First Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning in Children - Prof. Parker, Resúmenes de Arqueología

¡Descarga First Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning in Children - Prof. Parker y más Resúmenes en PDF de Arqueología solo en Docsity! Clark, 2009 – First language acquisition. Acquiring language: Issues and questions: -This book focusses on children’s acquisition of a first language, the stages they go through, and how they use language as they learn. In this chapter, I take up some of the issues in that process. I outline some of the theoretical approaches in the field and the assumptions they make before turning to the overall plan of the book. Some Issues for acquisition: -A tabula rasa? Do children have to learn everything about language and language use from scratch? Do they start out at birth with John Locke’s tabula rasa, or do they come with certain things already pre-wired? Debate over this has led many to draw strict lines between “nature” (any innate capacities and structure children are born with) and “nurture” (what they gain from experience). Since children are not born speaking, they must learn language. The question then becomes one of what they are born with that is required for this task. Do they come with innate learning mechanisms to get them started? Are such mechanisms general-purpose aids to learning or specific to language alone? What empirical findings could help answer these questions? -Languages differ Languages aren’t all cut from the identical pattern, and this makes a difference in acquisition. They differ in a lot of things, both syntactical and grammatical. Languages are usually consistent both in their basic word-order and in the orders favored across a variety of constructions. -Complexity for learning Languages differ in what is easier and what harder to learn. Researchers have distinguished two sources of complexity for learning: conceptual and formal complexity (e.g., Slobin 1973, 1985b). Conceptual complexity pertains to the complexity of the ideas being expressed in language. Children probably develop cognitively at about the same rate in similar societies all over the world. This in turn suggests that they should go through stages in cognitive development at the same rate and grasp similar ideas at about the same age. In general, they master simple conceptual distinctions before more complex ones: the notion of more than one (marked by a plural word-ending), say, before notions of truth or beauty, and the notion of an action being finished (marked by a perfective or past tense ending) before the notion of one event being contingent on another (if X, Y ). In principle, children should master simpler distinctions before more complex ones. But since languages differ, the same conceptual distinction may be ex- pressed in a variety of forms. One language might opt for a single word- ending for ‘more than one’ and use this as an invariant form on every noun, much like the -s ending for plural in English. Another might make use of ten or more different plural markers depending on the gender of the noun (masculine, feminine, or neuter), the “shape” of the noun (e.g., whether it ends in a consonant or a vowel), its use with a numeral (five gold rings) and what numeral (five, ten, one hundred twenty), and so on. While no one language appears to be easier to learn overall, there are many trade-offs from one language to another in what is easy and what is hard. Children may find some aspects of a language easier to master than others, and children exposed to different languages may well learn at different rates on equivalent parts of the system. To find out, we need to establish what’s hard and what’s easy in acquisition for each language. -Social dimensions Language acquisition takes place in midconversation. Adults and children talk to each other; adults expect children to respond to requests and comments, and to indicate to their interlocutors what they are interested in as well as their needs and wants. When adults talk to children, they directly or indirectly offer them extensive information about their language. They set up both tacit and explicit expectations for when children should talk, what they should say, when and how they should respond to adult utterances; what counts as a turn in conversation, when (and when not) to take a turn; and what counts as an appropriate contribution in the ongoing exchange. Conversation demands that its participants attend to each other and to whatever is being talked about. This means keeping track of what others know at each point in the conversation. The participants share common ground and add to it with each utterance. Understanding in conversation may depend as much on what is not said as on what is said. Knowing some of the elements of a language doesn’t necessarily allow one to interpret utterances appropriately. One has to learn -Product vs Process Some approaches to language acquisition focus on the product – the end state to be achieved – rather than on the process. This distinction tends to capture one difference between linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to acquisition. Linguists tend to focus on the product, for instance, what a relative clause looks like, laid on the table for analysis. In contrast, the psycholinguist is more concerned with when the speaker needs a relative clause, how he accesses the pertinent structure, the phrases, words, syllables and sounds, and then produces the utterance itself piece by piece. This has led to differences in emphasis, with linguistic approaches focusing more on the adultlike nature of children’s knowledge while psychological ones have focused more on the changes that occur during development. One