• Basic requirements:

1. interaction with other language-users

2. exposure and learning from a language-using environment

3. physical ability to send and recieve sound signals

• motherese or child-directed speech

-> A style of communication used by caregivers when speaking with young children or infants

Features of caregiver speech:

• frequent questions,

• extra loudness,

• slower tempo,

• longer pauses,

• treating actions and vocalizations as conversational turns,

• baby talk,

• simplr sentence structures,

• a lot of repitition

• Children develop language at roughly the same time, like with physical activities.

• Children have a biological capacity to ideantify aspects of linguistic input.

• Infants process what they hear and can distinguish speech sounds.

• By 2-6 months of age:

• Can produce sequences of vowel-like sounds, particularly high-vowels

• Can hear and discriminate between vowels  [i] and [a]  and syllables like [ba] and [ɡa].

• sit up and produce different vowels and consonants 

• recognize intonation patterns and variation in combinations

• late babbling stage -> more complex syllable combinations, sound-play, and attempted imitations

• By 12-18 months of age: 

• produce single terms for objects

• Holophrastic: the use of single word to express a complex idea or convey a complete sentence's meaning

• produce two words together

• e.g.:

•  begins as the child's vocabulary moves beyond fifty words

• show appearance of a variety of combinations.

=> Adult interpretation of combinations is tied to the context of their utterance

• Telegraphic Speech (2-2.5 years): Children produce multiple-word utterances, focusing on word variation rather than quantity.

• strings of words (lexical morphemes without inflectional morphemes) in phrase produced by two-year old children 

=> Telegraphic speech: lexical morphemes without inflectional morphemes 

Children acquire language through active construction of possible language usage, not primarily through adult instruction or imitation.

• Do not primarily learn language through imitation.

• Actively construct possible language usage and have their own way of expressing what they understand.

Examples:

•   "The dogs are hungry" → "dog hungry."

•   "The owl who eats candy runs fast" → "owl eat a candy and he run fast."

• Children understand adult language but simplify their expression.

• Concepts like antonyms (e.g., more/less) and certain word pairs (e.g., buy/sell, before/after) are understood only after age five.

• The ability to form complex sentences and extended discourse also develops later.

• By five, children typically have a strong grasp of their first language.

• Despite the ease of first language acquisition, second language learning often proves challenging.

FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

What evidence best supports the idea that human infants have a natural ability to acquire language?

1. All children learn their first language before starting school

2. All children have a unique ability to communicate through language

3. All children acquire language without explicit instruction, regardless of their circumstances

4. Newborns are born with a special capacity for language

-> Children have a natural ability to acquire their first language without being taught explicitly, regardless of their background or environment 

ACQUISITION

What is the most important requirement for a child to develop language?

1. Exposure

2. Hearing

3. Interaction

4. Receiving signals 

5. Talking

CAREGIVER SPEECH/ CHILD-DIRECTED SPEECH

Which of these features is NOT typical of CAREGIVER SPEECH?

1. Paraphrasing

2. Repetition

3. Restricted reference

4. Simple sentence structures

5. Simplified words

6. Vocalizations

Which TWO features are NOT typical of CAREGIVER SPEECH?

1. Paraphrasing

2. Repetition

3. Restricted reference

4. Simple sentence structures

5. Simplified words

6. Vocalizations

DEVELOPING MORPHOLOGY

Which of the following best defines overgeneralization?

1. Mixing 2 languages or dialects in speech

2. Using a correct form of a word or grammatical construction in the wrong context

3. Repeating the exact same phrase or sentence multiple times in a conversation

4. Using of an inflectional morpheme in more instances than is typical or correct in the language being acquired 

5. All of the above

What is the first inflectional morpheme typically acquired by children when developing morphology?

1. -s form for regular plurals

2. -ed form for regular past tense

3. -ing form for progressive aspect

4. -’s form for possessives

What is an example of overgeneralization in the acquisition of the plural marker?

1. Saying “boies” instead of “boys”

2. Saying “foots” instead of “feet”

3. Saying “mans” instead of “men”

4. All of the above

What is the final inflectional morpheme typically used by children in developing morphology?

1. -s form for regular plurals

2. -ed form for regular past tense

3. -ing form for progressive aspect

4. -s form for present tense

After -ING, which forms are typically next to appear in a CHILD’S SPEECH?

1. Articles

2. Regular past tense ending {-ed}

3. Prepositions {in/on}

4. Present tense endings {-s}

5. Plural {-s}

At what stage in the acquisition of morphology do the articles [a,the] appear?

1. 5

2. 6

3. 7

4. 8

5. 9

6. 10

Which of these forms typically appears later than the others?

1. cat not eat

2. daddy can’t sing

3. dong won’t bite

4. I don’t want it

5. this isn’t cake

6. that not teddy

FORMING QUESTIONS

At what age do most English-speaking children reach Stage 3 of forming questions?

1. 18-26 months

2. 22-30 months

3. 24-40 months

4. It varies widely among children

What is the main difference between Stage 2 and Stage 3 of forming questions?

1. The use of wh-forms

2. The presence of rising intonation

3. The change in position of auxiliary verbs (inversion)

4. The complexity of expressions formed

Which of these expressions is likely to be used before the others?

1. Mommy books

2. Mommy’s book

3. Mommy reading

4. Mommy goed

Which of these expressions is likely to be used before the others?

1. What book name?

2. How that opened?

3. Where kitty go?

Which of these two utterances was produced by the older child and why?

1. I not hurt him

2. No the sun shining

FORMING NEGATIVES

At Stage 1 of forming negatives, what are the 2 strategies used by children?

1. Using “No” or “Not” at the end of the sentence

2. Using “No” or “Not” at the beginning of the sentence

3. Using “Don’t” or “Can’t” at the end of the sentence

4. Using “Don’t” or “Can’t” at the beginning of the sentence

At which stage do the additional negative forms “don’t” and “can’t” appear?

1. Stage 1

2. Stage 2

3. Stage 3

What is the reason behind children using “don’t” as a single unit in the second stage of forming negatives?

1. They don’t understand the alternative form of ‘do not’

2. The contracted form of ‘not’ is not heard as a distinct element in speech

3. It is natural progression in language acquisition

What is the latest negative form to be acquired by children?

1. ‘no’

2. ‘not’

3. ‘isn’t’

DEVELOPING SEMANTICS

TRUE OR FALSE?

1. During the holophrastic stage, children use their limited vocabulary to refer to a large number of unrelated objects T

2. Overextension is the process of narrowing down the application of each term as more words are learned F

-> Overextension is the process of using a word to refer to more objects than is usual in the language

3. Children overextend the meaning of words based on similarities of shape, sound, size, movement, and texture T

4. Overextension is used in both speech production and comprehension in young children F

-> Overextension is mainly used in speech production but not necessarily in comprehension

5. Children first learn the most general term in a hyponymous set such as animal-dog-terrier F

-> Children first use the middle level term, such as dog, with an overextended meaning close to the meaning of “animal”

LATER DEVELOPMENTS

At what age do children acquire some types of antonymous relations?

1. Before the age of 5

2. After the age of 5

3. At the age of 5

4. None of the above

According to the text, what is the question that arises regarding learning a second language?

1. How can children learn a second language?

2. Why is learning a second language so difficult for so many people?

3. What is the best way to learn a second language?

4. Can everyone learn a second language?

Which of the following are challenges that children face in the later stages of language acquisition?

1. Learning vocabulary words

2. Understanding grammar rules

3. Acquiring antonyms and complex sentence structures

4. Learning multiple languages