Second Language Acquisition

Second Language Acquisition

1. A child born to Korean speaking parents is adopted in to a Chiolean family and learns Spanish as her native language

   • Input: External exposure to a language
     • Native language
     • Multilingualism
     • L1
     • L2

2. Commonality of basic grammatical structure

   • Universal Grammar: innate capacity of learning a language.

3. Any normally developing child acquires one or more languages without too many errors and without explicit teaching.

   • Language architecture: The way in which language is structured
     • Syntax
     • Morphology
     • Phonology

4. The sentences in any language are innumerable, but the grammar of every language can be described by a finite number of rules

   • Competence: The fact of knowing rules sufficiently to generate acceptable, in other words, sentences that can be understood by the hearer.
   • Performance: The ability to understand and produce sentences in a language.

5. Language offers a means to study the nature of the mind that produces it.

   • Semantics : Part of linguistics that studies the meaning of words and the compositional meaning of the whole sentence.
   • Pragmatism:Part of linguistics that explains the way in which context contributes to the meaning.