linguistic approach known as parameter-setting proposes that children start out with default settings for parameters that capture all the dimensions that distinguish among languages. For instance, languages differ on whether they require subjects to be marked by a pronoun where there isn’t a noun subject present. Each parameter has a start-up setting (the default setting) and children begin there, regardless of the language to be acquired. Then, at a certain point in development, they identify the actual parameter- setting for that language and from then on make adultlike use of the pertinent forms. Processing approaches take account of the dynamic nature of conversa- tion. Speakers interact with each other. They don’t produce isolated sen- tences that stand on their own. Once someone has mentioned Kate, for example, the next speaker will use she (not Kate) to refer to her again. Or once someone has asked Rod whether he wants lasagna, he can answer Just a little, or Yes please. What these utterances refer to requires that we know that there was a prior offer, Would you like some lasagna? Without that, we can’t give a full interpretation to Yes please. What someone says depends critically on what someone else has just said and often can’t be interpreted without a whole sequence of contributions to the conversation. Imagine recording a conversation and then transcribing what only one of the speakers said. It quickly becomes difficult or impossible to interpret what that person means. In fact, utterances depend on both conversational and physical context for interpretation (H. Clark 1996). This should hold even more strongly for young children whose utterances may consist of only one or two words. -The goal of acquisition. The goal is to become a member of a community of speakers. This entails learning all the elements of a language, both structure and usage. Children need to learn the sound system, the phonology. This in turn means learning which sounds belong (sound segments like p, b, t, d, s, z, a, i, u, e), which sequences of sounds are legal in syllables and words (phonotactic constraints, e.g., drip but not dlip in English), stress patterns on words (e.g., electric vs. electricity), tone on words in a language like Mandarin or Hausa, and the intonation contours in sentences that distinguish a question from a statement (e.g., Alan is coming at six o’clock? vs. Alan is coming at six o’clock). Language is used to convey meaning. Words, suffixes, and prefixes all carry meanings that are conventional (Lewis 1969). The speech community relies on all its members agreeing that ball means ‘ball’, throw means ‘throw’, and sand means ‘sand’. These conventions are what make languages work. Without agreements about meanings, one couldn’t rely on the fact that the next time someone uses sand, say, people hearing the word will interpret it in the same way. Conventions are critical in language use. They govern both word meanings and construction meanings. In learning a language, children must learn the conventions for that community. In summary, children need to learn to use language effectively, whatever the genre, whoever the addressee, and whatever the goal. -Stages in acquisition. As children learn to talk, they go through a series of stages, beginning with infancy when they are unable to converse and do not yet understand any language. They go from babbling at seven to ten months old, to producing their first recognizable words six to twelve months later. Then, within a few months, they combine words and gestures, and produce their first word combinations around age two. This is followed by the production of ever more complex, adultlike utterances, as they become active participants in conversation, taking turns and making appropriate contributions. They begin to use language for a larger array of functions – telling stories, explaining how a toy works, persuading a friend to do something, or giving someone directions for how to get somewhere. Between age one and age six, children acquire extensive skills in using language and sound quite adultlike much of the time. By around age ten to twelve, they have mastered many complex constructions, a good deal more vocabulary, and many uses of language. Comprehension, throughout this process, tends to be far ahead of production. Children understand many words long before they can pro- duce them, and this asymmetry between comprehension and production is lifelong: consider the number of dialects adults can understand without being able to produce more than two or three at most. For a second language, consider how much better people are at understanding than at speaking. The same holds true for a first language: comprehension remains ahead of production, but once production reaches a certain level, speakers tend to no longer notice any mismatch (but it remains). -Why study acquisition? In the 1960s, under Noam Chomsky’s influence in linguistic theory, researchers renewed their interest in how children acquired language. Chomsky himself argued that children must rely on certain innate structures and mechanisms, specific to language, because it would be impossible for them to learn from adult speech alone (see Chapter 2). These claims became embedded in the Chomskyan approach, although few of his students did empirical research on language acquisition in children. Since it remains unclear how much of language is innate or whether any specialized learning mechanisms subserve it, my stance on this is a conservative one. I prefer to see how much one can account for on more general grounds first. The emphasis here is therefore on how (and how much) children can learn from adult usage, including specially tailored child-directed speech.