How Languages Are Learned Flashcards
Highlights from book
First-language acquisition:
- first three years, milestones and developmental sequences
- Pre-school years
- School years
high degree of similarity in the early language of children all over the world.
Infants are able to hear subtle differences between the sounds of human languages…have very fine auditory discrimination capability…seem able to recognize the language spoken before they were born.
Language acquisition/learning
Krashen: Acquisition is unconscious internalization of language knowledge, focus is on meaning rather than form; learning is a conscious process with the objective of learning the language itself rather than to understand the message conveyed through the language.
Auditory discrimination
ability to hear differences between similar sounds, such as “pa” and “ba”.
Phonemic
Small differences in language sounds that can change meaning within the language: p and b are phonemic in English, not in Arabic.
Cross-sectional study
Participants are of different ages/stages of development. Contrasts with longitudinal study.
longitudinal study
Same participants are studied over a period of time. Contrasts with cross-sectional study.
Function words
Linking or supporting words for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Have little or no meaning by themselves, but have important effect on the meanings of words they accompany.
Grammatical morphemes
Units smaller than morphemes that are added to words to alter their meaning. The grammatical morpheme “s” added to the morpheme “book” indicates plural. Grammatical morphemes also can be function words, such as “the”, that are usually attached to another word.
Examples: present progressive -ing (Mommy running) plural -s (two books) irregular past forms (Baby went) possessive -s (Daddy’s hat) copula (Mommy is happy) articles the and a regular past -ed (she walked) third person singular simple present -s (she runs) auxiliary be (he is coming)
hypothesis
A statement of a possible fact that can be tested through research.
Wug Test
Test using nonsense words to examine children’s grasp of grammatical morphemes. “Here is a wug. Now there are two of them. There are two____.” “Here is a man who knows how to bod. Yesterday he did the same thing. Yesterday, he____.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wug_test
Negation (4 stages of)
Stage 1: “No” as a single word or as the first word in an utterance. No. No cookie. No comb hair.
Stage 2: longer utterances, may include subject. Negative word — no or don’t — is just before verb. Sentences expressing rejection or prohibition often use “don’t”. Daddy no comb hair. Don’t touch that!
Stage 3: more complex sentences, negative words include no, can’t, and don’t. Negative attached to auxiliary or modal verb (correct English pattern) but form not varied for different persons or tenses. I can’t do it. He don’t want it.
Stage 4: Negative attached to correct form of auxiliary verbs, such as “do” and “be”. You didn’t have supper. She doesn’t want it. May still have difficulty with other negative features: I don’t have no more candies.
Questions (order of)
Consistent, predictable order:
- What (often as chunk: “whassat?”
- Where and who. Where’s mommy? Who’s that?
- Why (end of second year). Children use this to engage adults in conversation.
- How and when. After children have better understanding of manner and time.
Questions (6 stages of)
Stage 1: Single word or simple two- or three-word sentences with rising intonation. Cookie? Mommy book? Also some correct questions learned as chunks. Where’s Daddy? What’s that?
Stage 2: word of a declarative sentence, with rising intonation. You like this? I have some?
Stage 3: Correct question pattern. Can I go? Are you happy? May also use “fronting” in which verb or question word is put at the front of a standard statement sentence. Is the teddy is tired? Do I can have a cookie? Why you don’t have one? Why you catched it?
Stage 4: Some questions formed by subject-auxiliary inversion, with more variety in the auxiliaries that appear before the subject. Are you going to play with me? Can also add ‘do’ in questions. Do dogs like ice cream? Still cannot use inversion or a eh-word in the same question, such as “Why is he crying?”
Stage 5: Both wh- and yes/no questions are formed correctly. Are these your boots? Why did you do that? Does Daddy have a box? Negative questions may still be difficult. Why the teddy bear can’t go outside? Also children overgeneralize the inverted form for simple questions to produce sentences such as, “ Ask him why can’t he go out.”
Stage 6: Children are able to correctly form all question types, including negative and complex embedded questions.
Formulaic units
Expressions or phrases that are often perceived or learned as unanalyzed chunks, such as “What’s that?” as a single unit of language rather than as three units.
Performance
The way language is used in listening, speaking, reading, writing. Performance is contrasted with competence, which is the knowledge that underlies our ability to use language. Performance is affected by inattention or fatigue, while competence is more stable, at least for the mature native speaker.
Overgeneralization
The result of trying to use a rule or pattern in an inappropriate context, such as putting the regular-verb ending “-ed” on an irregular verb: buyed instead of bought.
Question types:
- Yes/no questions
- wh- questions
- Negative questions
- complex embedded questions.
Others?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question
Metalinguistic awareness
Ability to treat language as an object; being able to define a word, or say what sounds make up that word.
