Second Language Acquisition Semester 1, 2004

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Second Language Acquisition Semester 1, 2004

• Week 3
• Child language learning

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Biological preparedness for language

• Human infants are specially tuned to hear human
  language from birth..
• New born infants can hear sound distinctions that
  are not distinctive, or phonemic, in their native
  language.
• This ability to perceive differences disappears
  after about 6 months, when the native
  phonological system becomes established.

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Universal Grammar

• This biological preparedness for language
  learning has been described by Chomsky as a
  Universal Grammar (UG) that is part of our
  genetic makeup as human beings. UG specifies the
  general form of human language and guides the
  child in the acquisition of the target language.

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From first sounds to babbling.

• In the first six months the infant interacts with
  her caretakers in a variety of ways.
  Vocalizations are primarily soft coos and gurgles
  and do not resemble genuine language.
• After the first 6 months true babbling begins. At
  this point the infant starts to make sounds that
  exhibit languagelike features. At first this
  consists of single syllables consisting of stop
  consonant (p, b, t, d, etc) and a vowel like
  "ah". At first the babbles will be a string of
  similar syllables, ba, ba, ba.

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From babbling to words

• Eventually this will become more varied baga,
  bada and will start to sound like phonemic
  segments, in a process called segmental babbling.
  The vocalizations will also have sentence
  intonation, with the infant appearing to engage
  in a "conversation" that has no semantic content.

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First words one-word stage.

• Infants as young as 9 months can recognise
  individual words from a string of speech, but the
  first word is not produced until between 12-18
  months. The first word often sounds like babble,
  although it is consistently used to refer to one
  thing.
• This stage is also referred to as holophrastic
  because each word conveys as much meaning as an
  entire phrase. "Milk" can refer to the milk, to
  spilling it, drinking it, etc.

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Early word use Under- and over-extension

• During the early one-word stage the child will
  both underextend and overextend the meaning of
  words.
• underextension is when the child learns the word
  birdie in reference to the family budgie, and
  does not use it to refer to other birds.
• overextension of word meanings, where the child
  extends a word like doggie to refer to all
  four-legged animals. Overextension is more common
  and appears to be limited to production.

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The two-word stage

• When the child has learned about 50 words, two
  significant things happen.
• A vocabulary spurt takes place in which the rate
  of vocabulary learning increases dramatically.
• The infant also enters the two-word stage, in
  which s/he starts producing two-word utterances
  from which the grammar of the language is
  developed.

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The two-word stage and the emergence of grammar

• As the child moves beyond the one-word stage of
  development, lexical learning speeds up and the
  child begins to combine words to form small
  sentences. The structure of the child's target
  language is already reflected in the two-word
  stage. Here are examples of utterances of an
  English-speaking child at this stage.
• a car baby cookie
• a rice here Mommy
• doggie allgone pull car

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Lexical development

• Various principles govern child vocabulary
  learning
• Fast-mapping is where a child hears a word once
  or twice, learns its grammatical class, but has
  only a vague idea of what it means.
• Whole object principle allows the child to sort
  out what is being referred to quickly, without
  having to consider whether the speaker is
  referring to the whole object or one of the
  parts.
• Only one name principle says that there is only
  one name for each object.
• Extendability principle. The child has the
  expectancy that individual words will refer to
  categories of similar things. During the one-word
  stage this principle can lead to overextension of
  word meaning, but is helpful later in the
  development of knowledge of categories.

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Developing grammar

• Around the age of 3 the child will gradually
  start to produce longer sentences. This
  development can be measured in the mean length of
  utterance (MLU), which refers to the average
  number of morphemes in the child utterances. It
  is calculated by adding up the total number of
  bound and unbound morphemes in a set of
  utterances and dividing by the total number of
  utterances. MLU increases steadily with age from
  the age of 1 to 4.5. This increase is related to
  the increasing use by the child of bound
  morphemes and function words.

