First language acquisition Flashcards
What’s the difference between Acquisition and Learning?
- Acquisition: unconscious, intuitive, ‘picking it up’, informal, procedural knowledge
- Learning: conscious, deliberate, attention to form, formal, declarative knowledge
What does phylogenetic mean?
The species
- history of evolution of group of organism of the same species
- evolutionary development and history of a species
FLA within a species
Broad focus, i.e. a whole species → looking for
trends & universals, with less importance
attributed to outliers
What does ontogenetic mean?
The individual
- all events that took place and occur during the existence of a specific living organism
- development of a single organism or individual
so FLA within one person
Narrow focus, i.e. one individual → precise, indepth look at its history, and the consequences
What are the stages of FLA (=First Language Acquistion)?
- Prelinguistic stage
- Single-word stage
- Two-word stage/Telegraphic speech
- Simple sentences
stages presented as clear-cut and episodical but are quite intwined
as long as they produce and there’s no meaning, it is prelinguistic
What are the stages of the Prelinguistic stage?
- Receptive pre-natal experience
- Receptive ability in new-borns
- Cooing
- Babbling
What is the receptive pre-natal experience and from what week/time?
Perception of mother’s voice within the womb -> prosody and rhythm, from 25th week onwards
input
What is the receptive ability in newborns?
Caregiver speech/Motherese
- Higher pitch
- Exaggerated intonation
- Clear and slow
- Overall grammatical
input
What is Cooing and from what week/month?
First intonation patterns, from 0-4 months
output
What is Babbling and from what week/month?
Experimenting with chained speech sounds -> consonants and vowels, 6-8 months
output
What is the single-word stage and from what month?
also: holophrastic stage, ~12 months
- understanding of ~80-100 words
- Lexical acquisition (words for things of immediate importance e.g. people, food, toys, clothes, body parts)
- Slow growth rate until 2 y/o (50-550 words)
- Rapid growth rate until age 6 (~15 K words)
influencing factors: amount/quality of input, birth order, caretaker responsiveness, phonological memory
What are the characteristics of the two-word stage/telegraphic speech?
- First combinations (agent + object, agent + action, entity + attribute, entity + location)
- Telegrapic speech (content words)
- No morphology or overt grammar (no questions/negations but declaratives, imperatives, affirmatives)
telegraphic speech = getting meaning across without grammatical matters
Daddy sit, drive car, Mommy sock, crayon big, toy floor
What are the characteristics of the simple sentence stage?
- Emergence of inflectional morphemes
- own Acquisition order
Grammar usually well developed by 4 y/o
What is the Acquisition order?
- Present progressive (-ing)
- Plural (-s)
- Irregular past (broke, went, brought)
- Possessive (‘s)
- Copula ‘is’
- Articles
- Regular past (-ed), overgeneralization
- 3rd person singular present simple (-s)
- Auxiliary ‘be’
overgeneralization of regular past later (runned, breaked, bringed)
What are the approximate ages of the stages of FLA?
- Prelinguistic Stage (9 m. - 1 y/o)
- Single-word stage (9-18 m.)
- Two-word stage/Telegraphic speech (18-24 m.)
- Simple sentences (24 m.)
What are the three main theoretical positions on FLA?
- Behaviourism (Skinner)
- Innatist perspective/Generativism (Chomsky)
- Interactionist & developmental perspectives (Tomasello)
What is the basic assumption in Behaviourism?
‘Learning a language is like learning any other skill’
- Nurture/Environment is crucial
- Learning is: imitation -> practice -> reinforcement -> habit formation
Nurture (Empiricism) as in our behaviour is result of experience/environ
mind: blank slate at birth
What is the Innatist perspective/Generativism?
Language is based on nature -> Universal Grammar (UG)
- Children construct rules, they create forms they have never heard from adults
- human language too complex to only be taught by imitation -> not enough input, no systematic feedback
-> children ‘discover’ their language
What is the Universal Grammar?
biological grammatical categories and rules that are triggered as the child slowly acquires more and more words of a language
e.g a child will instinctively know how to combine a noun and a verb to create meaning
What is the Interactionist & Developmental Perspective?
- No LAD, language learning relies on general cognitive abilities
- Environment and social interaction are crucial -> nature and nurture
- variable and gradual acquisition
- child is active agent in acquisition
What are the types of bilingual FLA?
- Different parental first languages
- Home language vs. environment language
- Simultaneous vs. sequential bilingualism
Different stages in bilingual vs. monolingual FLA: code-switching, language mixing (mixing words, transfer errors)
What are the two hypotheses to represent first languages in the brain?
- Seperate system hypothesis: seperate representation
- Unitary system hypothesis: one lexicon, one grammar for both languages
How do children produce distinct gestures e.g. + from what week/month?
- Point with outstretched hand
- Hold out an object toward parent
12 month
What are the stages of forming questions when developing syntax?
- Stage 1: wh-form at beginning of expression, rise of intonation toward end
- Stage 2: rising intonation strategy continues + more wh-forms
- Stage 3: Inversion, non-adult forms
What are the stages of forming Negatives when developing syntax?
- Stage 1: No/Not at beginning
- Stage 2: Don’t/can’t
- Stage 3: Incorporation of Auxiliaries
