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)
