First Language Acquisition (Unit 13), Apuntes de Lingüística

¡Descarga First Language Acquisition (Unit 13) y más Apuntes en PDF de Lingüística solo en Docsity! UNIT 13: FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 
! —ACQUISITION: during the first two or three years of development, a child requires interaction with other language-users in order to bring the general language capacity into contact with a particular language such as English. The child must also be physically capable of sending and receiving sound signals in a language. All infants make “cooing” and “babbling” noises during their first year, but deaf infants stop after about six months. So, a child must be able to hear that language being used. ! —Input: human infants are helped in their language acquisition by the behavior of older children and adults in the home environment who provide language samples, or input, for the child. Adults tend not to address the little creature before them as if they are involved in normal adult-to-adult conversation. The characteristically simplified speech style adopted by someone who spends a lot of time interacting with a young child incorporates a lot of forms associated with “baby talk”. This style is more generally known as “caregiver speech”. ! —Caregiver speech: this is a type of structure that seems to assign an interactive role to the young child even before he or she becomes a speaking participant. Example: ! -Mother: Look! -Child: (touches pictures) -Mother: What are those? -Child: (vocalizes a babble string and smiles) -Mother: Yes, there are rabbits. ! —THE ACQUISITION SCHEDULE: the language acquisition schedule has the same basis as the biologically determined development of motor skills and the maturation of the infant’s brain. At one month an infant is capable of distinguishing between [ba] and [pa]. During the first three months, the child develops a range of crying styles, with different patterns for different needs, produces big smiles in response to a speaking face, and starts to create distinct vocalizations. ! —Cooing: the earliest use of speech-like sounds has been described as cooing. During the first few months of life, the child becomes capable of producing high vowels similar to [i] and [u]. By four months of age, infant starts creating sounds similar to [k] and [g]. By the time they are five months old, babies can already hear the difference between the vowels [i] and [a] and discriminate between syllables like [ba] and [ga]. ! —Babbling: between six and eight months, the child produces combinations such as ba-ba-ba and ga- ga-ga. This type of sound production is described as babbling. Around nine to ten months, nasal sounds become more common. During the tenth and eleventh months, they become capable of using their vocalizations to express emotions and emphasis. ! —The one-word stage: the period between twelve and eighteen months is known as the one-word stage. This stage is characterized by speech in which single terms are uttered for everyday objects such as “milk”, “cat”, “cookie”, etc. We sometimes use the term holophrastic speech to describe an utterance that could be analyzed as a word, a phrase, or a sentence. 1 —The two-word stage: this stage can begin around eighteen to twenty months, as the child’s vocabulary moves beyond fifty words. By the time the child is two years old, a variety of combinations have appeared. The adult interpretation of such combinations is very much tied to the context of their utterance. The phrase baby chair may be taken as an expression of possession, as a request or as a statement. 
! —Telegraphic speech: this stage takes place between two and two and a half years old. The child has developed some sentence-building capacity and can get the word order correct in phrases such as this show all wet, cat drink milk and daddy go bye-bye. By three, the vocabulary has grown to hundreds of words and pronunciation has become clearer. ! —THE ACQUISITION PROCESS: the child’s linguistic production appears to be mostly a matter of trying out constructions and testing whether they work or not. Children can repeat versions of what adults say on occasion and they take a lot of vocabulary from the speech they hear, but adults do not produce many of the expressions that turn up in children’s speech. Children can create new words in their speech. ! —Learning through imitation?: children may repeat single words or phrases, but not the sentence structures. For example: ! -Mother: the cats are hungry. -Child: cat hungry. -Mother: the owl who eats candy runs fast. -Child: owl eat a candy and he run fast. ! It’s obvious that the child understands what the adult is saying in the example, but the child has their own way of expressing what they understand. ! —Learning through correction?: adult “corrections” are not a very effective determiner of how the child speaks. For example: ! -Child: My teacher holded the baby rabbits. -Mother: Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits? -Child: Yes. -Mother: What did you say she did? -Child: She holded the baby rabbits. ! —DEVELOPING MORPHOLOGY: by the time a child is two-and-a-half years old, he or she is going to incorporate some of the inflectional morphemes. The first to appear is usually the -ing form. The next morphological development is typically the marking of regular plurals. The acquisition of the plural marker is often accompanied by a process of overgeneralization. The child overgeneralizes the apparent rule of adding -s to form plurals and will talk about foots and mans. Some children also begin using irregular plurals such as men quite appropriately for a while, but then try out the general rule on the forms producing expressions like some mens and two feets. Not long after, the use of the possessive inflection -’s occurs in expressions such as girl’s book. At about the same time, different forms of the verb “to be”, such as are and was, begin to be used. Once the regular past-tense forms (walked, played) begin appearing in the child’s speech, the irregular forms may disappear for a while. For a period, the -ed inflection may be added to everything, producing oddities such as walkeded and wented. Finally, the regular -s marker on third person singular from the present tense appears. !!! 2