Acquisition

• Language acquisition requires interaction with other language-users during the first two or three years of a child’s development.

• The language a child learns is not genetically inherited but is acquired in a language-using environment.

• A child must be physically capable of sending and receiving sound signals in a language.

• Interaction with others via language is a crucial requirement for language acquisition.

Input

• Human infants are helped in their language acquisition by the typical behavior of older children and adults who provide language samples, or input.

• Adults tend to use a simplified speech style, often referred to as “baby talk,” when interacting with a young child.

• This type of speech style is characterized by the frequent use of questions, exaggerated intonation, extra loudness, and a slower tempo with longer pauses.

Caregiver Speech

• Caregiver speech assigns an interactive role to the young child even before they become a speaking participant.

• Caregiver speech is characterized by simple sentence structures, a lot of repetition and paraphrasing, and reference largely restricted to the here and now.

• These simplified models produced by the interacting adult may serve as good clues to the basic structural organization involved in language acquisition.

The Acquisition Schedule

• All normal children develop language at roughly the same time, along the same schedule as the development of motor skills and the maturation of the infant’s brain.

• Children have the biological capacity to identify aspects of linguistic input at different stages during the early years of life.

• Infants are capable of distinguishing between different sounds from a very young age.

Cooing

• The earliest use of speech-like sounds is described as cooing.

• During the first few months of life, the child gradually becomes capable of producing sequences of vowel-like sounds.

• By four months of age, infants can create sounds similar to the velar consonants [k] and [ɡ].

Babbling

• Between six and eight months, the child starts producing a number of different vowels and consonants, as well as combinations such as ba-ba-ba and ga-ga-ga, described as babbling.

• In the later babbling stage, around nine to ten months, there are recognizable intonation patterns to the consonant and vowel combinations being produced.

• As children begin to pull themselves into a standing position during the tenth and eleventh months, they become capable of using their vocalizations to express emotions and emphasis.

The One-Word Stage

• Between twelve and eighteen months, children begin to produce a variety of recognizable single-unit utterances, traditionally called the one-word stage.

• This period is characterized by speech in which single terms are used for objects such as “milk,” “cookie,” “cat,” “cup.”

Note

• There is substantial variation among children in terms of the age at which particular features of linguistic development occur.

• Statements concerning development stages such as “by six months” or “by the age of two” are general approximations and subject to variation in individual children.

Telegraphic Speech

• Between two and two and a half years old, children begin producing a large number of utterances that could be classified as “multiple-word” speech.

• A stage known as telegraphic speech is characterized by strings of words in phrases or sentences such as “this shoe all wet,” “cat drink milk,” and “daddy go bye-bye.”

• The child has developed some sentence-building capacity by this stage and can get the word order correct.

• Inflections (-ing) begin to appear in some word forms and simple prepositions (in, on) are also used during this stage.

• By the age of two and a half, the child’s vocabulary is expanding rapidly, and the child is initiating more talk.

• By three, the vocabulary has grown to hundreds of words, and pronunciation has become clearer.

• It is worth considering the influence adults have in the development of the child’s speech at this point.

The Acquisition Process

• Children actively construct possible ways of using the language from what is said to them and around them.

• The child’s linguistic production appears to be mostly a matter of trying out constructions and testing whether they work or not.

• It is not possible that the child is acquiring the language principally through adult instruction.

Learning through Imitation?

• Children may repeat single words or phrases, but not the sentence structures.

• Children have their own way of expressing what they understand.

Learning through Correction?

• Adult “corrections” are not a very effective determiner of how the child speaks.

• The child will continue to use a personally constructed form, despite the adult’s repetition of what the correct form should be.

Word Play

• One factor that seems to be important in the child’s acquisition process is the use of sound and word combinations, either in interaction with others or in word play, alone.

• Word play seems to be an important element in the development of the child’s linguistic repertoire.

• Specific linguistic features can be traced in the steady stream of speech from the child beyond the telegraphic stage.

Developing Morphology

• By the time a child is two and a half years old, they start incorporating inflectional and functional morphemes, going beyond telegraphic speech forms.

• The first to appear is the -ing form in expressions such as “cat sitting” and “mommy reading book”. This is usually followed by the prepositions “in” and “on”.

