438  CHAPTER 9  Language Acquisition

after puberty may be because there are sensitive periods for L2 acquisition.
Some theories of second language acquisition suggest that the same principles
­operate that account for first language acquisition. A second view suggests that
the acquisition of a second language in adulthood involves general learning
mechanisms rather than the specifically linguistic principles used by children.
The universality of the language acquisition process, the stages of develop-
ment, and the relatively short period in which the child constructs a complex
grammatical system without overt teaching suggest that the human species
is innately endowed with special language acquisition abilities and that lan-
guage is based in human biology.
All normal children learn whatever language or languages they are ex-
posed to, from Afrikaans to Zuni. This ability is not dependent on race, social
class, geography, or even intelligence (within a normal range). This ability is
uniquely human.

References for Further Reading

Berko, J. “The child’s leaning of English morphology,” Word 14(1958): 150–177.
Brown, R. 1973. A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Clark, E. 2009. First language acquisition, 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Gass, S. and L. Selinker. 2008. Second language acquisition: An introductory course,
3rd ed. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Guasti, M. T. 2004. Language acquisition: The growth of grammar. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Hakuta, K. 1986. Mirror of language: The debate on bilingualism. New York: Basic Books.
Ingram, D. 1989. First language acquisition: method, description and explanation. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Jakobson, R. 1971. Studies on child language and aphasia. The Hague: Mouton.
Lust, B. 2006. Child language: acquisition and growth. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
O’Grady, W. 2005. How children learn language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Ortega, L. 2009. Understanding second language acquisition. London: Hodder
Education.
Saville-Troike, M. 2005. Introducing second language acquisition. Cambridge, UK: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Saxton, M. 2010. Child language: acquisition and development. London, UK: Sage Pub-
lications Ltd.
White, L. 2003. Second language acquisition and Universal Grammar. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.

Exercises

1. Baby talk is a term used to label the word forms that many adults use
when speaking to children. Examples in English are choo-choo for
‘train’ and bow-wow for ‘dog.’ Baby talk seems to exist in every lan-
guage and culture. At least two things seem to be universal about baby

Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
 Exercises  439

talk: The words that have baby-talk forms fall into certain semantic cat-
egories (e.g., food and animals), and the words are phonetically simpler
than the adult forms (e.g., tummy /tʌmi/ for ‘stomach’ /stʌmɪk/). List
all the baby-talk words you can think of in your native language; then
(1) separate them into semantic categories, and (2) try to state general
rules for the kinds of phonological reductions or simplifications that
occur.

2. In this chapter we discussed the way children acquire rules of question

formation. The following examples of children’s early questions are from
a stage that is later than those discussed in the chapter. Formulate a gen-
eralization to describe this stage.
Can I go? Can I can’t go?
Why do you have one tooth? Why you don’t have a tongue?
What do frogs eat? What do you don’t like?
Do you like chips? Do you don’t like bananas?

3. Find a child between two and four years old. Note the age in years;
months, and play with the child for about thirty minutes. Keep a list
of all words and/or “sentences” that are used inappropriately. Describe
what the child’s meanings for these words and sentences probably are.
Describe the syntactic or morphological errors (including omissions). If
the child is producing multiword sentences, write a grammar that could
account for the data you have collected.

4. Roger Brown and his coworkers at Harvard University studied the lan-
guage development of three children, referred to in the literature as
Adam, Eve, and Sarah. The following are samples of their utterances
during the “two-word stage.”
a coat my stool poor man
a celery that knee little top
a Becky more coffee dirty knee
a hands more nut that Adam
my mummy two tinker-toy big boot
One observation made by Brown was that many of the sentences and
phrases produced by the children were ungrammatical from the point of
view of the adult grammar. Mark with an asterisk any of the above NPs that
are ungrammatical in the adult grammar of English and state the “viola-
tion” for each starred item. For example, if one of the utterances were Lotsa
book, you might say: “The modifier lotsa must be followed by a plural noun.”

5. In the holophrastic (one-word) stage of child language acquisition, the

child’s phonological system differs in systematic ways from that in the
adult grammar. The inventory of sounds and the phonemic contrasts
are smaller, and there are greater constraints on phonotactic rules. (See
chapter 6 for a discussion of these aspects of phonology.)
A. For each of the following words produced by a child, state what the
substitution is, and any other differences that result.

Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
 440  CHAPTER 9  Language Acquisition

Example:
spook [pʰuk] Substitution: initial cluster [sp] reduced to single
consonant; /p/ becomes aspirated, showing that child has
­acquired the aspiration rule.
 (1) don’t [dot]
 (2) skip [kʰɪp]
 (3) shoe [su]
 (4) that [dæt]
 (5) play [pʰe]
 (6) thump [dʌp]
 (7) bath [bæt]
 (8) chop [tʰap]
 (9) kitty [kɪdi]
(10) light [waɪt]
(11) dolly [daʊi]
(12) grow [go]
B. State general rules that account for the children’s deviations from the
adult pronunciations.
6. Children learn demonstrative words such as this, that, these, and those;
temporal terms such as now, then, and tomorrow; and spatial terms such
as here, there, right, and behind relatively late. What do all these words
have in common? (Hint: See the pragmatics section of chapter 4.) Why
might that factor delay their acquisition?

7. We saw in this chapter how children overgeneralize rules such as the

plural rule, producing forms such as mans and mouses. What might a
child learning English use instead of the adult words given?
a. children
b. went
c. better
d. best
e. brought
f. sang
g. geese
h. worst
i. knives
j. worse
8. The following words are from the lexicons of two children ages one year
six months (1;6) and two (2;0) years old. Compare the pronunciation of
the words to adult pronunciation.

