LANGUAGE LEARNING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

LANGUAGE LEARNING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

1. First language acquisition: Is one of the most impressive and fascinating aspects of human development.

2. The first 3 years: Children are able to discriminate

3. Children are able to acquire different morphemes, such us plural –s copula, articles the and a, etc. But it doesn’t follow a specific order of acquisition.

4. Negation

   • Stage 1: Using "no"
   • Stage 2: Longer utterances. Often use don't
   • Stage: More complex sentences. Include words like can't
   • Stage 4: correctly use the negative form of the verb do and be.

5. Questions

   • Stage 1: One or three word questions
   • Stage 2: Declarative sentences with rising intonation
   • Stage 3: Notice the structure of questions and produce them (Fronting stage)
   • Stage 4: Subject-auxiliary inversion questions
   • Stage 5: Wh and Yes/No questions are formed correctly.

6. Metalinguistic Awareness

   • Ability to treat language as an object separate from the meaning it conveys.

7. Behaviorism

   • children imitate the language produced by those around them, their attempts to reproduce what they heard received. ‘positive reinforcement’.

8. Children tend to take things in a “literally”

9. Question formation

   • Children conclude that for asking q. they need to put ‘are’ at the beginning of a sentence

10. Order of events

    • Children tend to mention events in order of their occurrence. They don’t understand how a word like ‘before’ and ‘because’ changes the order of cause and effect.

11. The Innatist perspective

    • Chomsky’s hypothesis that all human languages are based on some innate universal principles.
      • children are biologically programmed for language and that language develops in the child in just the same way that that other biological functions develop (walk).
      • hypothesized that children are born with specific innate ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules of a language system based on the natural language they are exposed to.

12. The critical period hypothesis

    • Humans are genetically programmed to acquire certain kinds of knowledge and skills at specific times in life.
      • Beyond those ‘critical periods’, it is either difficult or impossible to acquire those abilities.