First Language Acquisition

1
First Language Acquisition

• Lecture 16

2
First Language Acquisition

• Why do we call it language acquisition?
• Learning
• Intentional process
• Presupposes teaching
• Teacher controls pace
• Acquisition
• Unconscious process
• Does not presuppose teaching
• Child controls pace

3
First Language Acquisition

• How do nurture and nature interact in FLA?
• Nature
• Must have LADpoverty of stimulus too great to
  learn without language instinct
• All children learn a language have language
  capacity
• Overgeneralizations demonstrate child is
  analyzing language
• Nurture
• Children cannot acquire language without
  interaction/scaffolding
• Children learn the language of their environment
  through parents who model social interaction
• Memorization of chunks by rote demonstrates not
  all info is anlayzed fully

4
Four Pillars of FLA

• Ability
• Physiological
• Cognitive
• Interaction
• Scaffolding (Caretaker speech)
• Motivation
• Internal vs. External
• Instrumental vs. Integrative
• Data
• Forms
• Meaning
• Function

• Targeted/limited vocab
• Exaggerated intonation
• Repetition
• Questioning

5
Critical Period Hypothesis

• There is an ideal window of opportunity within
  which we are primed to acquire language birth -
  puberty
• Evidence?
• Adults struggle to learn a second language (to a
  greater or lesser degree)
• The question is why?
• We struggle with both the physiological and the
  cognitive ability.

6
Stages of First Language Acquisition

• Prelinguistic Sounds
• 0-1 mo. Sleep, eat, cry
• 1 mo. Intonational patterns
• 2-5 mos. Cooing stage
• 5-12 mos. Babbling stage
• One-word Stage (holophrastic)
• 1 yr. emergence of first word (controversial)
• 1 yr., 6 mos. Holophrastic stage
• intonation layers on meaning
• fis phenomenon

7
Stages of First Language Acquisition

• Two-word Stage
• 2 yrs. Two words, three possible interpretations
• Subject-verb Mary go.
• Verb-modifier Push truck.
• Possessor-possesed Mommy sock
• Content words, no function words
• Telegraphic Stage
• 2 yrs., 6 mos. telegraphic stage
• 2-5 words with little extra morphology
• Morphological overgeneralization
• Easier, more productive morphemes first

8
Stages of First Language Acquisition

• Telegraphic Stage, cont.
• 2-5 yrs. More elaborate syntax
• Learning 20-30 words per day
• Semantic overgeneralization/
• undergeneralization
• Fine-tuning
• 5-10 yrs. Refining grammar, building vocabulary
• How children learn vocabulary
• Assign word to a broad semantic category
• Work out distinctions among words in that category

9
Building Vocabulary

• Traditional efforts
• Flash cards
• Look it up in the dictionary
• what is the problem here?
• Better to learn vocab in context
• Reading
• Conversation
• Language learning software

How can you help your children develop their
language skills the most?