Pre-school years
By age four, children have acquired the basic structures of the languages spoken to them. They can ask questions, give commands, report real events, create stories about imaginary ones, using correct word order and grammatical markers most of the time.
Children’s language acquisition efforts are spent in developing their ability to use language in a widening social environment.
Also begin to develop metalinguistic awareness (ability to treat language as an object separate form the meaning it conveys).
Children spend thousands of hours interacting with the language—participating in conversations, listening to others converse, being read to, watching television, etc. By the time they go to school, they have been in contact with the language for 20,000 hours or more.
School years
Learning to read gives a major boost to metalinguistic awareness. Discover ambiguity: words and sentences can have multiple meanings. Leads to word jokes, trick questions, and riddles.
Astonishing growth of vocabulary: between several hundred and more than a thousand words a year, depending on how much and how widely children read. Reading a variety of text types is an essential part of vocabulary growth.
Importance of reading
Reading a variety of text types is an essential part of vocabulary growth.
A child using a new word but mispronouncing it in a way that reveals that it has been encounter on in written form.
Language registers
Different language for different settings: speaking and writing have different registers, and the register for writing a research report differs from that used for writing a letter to a friend.
Language variety
A way of speaking and using language that is typical of a particular regional, socioeconomic, or ethnic group. A “dialect”. While some varieties are stigmatized as “uneducated”, each has its own rules and patterns that are as complex and systematic as those of standard languages.
Standard variety
The variety of a language that is typically used for formal writing and formal public speaking (including broadcasting). English has a number of “standard varieties” that are used in various English-speaking countries. American English, British English, Canadian English (inner circle countries), and Indian English (outer-circle country). All also have numerous ethnic, regional, and socioeconomic varieties.
bilingualism
Ability to use two languages. Does not specify the degree of proficiency in either language.
Chunk
A unit of language that is often perceived as a single unit. Formulaic expressions, such as “Thank You” and “What’s that” as well as bits of language that frequently occur together, such as “ice cream cone” and “significant difference”.
Behaviorist perspective
Influential in 40’s and 50’s. B. F. Skinner (1957)
Imitation and practice are the primary processes in language development. When children imitate the language of those around them, they receive positive reinforcement: praise or successful communication. Encouraged by this, children continue to imitate and practice the sounds and patterns until they form “habits” of correct language use. Therefore, the quality and quantity of language heard by the child, as well as the consistency of reinforcement, shape the child’s language behavior. This theory gives great importance to the environment as the source of everything the child needs to learn.
Focus is learning the patterns of the language, then meaning.
Imitation and practice alone does not explain some of the forms used by children. They pick out patterns and generalize them to new contexts, create new forms and uses of words. Sentences are usually comprehensible and often correct.
Limitations of behaviorist perspective: explains how children learn some of the regular and routine aspects of language, especially in the earliest stages. But children who do little imitation also acquire language just as fast and fully as those who do a lot. While behaviorism explains over-generalizations that children make, it does not explain well the acquisition of more complex grammar.
Imitation
word-for-word repetition of all or part of someone else’s utterance. Children imitate selectively based on something new that they have just begun to understand and use. Some children imitate a lot, others not so much.
Mother: Shall we play with the dolls?
Lucy: Play with dolls.
Practice
Repetitive manipulation of form.
Cindy: He eat carrots. The other one eat carrots. They both eat carrots.
Innatist perspective
Human beings are born with mental structures that are designed specifically for the acquisition of language.
Noam Chomsky: all human languages are based on some innate universal principles. Children are biologically programmed for language, and language develops in just the same way that other biological functions develop. Environment contributes only people who speak to the child.
Behavioral perspective fails to account for the fact that children know more about the structure of the language than can be learned from samples of language they hear from others. Children are born with a specific innate ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules of the language system from the samples of natural language to which they are exposed. This innate endowment is a template containing universal principles of all human languages, a universal grammar.
Universal grammar (UG)
Innate linguistic knowledge that consists of a set of principles common to all languages. This term is associated with Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition.
Critical period hypothesis (CPH)
The proposal that language can be acquired only during a limited period.
Animals, including humans, are genetically programmed to acquire certain kinds of knowledge and skill at specific times in life. Beyond these critical periods, those abilities are either difficult or impossible to acquire.
Auxiliary verbs
Can, do, will, would, should, might
Semiotics
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies and in the Saussurean tradition called semiology) is the study of meaning-making. This includes the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. However, as different from linguistics, semiotics also studies non-linguistic sign systems. Semiotics is often divided into three branches:
Semantics: relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning
Syntactics: relations among signs in formal structures
Pragmatics: relation between signs and sign-using agents
