

of the learning process itself which has now been regarded as not only inevitable

but necessary. Corder (1967:167) maintains in this context that “the making of


errors then is a strategy employed both by children acquiring their mother-

tongue and by those learning a second language”. The L2 learner is, therefore,

seen as constructing for himself a grammar of the target language on the basis of

the linguistic data to which he is expected and the help he receives from

teaching.

CONCLUSION

On the basis of the above discussion, it can be concluded that although the

language acquisition capacity per se may be viewed as an innate capability

shared by first and second language learners, the rate at which both first and

second languages are acquired and the effectiveness with which the two

languages are used are affected by individual differences both from the point of

view of internal and external factors, i.e. variations in general intelligence, in

personalities, in motivation and physical health on the one hand and in

experiences derived from the environment and social setting on the other.


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