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
What is overextension?
meaning of words is overextended based on similarities of shape, sound, size, movement, texture
only in speech production, they know in their minds but cant tell it
sizo, scizzers -> all metal objects
When is a child in a good position to study a second language?
By age 5
When do children start saying ma-ma & ba-ba?
9-11 months
babbling
