Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition

1. Stages in Language Acquisition

   • Pre-linguistic communication
     • Turn taking - at 3 months. Vocalization initiated by the baby in a call and responce tactic.
     • Joint attention - ability to follow anothe eye's gaze.
     • Babbling 0 becomes systematic and has phonological features by 6 months.
   • The single-word speaker - 12-24 mnths
     • Initially children make errors in mapping a word to its meaning (underextensions, overextensions, mismatches).
     • Holophrases - single word indicates entire proposition
   • Telegraphic Speech - 18-30 mnths
     • Cildren use 2-3-word sentences, leaving out words (correct order but leaves function words)
   • Further Grammatical Development - 2-4 yrs
     • appearance of grammatical morphemes
     • Over-regularization
     • 3 yrs - use relative clauses.
   • Stages are UNIVERSAL!

2. Environmental and Biological Contributions

   • Goldin-Meadow & Mylander (1998)
     • Studied looked at 10 home signers ( who were not exposed to sign or spoken language at home) between the age of 1 and 4 and at the sequences of their gestures over a few years.
       • Sign sequences were analyzed and compared to native language speakers. A lot of parallels were found.
         • Home signers predicates show the same number of arguments - reveal a degree of linguistic competence.
       • Children intrinsically understood syntax and sequence systems.
       • By the age of 2 gestures begin to be combined into sequence of gestures which are systematic.
       • 1st year - first word/sign; 2nd year - rudimentary sentences; 2 1/2 - 3rd year - elaborations.
     • Who is creating the language?
       • Looked at homesigners from different cultures.
       • Children were producing more complex sentences than their mothers
         • There's a LINGUISTIC DRIVE in children.
   • Senghas & Cappola (2002) - Creolisation - Nicaraguan Sign Language
     • Creolization - emergent language that develops in a culture of different language; nativisation of a pidgin.
     • Spanish oral school created for deaf children - '77-'83. By '86 signed pidgin emerged within this community. There was little contact with other sign systems, so children created the language.
       • Age mattered - younger learners were more fluent
       • Input mattered - those who learned the more mature language were more fluent.
   • Skinner vs. Chomsky - exposure vs. genetic heredity.
   • When language is chaotic, children structure it. When it's absent, they create it.
     • Humans have a LINGUISTIC NATURE that rescues learners from inadequacies in the environment.

3. Lenneberg's Milestones

   • 4 Criteria:
     • 1. Regular sequence of milestones correlated with age and developments in other domains.
     • 2. Environment remains stable over time.
     • 3. Behavior emerges (in part) before it is useful
     • 4. Early stages not signs of goal-directed practice.
   • There's a correlation between motor and language development, but no causation. (e.g. Down's syndrome)
     • Motor disorders don't affect language.
   • There's little environmental influence on language milestones (S-shaped curve).
     • No effect of birth order, social-economic status, deaf parents etc.
   • Lennenberg (1967) hypothesized that human language acquisition was an example of biologically constrained learning, and that it was normally acquired during a critical period, beginning early in life and ending at puberty.
     • The critical period for language acquisition ended with the establishment of cortical lateralization of function, as the brain reached its mature organization in late puberty

4. Chomsky 'Universal Grammar': The theory that we are born with an innate knowledge of syntactical structure and grammar rules, that language acquisition is predominantly nature, but input is needed

5. Critical Periods

   • Sparrow & Song Learning
     • Mechanisms guiding learning
       • Selection of stimuli for further processing - releasing mechanisms; attentional biases
       • Innate templates
     • Marler (1997) conducted experiments with sparrows by taking the birds and isolating them to expose them to birdsong at different time periods.
   • What is a critical period?
     • A sensitive period in the development when exposure or a certain state makes the behaviour appear
     • A critical period is a maturational time period during which some crucial experience will have its peak effect on development or learning, resulting in normal behaviour attuned to the particular environment to which the organism has been exposed.
   • Second Language Acquisition
     • Adults are better than children in the first year - morphology and syntax. They practice explicitly. However, they then appear to reach a plateau.
     • Johnson and Newport (1989) have shown that Chinese or Korean immigrants who move to the US and become exposed to English as a second language show strong effects of their age of exposure to the language on their ability to judge its grammatical structure many years later. These effects are not due to the interference of the first language on the learner’s ability to acquire the second language: deaf adults, acquiring American Sign Language as their primary language, show effects of age of exposure on their grammatical skills, even though they may not control any other language (Newport, 1990).
   • Prevention of exposure studies (not as good as case studies - most of the children are also exposed to maltreatment).
     • Jim, Isabelle, Genie, Chelsea
   • White & Genesee (1996)
     • Challenged the notion of a critical period and the idea that adult learners reach a plateau. They tested the competency of speakers who arrived in Canada at different times. Identified 2 groups - non-native & near-native).
     • What level of competence is achievable?
   • Different critical periods.
     • Phonology - 6 (can be related to brain lateralization).
     • Morphology, syntax, semantics - 15 ( myelinization of axons continues after 15)
     • Comprehension - 10
   • According to recent findings, even over-hearing a language during early childhood, without producing it or hearing it again for many years, can result in learning to pronounce that language with a more native accent as adults (Au et al, 2002).
   • PET, fMRI studies all show strong left hemisphere activation for processing the native language. However, when second languages are learned after age 7, the regions and patterns of activation are partially or completely non-overlapping with those for the native language. Neural organization for late-learned languages is less lateralized and proficiency displays a high degree of variability from individual to individual (Perani et al, 1996).

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