The Acquisition of Language

Some people argue that a child's mastery by age five of a large part of their native language is the most remarkable of all human achievements. Members of this group can explore this ability. Though much remains a mystery, researchers have learned a great deal.

For this topic a good place to begin--the best article to read for your meeting in week six-- is "First-Language Acquisition," Chapter 8 of Linguistics for Non-Linguists by Fran Parker and Kathryn Riley (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1994).

Language: Readings in Language and Culture (abbrev.: LRLC), edited by Virginia P. Clark et al. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998) [Reserve] will be a good source, particularly the section called "Children and Language." Look at "The Acquisition of Language" by Breyne Arlene Moskowitz, a good overview, and also at the articles by Lenneberg and Aitchison (These two articles are conveniently taken together) and then the article by Miller and Gildea.

If you have young children yourself, or access to some, you (perhaps aided by another group member) can collect some data--record children's speech, for example--and then share it with the class during your group report. You can point out what the recorded speech suggests about the acquisition stage the child or children are in. You can simply record a conversation that you have with a young child, or one that he or she has with a friend, or you can elicit data from them. Say, for example, you wanted to determine how a child was acquiring English morphology, in particular the regular plural allomorph /z/ (as in words like "frogs" /fragz/ and "beads" /bidz/. Jean Berko Gleason checked acquisition of this plural allomorph by showing kids a picture of what she told them was a "wug." Then she showed them two "wugs" and asked them to complete the sentence "Now there are two________." Kids who said "wugs" (/wcgz/) were noted as having acquired the /z/ plural allomorph. Gleason describes some other similar experiments that you might want to replicate with your own (or neighbors') children. Gleason's article is in Louis Bloom's Readings in Language Development (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978), pp. 39-59 [Reserve].

To involve your classmates in this topic, you could first talk about stages of acquisition, mentioning some key features of the stages, and then give them a transcript of child language and ask them to determine the child's level of acquisition.

This group could divide their topic as follows:

1. How children acquire phonology (See Parker and Riley's "First Language Acquisition" in Linguistics for Non-Linguistics, pp. 193-195.)

2. How children acquire morphemes (See Roger Brown's A First Language; see article by Moskowitz in LRLC, pp. 529-555)[Book on Reserve]

3. How children acquire words (See article by Miller and Gildea in LRLC)

4. How children acquire syntax and semantics (See articles by Moskowitz and by Parker and Riley)

5. Implications of current research on language acquisition for primary school teachers

Or this group could divide "language acquisition" into these subtopics:

1. Lenneberg's critical period hypothesis

2. Caretaker speech; how important is it to language acquisition?

See article by Shirley Brice Heath in LRLC and also this book: Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition edited by Charles A. Ferguson and Catherine E. Snow.

3. The stages of acquisition

4. What we've learned from the case histories such as those of Isabelle and Genie (See LRLC, pp. 588-606; see also works by Susan Curtiss listed in the bibliography on p. 623 of LRLC).

5. Implications of current research on language acquisition for primary school teachers

See pp. 623-625 in LRLC for a useful "Selected Bibliography" of works on language acquisition. A good book on that list is the one by Jill G. de Villiers and Peter A. de Villiers-Language Acquisition.