ASSOC. PROF. DR WONG BEE ENG

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BBI 3209Language Acquisition

• ASSOC. PROF. DR WONG BEE ENG
• DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
• FACULTY OF MODERN LANGUAGES AND COMMUNICATION
• UNIVERSITI PUTRA MALAYSIA

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• Topics
• Characteristics of first language acquisition
• The Behaviourist Theory and first language
  acquisition
• Universal Grammar the logical problem of first
  language acquisition
• The language acquisition device Argument from
  the poverty of the stimulus
• Stages of first language acquisition
  phonological, morphological, syntactic and
  semantic development

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• E-mail bee_at_fbmk.upm.edu.my
• Phone [phone]

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First Language Acquisition

• The process of acquiring language among children
  is also known as emergence of language.
• The outcome of this process is a grammar.
• 2 reasons for saying that the development of
  linguistic skills involve the acquisition of a
  grammar.
• Source OGrady, W. Cho, S. W. (2012), pp.
  326-359

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First Language Acquisition

• Adult users of language are able to produce and
  understand an infinite number of novel sentences
  a basic requisite of normal language use -
• which can only happen if they have acquired a
  grammar as children.
• Another indication that children acquire a
  grammar, i.e. rules of a grammar, comes from
  their speech errors.
• These provide clues about how the acquisition
  process works.
• Source OGrady, W. Cho, S. W. (2012), pp.
  326-359

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First Language Acquisition

• Since adults dont talk the way children do,
  the errors made by children tell us that children
  dont merely imitate what they hear.
• They create rules of their own to capture
  regularities that they hear in their input.
• Source OGrady, W. Cho, S. W. (2012), pp.
  326-359

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First Language Acquisition

• Linguists and psychologists study identify and
  describe the process of language acquisition by
  analyzing the emergence grammatical system of
  children.
• They look to the study of the following to help
  them
• phonology
• morphology
• syntax
• Source OGrady, W. Cho, S. W. (2012), pp.
  326-359

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First Language Acquisition

• Methods
• Most studies focus on childrens early
  utterances, the order in which they emerge, the
  kinds of errors made.
• 2 Complementary Approaches of data collection
• The naturalist approach
• The experimental approach
• Source OGrady, W. Cho, S. W. (2012), pp.
  326-359

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First Language Acquisition

• Naturalistic approach usually longitudinal
• Observe and record childrens spontaneous
  utterances, e.g.
• a. diary study (researcher keeps daily notes on
  a childs linguistic progress)
• b. Regular taping sessions, often at biweekly
  intervals, an hour at a time, of the child
  interacting with his/her caregivers. Detailed
  transcripts are made for subsequent analysis.
  (see CHILDES Child Language Data Exchange
  System)
• Source OGrady, W. Cho, S. W. (2012), pp.
  326-359

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First Language Acquisition

• Naturalistic studies
• Advantage Provides a lot of information of the
  emergence of grammar.
• Disadvantages
• Certain structures and phenomena may occur
  rarely in childrens daily speech making it
  difficult to gather enough data to test
  hypotheses or draw firm conclusions.
• Speech samples from individual children capture
  only small portion of their utterances at any
  given point in development (15 or less).

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First Language Acquisition

• Experimental Approach usually cross-sectional
• Researchers make use of specially designed tasks
  to elicit linguistic activity relevant to the
  phenomenon they wish to study.
• The childs production is used to formulate
  hypotheses about the type of grammatical system
  acquired at that point in time.

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First Language Acquisition

• Types of experimental studies
• Use tasks that test childrens
• comprehension (e.g. judge truth statements made
  about particular pictures or situations),
• production (such tasks may be difficult for
  children), or
• imitation skills (such tasks can provide
  important clues about grammatical development)

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First Language Acquisition

• Experimental studies
• Advantage they allow researchers to collect
  data of a very specific sort about particular
  phenomena or structures.
• Disadvantages
• Difficult to design such experiments.
• Childrens performance may be affected by
  extraneous factors, e.g. inattention, shyness, or
  a failure to understand what is expected of them.

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First Language Acquisition

• Better to use naturalistic observation together
  with experimental techniques.
• Together they have advanced our knowledge of the
  process.

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• Phonological development
• a. Babbling
• b. The developmental order
• Consonant inventory at age two
• Stops Fricatives Other
• p b m f w
• t d n s
• k g

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• Consonant inventory at age four
• Stops Fricatives Affricates Other
• p b m f v ? ? w j
• t d n s z l r
• k g ? ?

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• c. Early phonetic processes
• 1. Syllable simplification systematic
  deletion of certain sounds in order to simplify
  syllable structure.
• e.g. delete s stop ? t ?p
• 2. Syllable deletion deletion of
  unstressed syllables.
• e.g. spa ghe tti ? g?