• The next morphological development is typically the marking of regular plurals with the -s form, as in “boys” and “cats”. The child often overgeneralizes the rule of adding -s to form plurals and will talk about “foots” and “mans”.

• Irregular plurals such as “men” and “feet” appear next, along with irregular past tense forms such as “came” and “went”.

• Not long after, different forms of the verb “to be,” such as “is” and “are”, appear. At about the same time, the possessive inflection -'s becomes part of noun phrases such as “Karen’s bed” and “mommy’s book”. Also in noun phrases, the articles “a” and “the” start to be used.

• Finally, the regular past tense forms with -ed, as in “it opened” or “he walked”, become common, with some overgeneralization in examples such as “he goed” and “you comed here”. The final inflectional morpheme to be used, present tense -s, occurs first on verbs (comes, knows), then with auxiliary verbs (does, has).

The general acquisition sequence based on Brown (1973):

Stage

Morpheme

Examples

1

-ing

cat sitting, mommy reading book

2=

in

in bag, not in that

3=

on

on bed, that on top

4

plural -s

boys, cats

5=

irregular past tense

he came, it went away

6=

possessive -s

Karen’s bed, mommy’s book

7

verb “to be” (is, are)

this is no, you are look

8

articles (a, the)

a cat, the dog

9

past tense -ed

it opened, he walked

10

present tense -s

it comes, she knows

Note: Stages 2 and 3 can be exchanged, similarly Stages 5 and 6.

Developing Syntax

• Studies show that the development of syntax in children’s speech follows a regular pattern, particularly in the formation of questions and the use of negatives.

• There are three identifiable stages in the formation of questions and negatives, with each stage occurring at different ages.

Forming Questions

• Stage 1: Children add a wh-form (Where) to the beginning of the expression or utter the expression with a rise in intonation toward the end.

• Stage 2: More complex expressions can be formed, but the rising intonation strategy continues to be used. More wh-forms, such as What and Why, come into use.

• Stage 3: The change in position of the auxiliary verb in English questions, called inversion, becomes evident in the child’s speech.

Forming Negatives

• Stage 1: Children put No or Not at the beginning of the sentence. Both no and not can be attached to nouns and verbs.

• Stage 2: Additional negative forms don’t and can’t appear, and, with no and not, are increasingly used in front of the verb rather than at the beginning of the utterance.

• Stage 3: Other auxiliary forms such as didn’t and won’t are incorporated while the typical Stage 1 forms disappear. A very late acquisition is the negative form isn’t.

Please note that the ages at which children go through these stages can vary quite a bit, reflecting the different rates at which different children normally develop.

Developing Semantics

• Children often use words in unique ways, attaching meanings based on their limited experiences and understanding.

• During the holophrastic stage, children use their limited vocabulary to refer to a large number of unrelated objects. This process is called overextension.

• Overextension is based on similarities of shape, sound, size, movement, and texture. For example, the word “ball” might be extended to all kinds of round objects.

• The semantic development in a child’s use of words usually involves overextension initially, followed by a gradual process of narrowing down the application of each term as more words are learned.

• Overextension in children’s speech production doesn’t necessarily apply to speech comprehension. A child might use a word like “apple” to refer to other round objects but can still correctly identify an apple when asked.

• In terms of hyponymy, children tend to use the “middle” level term in a hyponymous set such as animal – dog – terrier. They first use “dog” with an overextended meaning close to the meaning of “animal.”

Later Developments

• Some types of antonymous relations are acquired fairly late, after the age of five. For example, children often disregard the difference between “more” and “less”.

• The distinctions between a number of other pairs such as “before/after” and “buy/sell” also seem to be later acquisitions.

• The ability to produce certain types of complex structures and extended discourse are also much later developments.

• Despite the fact that children are still in the process of acquiring a number of other aspects of their first language through the later years of childhood, it is normally assumed that, by the age of five, they have completed the greater part of the basic language acquisition process.

• They have become accomplished users of a first language and are then in a good position to start learning a second (or foreign) language.

• However, most people don’t start trying to learn another language until much later. The question that always arises is: if first language acquisition was so straightforward and largely automatic, why is learning a second language so difficult for so many people?