THE ACQUISITION OF

LANGUAGE
Lecturer: Dr.Ekaterina Strati
Department of English Language
Faculty of Education
University of Durres, “A.Moisiu”
Lecture 1, 2nd part
 Language acquisition
ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE is one of the most
fascinating facts of
human development.

Biological predisposition to Experience with language in the

acquire language environment
 A BIOLOGICAL PREDISPOSITION FOR
LANGUAGE
• Natural development process / similar milestones

• Biologically based aspect of language

• Experience / Environmental input / External input

• Acquisition strategies: a set of acquisition strategies that enable the child to take the
input from the environment and construct a grammar that conforms to the
organizational principles of UG

• The research object: the child- a LAD or Language Acquisition Device. (a property of the
child’s brain)

• The child exposed to language through the environment, processes the input using
biologically endowed systems for language acquisition and the eventual outcome is a
grammar and a lexicon.
 The psycholinguistic theory of the
Nativist Model
• Language is rooted in human biology: a human infant will acquire that
system as its brain develops.

• The Nativist Model of acquisition relies on acquisition strategies based on

the pattern of discovery and attention to frequency.

• Children possess “preconceptions” about language acquisition with

ultimately “give them the right solutions”.

• Human biology supplies knowledge of universal principles for organizing

language and limits the way the input is processed.

• Children can take input from the environment and efficiently acquire the
language.
 Universal Grammar (UG)
• Genetic

• All languages have a similar organization of their respective grammars

into phonological, morphological and syntactic components.

• First, the child will develop a grammar consisting of phonological,

morphological and syntactic components.

• Second, those components will include the principles basic to all

languages.

• Third, the parameters specified in UG will guide the children’s discovery of

the particular characteristics of the target language. Likewise, universal
principles for lexical organization will guide the mental vocabulary as it
develops.
 Characteristics of the language in the
environment.
• Child’s linguistic environment

• Main providers of input are the people who interact with the child

• Any characteristics of the input in the environment that are identified as essential for language
development must exist in every language community in the world. However, there are cultures
in which adults rarely talk with children. (NW Brazil)

• Children to not need to be rewarded, or encouraged to imitate the language around them, or
corrected when they produce an error. However, there is no evidence that imitators acquire
language any faster than non-imitators.

• Correcting errors is important. Errors produced by children usually go unnoticed. When they are
corrected the correction does absolutely no good. (McNeill 1966) A child who says eated
instead of ate will continue saying eated no matter how many times she is corrected.

• Infant Directed Speech or Motherese: prosody /pitch

• Infant- directed speech is similar in many different cultures. (Fernald 1994)
• Short, highly grammatical and semantically simple sentences.
• Two important points, first interactive input is necessary and second interactive experience is all
that is needed.
 Developmental
stages

Before birth- From 12 to 24 Preschool Later language

12 months months years development
 Before birth-12 months
• Infants are attuned to human language form from the moment they are born.

• Even before birth , since the earliest exposure to linguistic input babies have had considerable access to
the general prosody.

• Prosody plays a central role in the baby’s discovery of many aspects of the grammar being learned.

• Janet Werker: findings regarding the phonemic discrimination abilities of babies in their first year. By
about 12 months of age infants perform like adults, discriminating only those speech sounds that are
phonemic in the language of their environment. Infants are born with the ability to acquire any language,
then experience with the language of the environment allows them to acquire their target language.

• Bilingual language acquirers set two or more phonemic inventors. Bilingual infants rely on phonemic
information that they extract from the input ( Weker and Byers-Heinlein 2008).
•
• The delay in biligual children has to do with the time it takes the bilingual baby to identify which of the
two native(and familiar) languages is being presented.

• In the first half of the first year their vocalizations are primarily soft (not at all like actual language) . In
the second half of the first year true babbling begins.

• Babbling reflects a stage of linguistic development (Petittio et al 2004). This discovery offers the biological
language acquisition. Babies acquiring sign language babble with their hands.
 From 12 to 24 months
• Between 12 and 18 months children produce their first word.
• One-word stage of language (holophrastic period): each word convey s as much meaning as an
entire phrase. e.g milk (nouns related to toys, clothes)
• Underextension (use a word for a particular thing and fail to extend it to other objects in the
same category e.g flower/rose) overextension (extend a word incorrectly to other things, e.g
doggie)
• The process of putting words together
• Vocabulary spurt (6-year-old has 8000-14000 words) (Carrey 1978)
• Fast mapping: child hears a word once and doesn’t know its meaning, use it in sentences, then
acquire meaning e.g shy (quite children, stone cat)
• Tests conducted to measure the vocabulary development (Fernson 1994 detected delays)
• Pearson 1998, bilingual children: they followed lexical development patterns that are similar to
monolingual children.
• Lexical learning principles: 1.whole object assumption (if the child does not know the name of
the horse, when we say tail the child infers that the horse is the tail) 2.mutual exclusivity
assumption, helps to acquire labels for parts of things (horse, tail, saddle) (Markman 1992) 3.
extendability, taxonomic assumption, individual words refer to categories of similar things, e.g.
dog
• verbs present a different problem (Naigles 1990) it is the structure of the sentence which affects
the child’s interpretention of the new verb presented. (e.g gorping, meaning “wave your arm” or
“push” )
 Preschool years
• Combine words into small sentences
• Syntactic principles
• Word order SVO, e.g. Mummy push; Pull Car)
• Bilingual children use code-switching strategy (e.g. rouge bird in an English
sentence, Bird rouge in a French sentence) (Paradis,2000)
• MLU (Mean Length of Utterances, index to measure language development)
correlated with age: it increases with age
• Early speech; “telegraphic speech”: e.g. Where go mom? (Absence of: tense
markers, plural markers, subjects, null subject languages)
• Features of language skills: 1. picture naming speed and 2.communicative gestures
• Bilinguals have a smaller vocabulary but in total of their two or more languages
they have a larger lexical capacity.
• First children learn –ing marker, plural –s, possessive ‘s, irregular past simple form
• Later: articles a,an, the, function words, auxiliaries, copula, third person “s” ,
regular past simple form, relative pronouns
• Overgeneralize when they learn rules such as ed enfing e.g. eated, goed
• Can’t and other negatives are learned as fixed words
• Child English is identical for all english-learning children
 Later language development
• Rapid rate of lexical learning
• Derivational morphemes (-ness, -ful, -ment)
• Interpretation of sentences
• Increased grammatical knowledge
 Discourse ability
• Ability to converse
• Brown and Yule (1983) interactional discourse
(social function) and transactional discourse
(to communicate info)
• Interpretation and use of ambiguous
pronouns (inference)
• Ability to create a narrative, tell a story
 Metalinguistic development
• Related to reading ability
• Awareness of language as an object
• Explain metaphors, figurative language
• Phonologiacal awareness: speech as a string of
phonological units
 Second language acquisition
• Bilingual acquirers – simultaneous/sequential
• The study of how people learn languages after
their first one
• Research in the process of acquiring first and
second languages (similarities and differences)
• Morphosyntactic development is similar
• Pace of acquisition is different
• The level of attainment is different
• Transfer and fossilization (Han 2009)