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Complex grammar

• At approximately 3 years the child will begin to
  produce complex sentences, that is, a sentence
  consisting of two verbs (e.g., Watch me draw
  circles). Early complex sentences consist of a
  clause being substituted for a constituent of a
  sentence that was earlier filled by a single word
  or phrase

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Acquisition of grammatical features

• Bound morphemes are acquired in a similar order
  by children learning English. Earliest to appear
  is the -ing marker on verbs signalling the
  present progressive form. Sentences like Mommy
  sleeping are very common, with the auxiliary is
  (Mommy is sleeping) appearing much later.

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Mean order of acquisition of morphemes

• 1. Present progressive (-ing)
• 2/3. Preposition in/on
• 4. Plural (-s)
• 5. Past irregular
• 6. Possessive (-s)
• 7. Uncontracted copula (is, am, were)
• 8. Articles (a, the)
• 9. Past regular (-ed)
• 10. Third person regular (-s)
• 11 Third person irregular

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U-shaped development

• Often observed in English is the
  overgeneralization of the regular past tense
  verb. The most frequent verbs have irregular past
  tenses and children tend to acquire these first
  (e.g., went and ate). They then acquire some high
  frequency regular verbs like hugged and kissed.
  At that point they seem to discover that past
  tense formation is rule-governed, and begin to
  overgeneralize the past tense marker to irregular
  verbs (e.g. producing utterances like eated and
  goed).
• This overregularizing is also evident in the
  production of plurals (foots and feets) and
  illustrates the tendency of all children to make
  irregular processes in their language more
  regular. Regular forms are easier to learn and
  the child seems to impose regularity where it
  doesn't exist.

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Question formation

• Stage 1. Rising intonation He work today?
• Stage 2. Intonation with sentence complexity
• Yes/no questions You like this?
• Wh questions Why you catch it?
• Stage 3. Beginning of inversion
• Can I go? Is that mine? But Why you dont have
  one?
• Stage 4. Inversion
• Do you like ice cream? do in yes/no but not
  wh-questions
• Stage 5. Inversion with wh-question
• Why can he go out? Why he cant go out? No
  inversion with negative
• Stage 6. Overgeneralization of inversion
• I dont know why cant he go out.

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The L1 is not learned by imitation

• children make non-random errors
• acquisition happens in a regular manner across
  diverse languages and settings
• the basic grammar is learned quickly
• acquisition comes about without formal
  instruction or correction,
• acquisition happen regardless of kind of
  interaction the child is exposed to when learning.

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Imitation doesnt work

• Cazden (1972)
• McNeill (1966)
• Gass Selinker p99

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Child L2 acquisition

• the successive acquisition of two languages in
  childhood McLaughlin, 1978, p 7
• Two hypotheses
• gt Child uses the L1 to use the L2
• gtChild goes back to scratch to learn the L2.

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Morpheme Order Studies

• Motivated by the hypothesis that there was an
  invariant order in SLA similar to L1, evidence
  for universal processing strategies
• Based on speech data elicited by the Bilingual
  Syntax Measure assumed to reflect natural
  speech.
• Text p 107

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Morpheme Order Studies Findings

• Similar patterns of morpheme suppliance found for
  L1 and L2 children from many language
  backgrounds.
• Interpreted as evidence for a "natural order" in
  SLA.
• Other evidence for a natural order comes from
  studies of interrogatives and negation.

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Creative Construction (CC) (Dulay Burt, 1977)

• SLA, especially for the child is a "recreation
  of the L2 using the same capacities as the used
  on the L1.
• The learner "creates" the L2 in a manner
  analogous to the L1.

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Principles of CC

• Rules of target language worked out by cognitive
  processes like generalization
• Similar process as L1
• (e.g. similar acquisition orders)
• Creates forms not found in target language
• (she goed to school)
• L1 not important
• "Natural" route for development.

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End of Week 3 lecture slides.
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