Introduction to First Language Acquisition

Introduction to First Language Acquisition

1. BEHAVIOURISM (before 1960s)

   • Skinner the best known proponent
   • child imitates, reinforced, repeats, conditioned - habit formation
   • INADEQUACIES
     • 1. uage is not merely ‘verbal behavior’. Underlying the actual behavior that we observe, there is a complex system of rules (Challenged by Noam Chomsky)
     • enable speakers to create and understand an infinite number of sentences, most of which they hav e never encountered before. This creativity would not be possible if we had to rely on individual bits of learnt behavior
     • What children learn, then, is an abstract knowledge of rules (or ‘competence’). However, this is not what they are exposed to: they are exposed only to people’s speech (‘performance’).
     • eplanation becomes even less feasible if we consider that the rules are often reflected very indirectly in the actual surface structure of speech (compared to deep structure)
     • though children are exposed to different actual speech, they arrive at the same underlying rules as other children in their community - his means that the child’s language is not simply being shaped by external forces: it is being creatively constructed by the child as he interacts with those around him.

2. INNATE LANGUAGE-LEARNING CAPACITY?

   • Language Acquisition Device’ (often shortened to LAD)
   • It gives children a means of processing the speech in the environment so that they can construct its underlying system
   • To enable it to operate so quickly, it may already contain some of the ‘universal’ features which are found in all known languages, such as the use of word order to signal meaning or basic grammatical relationships like that between subject and object
   • Language acquisition in terms of cognitive capacity
     • or example, their ability to discover the relationship between subject and object in grammar may originate in their more general ability to perceive the world in terms of the agents and objects of actions

3. GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT

   • 1. Telegraphic speech
     • because it lacks inflections and many of the small ‘function words’, such as articles or prepositions.
     • lois Bloom (1970) - Focus on the meanings of two nouns e.g. descriptions, conjunction etc.
   • Similarly, Dan Slobin (1979) looked at the communicative functions performed by two -word utterances
   • Michael Halliday (1975) looked at the instumental function, next the regulatory function (control ppls behaviour)
   • 2. Dev of inflections and function words
     • Roger Brown (1973) and dev of morphemes e.g. preposition, possession etc.
     • frequency does not correlate with the order of acquisition, which therefore cannot be explained in simple habit-formation terms. This is further evidence, then that the child is an active contributor to the acquisition process.
   • 3. DEV OF TRANSFORMATIONS - to produce more compelx utterances
     • negatives, interrogatives etc
     • there is also evidence from later stages of an intimate relationship between cognitive and linguistic development. For example, Richard Cromer (1974) found that the English perfect tense (he has walked) was not used before the age of four and a half, despite the fact that the form is frequent in parents’ speech and consists only of simple elements which were well within the children’s capacity