Child 1 (1;6) Child 2 (2;0)

soap [doʊp] bib [bɛ] light [waɪt] bead [biː]
feet [bit] slide [daɪ] sock [sʌk] pig [pɛk]
sock [kak] dog [da] geese [gis] cheese [tis]
goose [gos] cheese [ʧis] fish [fɪs] bees [bis]
dish [dɪʧ] shoes [dus] sheep [ʃip] bib [bɪp]

Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
 Exercises  441

a. What happens to final consonants in the language of these two chil-

dren? Formulate the rule(s) in words. Do all final consonants behave
the same way? If not, which consonants undergo the rule(s)? Is this a
natural class?
b. On the basis of these data, do any pairs of words allow you to iden-
tify any of the phonemes in the grammars of these children? What
are they? Explain how you were able to determine your answer.
9. Make up a “wug test” to test a child’s knowledge of the following
morphemes:
comparative -er (as in bigger)
superlative -est (as in biggest)
progressive -ing (as in I am dancing)
agentive -er (as in writer)
10. Children frequently produce sentences such as the following:
Don’t giggle me.
I danced the clown.
Yawny Baby—you can push her mouth open to drink her.
Who deaded my kitty cat?
Are you gonna nice yourself?
a. How would you characterize the difference between the grammar
or lexicon of children who produce such sentences and that of adult
English?
b. Can you think of similar, but well-formed, examples in adult English?
11. Many Arabic speakers tend to insert a vowel in their pronunciation of
English words. The first column has examples from L2ers whose L1 is
Egyptian Arabic; the second column has examples from L2ers whose L1
is Iraqi Arabic (consider [ʧ] to be a single consonant):

L1 = Egyptian Arabic L1 = Iraqi Arabic

[bilastik] plastic [ifloːr] floor
[θiriː] three [ibleːn] plane
[tiransilet] translate [ʧilidren] children
[silaɪd] slide [iθriː] three
[firɛd] Fred [istadi] study
[ʧildiren] children [ifrɛd] Fred
a. What vowel do the Egyptian Arabic speakers insert and where?
b. What vowel do the Iraqi Arabic speakers insert and where?
c. Based on the position of the italicized epenthetic vowel in “I wrote
to him,” can you guess which list, A or B, belongs to Egyptian Arabic
and which belongs to Iraqi Arabic?

Arabic A Arabic B
kitabta ‘I wrote him’ katabtu ‘I wrote him’
kitabla ‘He wrote to him’ katablu ‘He wrote to him’
kitabitla ‘I wrote to him’ katabtilu ‘I wrote to him’

Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
 442  CHAPTER 9  Language Acquisition

12. Following is a list of utterances recorded from Sammy at age

two-and-a-half:
a. Mikey not see him.
b. Where ball go?
c. Look Mommy, doggie.
d. Big doggie.
e. He no bite ya.
f. He eats mud.
g. Kitty hiding.
h. Grampie wear glasses.
i. He funny.
j. He loves hamburgers.
k. Daddy ride bike.
l. That’s mines.
m. That my toy.
n. Him sleeping.
o. Want more milk.
p. Read moon book.
q. Me want that.
r. Teddy up.
s. Daddy ’puter.
t. ’Puter broke.
u. Cookies and milk!!!
v. Me Superman.
w. Mommy’s angry.
x. Allgone kitty.
y. Here my batball.

Part One: What stage of language development is Sammy in?

Part Two: Calculate the number of morphemes in each of Sammy’s
utterances.
Part Three: What is Sammy’s MLU in morphemes? In words?
Part Four: Challenge question: Deciding the morpheme count for
several of Sammy’s words requires some thought. For each
of the following, determine whether it should count as one
or two morphemes and why.
allgone
batball
glasses
cookies

Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
 Exercises  443

13. The following sentences were uttered by children in the telegraphic

stage (the second column contains a word-by-word gloss, and the last
column is a translation of each sentence that includes elements that the
child omitted):

Child’s utterance Gloss Translation

Swedish Se, blomster har look flowers have ‘Look, (I) have
 flowers.’
English Tickles me ‘It tickles me.’
French Mange du pain eat some bread ‘S/he eats some
 bread.’
German S[ch]okolade holen chocolate get ‘I/we get chocolate.’
Dutch Earst kleine first little book read ‘First, I/we read a
 boekje lezen  little book.’
In each of the children’s sentences, the subject is missing, although this
is not grammatical in the respective adult languages (in contrast to lan-
guages such as Spanish and Italian in which it is grammatical to omit
the subject).
a. Develop two hypotheses as to why the child might omit sentence sub-
jects during this stage. For example, one hypothesis might be “chil-
dren are limited in the length of sentences they can produce, so they
drop subjects.”
b. Evaluate the different hypotheses. For example, an objection to the
hypothesis given in (a) might be “If length is the relevant factor, why
do children consistently drop subjects but not objects?”
14. Following is a list of overextensions that various children have made. In
each case say what the basis is for the overextension. For example, the
basis for the overextension of ball in example (a) is shape. All the objects
in column B are round.

A B
a. ball balls, balloon, marble, grapefruits, oranges, pompoms
b. cookie cookies, Cheerios, cucumbers
c. birdie birds, airplanes, flies, bees, kites
d. bowwow dogs, cows, guinea pigs, cats, hamsters
e. truck firetruck, garbage truck, bus, van
f. dada father, policeman, mailman, doctor, men’s tie, baseball cap
g. moon moon, half-moon shaped lemon slice, circular chrome
dial on dishwasher, half a Cheerio, hangnail

Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.