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• 3. Substitution processes systematic
  replacement of one sound by an alternative that
  the child finds easier to articulate
• stopping e.g. sing ? tI?
  change s ? t
• fronting e.g. ship ? sIp
  change ? ? s
• gliding e.g. lion ? jaIn
  change l ? j
• denasalization e.g. room ? wub change m
  ? b

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• 4. Assimilation
• The modification of one or more features of a
  segment under the influence of neighbouring
  sounds
• Initial consonants voiced in anticipation of the
  following vowel. e.g. tell ? del
• To maintain the same place of articulation for
  all of the consonants or vowels in a word.
• e.g. doggy ? g ?gi or d ?di

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Vocabulary Development

• By 18 months, the child has a vocabulary of 50
  words or more.
• Common words refer to
• Entities people, food/drinks, animals, clothes,
  toys, vehicles, other (e.g. bottle, key, book)
• Properties e.g. hot, dirty, here, there
• Actions e.g. up, sit, see, eat, go, down
• Personal-social e.g. bye, no, yes, please,
  thank-you

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• Noun-like words largest class, followed by
  verb-like words, and adjective-like words.
• Over the next few years children learn between
  10-12 words a day.
• By age 6, they have 13,000-14,000 words.

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• 3 Strategies for acquiring word meaning
• The Whole Object Assumption
• A new word refers to a whole object
• The Type Assumption
• A new word refers to a type of thing, not just
  to a particular thing.
• The Basic Level Assumption
• A new word refers to objects that are alike in
  basic ways (appearance, behaviour, etc.)

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• Contextual clues
• Ability of the child to make use of contextual
  clues to draw inferences about the category and
  meaning of new words.
• e.g. children can use the presence or absence of
  determiners to differentiate between names and
  common nouns.

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• Meaning Errors
• Overextensions
• The meaning of the childs word is more general
  or inclusive than that of the corresponding adult
  form.
• e.g. the word dog is frequently overextended to
  include horses, cows, etc.
• Underextensions
• The use of lexical items in an overly restrictive
  fashion. e.g. the word kitty might be used to
  refer to the family pet, but not to other cats.

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• Verb meanings
• e.g. the word fill means pour into rather than
  make full.
• Such errors disappear as children realize the
  actual meaning of fill.

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• Dimensional terms
• Terms describing size and dimensions are acquired
  in a relatively fixed order.
• 1st group of adjectives big , small (can be
  used for talking about any aspect of size
  height, area, volume, etc.)
• 2nd group - tall, long, short, high, low (can
  only be used for a single dimension
  height-length)
• Other modifiers thick-thin, wide-narrow,
  deep-shallow more restricted in use describe
  secondary or less extended dimension of an
  object.

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• Morphological Development
• Overgeneralizations or Overregularizations
• e.g. mans
• runned
• felled

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• Developmental Sequence
• A. Typical developmental sequence for
  non-lexical morphemes
• 1. -ing
• 2. plural s
• 3. possessive s
• 4. the, a
• 5. past tense ed
• 6. third person singular s
• 7. auxiliary be

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• B. Some Determining factors
• 1. Frequent occurrence in utterance-final
• position
• 2. Syllabicity
• 3. Absence of homophony
• 4. Few or no exceptions in the way it is used
• 5. Allomorphic invariance
• 6. Clearly discernible semantic function

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Word formation processes

• Derivation and compounding emerge early in the
  acquisition of English.
• First derivational suffixes are the most common
  ones in adult language.
• Childrens creativity with compounds shows a
  preference for building words from other words.

Ending Meaning Word
/-ness/ state sadness
/-ing/ activity running
/-er/ doer /-ie/ diminutive teacher doggie
Childs word Intended meaning
car-smoke N-N exhaust
firetruck-man N-N fire fighter
cup-egg N-N boiled egg
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• The 2 processes that apply most freely in
  English,
• i.e. the formation of a noun by the addition of
  the agentive affix er to a verb (a derivational
  process) and
• compounding, were the first to emerge.
• e.g. A person who swims is a ___________.
• A house for a dog is a ___________.

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• Syntactic Development
• I. The one-word stage
• A child begins to produce one-word utterances
• (holophrases whole sentences)
• between the ages of 12 months and 18 months.

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• A basic property of these one-word utterances is
  that they can be used to express the type of
  meaning that would be associated with an entire
  sentence in adult speech.
• E.g. dada can mean I see daddy.
• Children seem to choose the most informative word
  that applies to the situation at hand.

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Semantic relations in childrens one-word
utterances

• Semantic relation Utterance Situation
• Agent of an action dada as father enters the
  room
• Action or state down as child sits down
• Theme door as father closes the door
• Location here as child points
• Recipient mama as child gives mother
  something
• Recurrence again as child watches
  lighting of a match

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• II. The two-word stage
• a. Within a few months of their first one-word
  utterances, children begin to produce two-word
  mini-sentences.
• b. The vast majority of two-word utterances
  employ an appropriate word order, suggesting a
  very early sensitivity to this feature of
  sentence structure.

