LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

1. 1. COGNITIVE THEORY-- JEAN PIAGET

   • A child first becomes aware of a concept, such as relative size, and only afterward do they acquire the words and patterns to convey the concept.
   • simple ideas are expressed earlier than more complex ones even if they are grammatically more complicated.
   • Piaget's theory helps explain the order in which certain aspects of language are acquired.
   • Bees develop the cognitive ability to respond to many shades of color , but bees never develop any communication signals based on shades of color.

2. 2. IMITATION AND POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT.

   • Children learn by imitating and repeating what they hear.
   • Children do imitate adults. Repetition of new words and phrases is a basis feature of children's speech.
   • Children often make grammatical mistakes that they couldn't possibly have heard.
   • Children do not respond to or produce metalanguage until 3 or 4.

3. 3. innateness of certain linguistic features.

   • . Children are born with an innate capacity for learning human language.
   • Children discover the grammar of their language based on their own inborn grammar.
   • Every language is extremely complex. Nevertheless, children master their native language in 5 or 6 years regardless of their other talents and general intellectual ability.
   • Chomsky originally believes that the LAD is a series of syntactic universals, structural properties univerally found in all languages.
   • . Children thus generate sentences based on learned words and innate syntactic patterns.
   • Today Chomsky believes that the universal properties are constraints, rules that dictate what cannot be in any language rather than structures which are universal.
   • The problem with the theory of innateness, then, is not in deciding whether the theory is correct, to learn language is certainly innate
   • Chomsky maintains that children couldn't simply figure out language structure by repetition and analogy because the language they hear is highly irregular.
   • language spoken around child is not as full of random errors, not as fragmented or randomly pidginized as one might believe.
   • Pragmatic features: sentences are shorter, speed slower, clarificational features than in speech between adults, more questions
   • Grammatical elements found in motherese are even more diverse:expressive element (intonation), lip rounding (Latvian palatalizes consonants), reduplication: choo-choo, use of special words,
   • morphemes often are used in speech between adults to make hypochoristics
   • There is also a social register called fatherese.
   • Older children and neighbors also talk to infants and very small children using special baby talk.
   • social registers that developed from the need to speak to small children have developed into forms that are specific to each language.

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