Language Acquisition

Question 1

Language acquisition:

Answer 1

All (normal) human children… • learn a language. • can learn any language they are exposed to. • learn all languages at basically the same rate. • follow the same stages of language acquisition.

Question 2

Children’s acquisition of language:

Answer 2

occurs quickly • adult-like grammar after about 5-6 years • without explicit instruction • uniformly • uniform stages of acquisition • uniform results

Question 3

Phonetics:

Answer 3

The sounds of a language

Question 4

Phonology:

Answer 4

The sound patterns of a language

Question 5

Morphology:

Answer 5

Rules of word-formation

Question 6

Syntax:

Answer 6

How words combine into phrases/sentences

Question 7

Semantics:

Answer 7

How to derive meaning from a sentence

Question 8

Pragmatics:

Answer 8

How to properly use language in context

Question 9

Lexical items:

Answer 9

words, morphemes, idioms, etc

Question 10

Innateness Hypothesis:

Answer 10

Living organisms have innate behaviors, argues that our ability to acquire (human) language is innate (genetically encoded).

Question 11

Language Acquisition Device (LAD):

Answer 11

an inherited mechanism that enables children to develop a language structure from linguistic data supplied by parents and others. In Noam Chomsky’s reinterpretation, however, the LAD contains significant innate knowledge that actively interprets the input: Only this can explain how a highly abstract competence in language results from a relatively deprived input.

Question 12

Universal Grammar (UG):

Answer 12

the set of structural characteristics shared by all languages • Innateness Hypothesis takes UG to be innate. • UG is not, however, dependent on the innateness hypothesis.

Question 13

The goal of theoretical linguistics:

Answer 13

to discover the properties of Universal Grammar.

Question 14

Theories of Acquisition:

Answer 14

Theories of Acquisition: 1. Imitation 2. Reinforcement 3. Active Construction of a Grammar 4. Connectionist Theories

Question 15

Imitation:

Answer 15

children imitate what they hear • Evidence: • Specific languages are not transferred genetically. • Words are arbitrary, thus children must hear them to ‘imitate’ them.

Question 16

Reinforcement:

Answer 16

children learn through positive and negative reinforcement

Question 17

Active Construction of a Grammar:

Answer 17

Children invent grammar rules themselves. • Ability to develop rules is innate.

Question 18

Acquisition process:

Answer 18

Listen • Try to find patterns • Hypothesize a rule for the pattern • e.g. past tense /-ed/ • Test hypothesis • Modify rule as necessary

Question 19

Connectionist Theories:

Answer 19

Claims that exposure to language develops and strengthens neural connections. • Higher frequency → stronger connections • allows for exploitation of statistical information • ‘rules’ derived from the strength of connections

Question 20

Critical Period Hypothesis:

Answer 20

there is a critical period in development during which a language can be acquired like a native speaker

Question 21

Prelinguistic:

Answer 21

babies make noises, but not yet babbling • crying, cooing • response to some stimuli (hunger, discomfort…) • sensitive to native and non-native sound distinctions

Question 22

Babbling:

Answer 22

starts at about 6 months of age • not linked to biological needs • pitch and intonation resemble language spoken around them

Question 23

One-word Stage:

Answer 23

begins around age 1 • speaks one-word sentences (called ‘holophrastic’) • usually 1-syllable words, with CV structure • consonant clusters reduced • words learned as a whole, rather than a sequence of sounds • ‘easier’ sounds produced earlier • Manner: nasals > glides > stops > liquids > fricatives > affricates • Place: labials > velars > alveolars > palatals • better perception than production (e.g. difficult sounds like [r])

Question 24

Two-word stage:

Answer 24

starts at about 1.5-2 years of age • vocabulary of +/- 50 words • sentences consist of two words (telegraphic) • e.g. all gone sock • those two words could have a number of relations • e.g. Daddy car • usually lacks function words • usually lacks inflectional morphology

Question 25

Beyond 2-word stage:

Answer 25

sentences with 3+ words (no 3-word stage) • begins using function words • have already learned some aspects of grammar: • word order (e.g. SVO in English, SOV in Japanese) • position of determiners • grammar resembles adult grammar by about age 5

Question 26

Imitation, Nativism or Behaviorism:

Answer 26

based on the empiricist or behavioral approach

Question 27

Innateness or Mentalism:

Answer 27

based on the rationalistic or mentalist approach

Question 28

Cognition:

Answer 28

based on the cognitive-psychological approach

Question 29

Motherese or Input:

Answer 29

based on the maternal approach to language acquisition

Question 30

Popular View:

Answer 30

Children learn to speak by imitating the utterances heard around them and analogy

Question 31

Children strengthen responses:

Answer 31

by repetitions, corrections, and other reactions provided by adults, language is practice-based

Question 32

General Perception:

Answer 32

there is no difference between the way one learns a language and the way one learns to do anything else

Question 33

Learning:

Answer 33

controlled by the conditions under which it takes place and that, as long as individual are subjected to the same condition, they will learn in the same condition

Question 34

Linguistic Competence:

Answer 34

concerned with the child’s grammar, the linguistic input, and construction of grammatical structures

Question 35

Performance:

Answer 35

deals with the nature of the child’s rule system; the psychological processes the child uses in learning the language, and how the child establishes meaning in the language input

Question 36

Principles:

Answer 36

According to UG, the learner’s initial state is supposed to consist of a set of universal principles common to all human languages

Question 37

Parameters:

Answer 37

determine the ways in which languages can vary

Question 38

Economy of derivation:

Answer 38

a principle stating that movements/transformations only occur in order to match interpretable features with interpretable features

Question 39

Economy of representation:

Answer 39

the principle that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose, the structure of a sentence should be no longer or more complex than required to satisfy constraints on grammaticality

Question 40

Cognitive Theory is criticized for:

Answer 40

it is highly difficult to show precise correlations between specific cognitive behaviors and linguistic features at the very early stage of language acquisition as the children become linguistically and cognitively more advanced in the course of time.