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Some patterns in childrens two-word speech

• Utterance Intended meaning Semantic relation
• Baby chair The baby is sitting
  agent-location
• on the chair.
• Doggie bark The dog is barking. agent-action
• Hit doggie I hit the doggie. action-theme
• Sam water Sam is drinking water.
  agent-theme
• Daddy hat Daddys hat. Possessor-possessed

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• III. The telegraphic stage
• Early sentences are mainly words from the major
  grammatical categories of nouns, verbs, and
  adjectives.
• The missing elements are determiners,
  prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and the bound
  morphemes that go on the ends of nouns and verbs.
  These are the grammatical morphemes.

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• It is possible that these grammatical morphemes
  are omitted because they are not essential to
  meaning.
• Another reason is children have cognitive
  limitations on the length of utterance they can
  produce, independent of their grammatical
  knowledge.

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• Given such limitations, children may sensibly
  leave out the least-important parts.
• Such words may not be stressed in adults
  utterances and therefore children may be leaving
  out unstressed elements.
• Other researchers also suggest that childrens
  underlying knowledge does not include grammatical
  categories that govern the use of the omitted
  forms.

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• IV. Later development
• The development of different sentence forms

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• Individual Differences in Grammatical Development
• Children differ in both the rate and course of
  grammatical development.
• Differences in rate are the most obvious.
• Some children produce multiword utterances at age
  18 months, whereas others do not start combining
  words until they are 2 years old.
• Differences in the kinds of multiword utterances
  children produce some children rote-learn these
  as wholes other children combine separate words
  from the start.

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• Some children pay more attention to syllables and
  phonemes others pay more attention to the
  overall prosodic tune (Peters, 1997).
• The tune approach or holistic approach or
  top-down approach, results in many unanalysed
  chunks.
• e.g. Idontwanna (for I dont wanna)
• The other approach is the analytical or bottom-up
  approach.
• In this approach, children break down speech
  into smaller units and then combine them.

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• Most children use both top-down and bottom-up
  strategies, and most children include both
  unanalyzed chunks and smaller units in their
  early sentences.
• However, children vary in how much they rely on
  one strategy versus the other, and the route to
  syntax some children take seems to be extremely
  holistic or extremely or extremely analytic
  (Hoff, 2001 223).

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What makes language possible?

• The role of adult speech - Caregive speech
• The role of feedback recasts
• The role of cognitive development
• The role of inborn knowledge

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Is there a critical period?

• Normal linguistic development is possible only if
  children are exposed to language during a
  particular time frame or critical period.
• Evidence for the existence of such a period
  from studies of individuals who do not experience
  language during the early part of their lives,
  e.g. Genie.

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BBI 3209 Assessment

• The assessment requirements for the course
  include
• Assignments 30
• Mid-semester test 30
• Final examination 40

• Assignment
• The questions for the assignment will be handed
  out during the face-to-face or sent to you by
  PPL.

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• Mid-semester Test
• The mid-semester test will include topics covered
  in the first face-to-face, units 1, 2, and 3 of
  this module, and related material handed out
  during the first face-to-face session.
• Types of question
• Multiple-choice
• Structural
• 2 questions which require longer answers
  (paragraphs)

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• Project 1
• Deadline for submission 2nd Face-to-Face
• Task
• Select a Malaysian subject aged between 2 and 5
  years.
• This subject must speak Malaysian English as the
  first language (L1).
• Make about 3 recordings of about 45-60 minutes
  over a period of about 3 or 4 weeks at regular
  intervals.
• Then transcribe the subjects utterances.
• Investigate the acquisition of phonology,
  morphology, syntax and semantics.

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• Describe the properties that the subject has
  acquired up to the point of study.
• If stages of development of the properties you
  are investigating are obvious over the period of
  data collection, chart them.
• Then, explain the phenomena you observe in the
  data, for example, if the subject is using
  certain rules to produce particular forms at a
  particular time.

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• Your report should include the following
• A. Introduction
• Include the objective or provide research
  questions for the study.
• B. Literature review
• Write a review of L1 acquisition and the stages
  an infant goes through in the acquisition of
  English as a first language.
• C. Methodology
• Describe the subject (age, gender, background)
  and the procedure (collection, transcription and
  analysis of data). Also describe the equipment
  used.
• D. Results and discussion
• Analyse, interpret and discuss the data.
• E. Conclusion
• F. References

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• Your report should
• be around 15 pages long including appendixes (12
  point, double spacing).
• include a cover page with the course code, title
  of the course, your name and matriculation
  number.
• have a content page.
• have in-text referencing/citations wherever
  applicable (surname of author/s, year, page
  number).
• NB Submit the hard copy of the report with a CD
  which should have the taped sessions with the
  subject, the transcribed data and the report
  saved.

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References

• OGrady, W. Cho, S. W. (2012). First
  Language Acquisition (pp. 326-359). In O
  Grady, W. Archibald, J. Contemporary
  Linguistic Analysis An Introduction (Seventh
  Edition). Toronto Pearson Canada.
• Hoff, E. (2009). Language Development (Fourth
  Edition). Belmont Wadsworth Cengage Learning.