First language
Acquisition
Muneerah Al Shuhail
Introduction
Acquiring a first language is an amazing process to witness for
several reasons:
1. Every language is complex.
2. Before the age of 5, the child knows most of the complicated system
of grammar.
Use the syntactic, phonological, morphological and semantic rules of
the language.
Join sentences.
Ask questions.
Use appropriate pronouns.
Negate sentences.
Form relative clauses.
Basic requirements
1.A child requires interaction with other language-users in order to
bring the general language capacity s/he has into operation.
Genie
Cultural transmission
2.The child must be physically capable.
Being able to speak
Being able to hear
Is hearing enough?
Interaction (The crucial requirement)
All these requirements are related.
The acquisition schedule
All normal children develop language at roughly
the same time, along the same schedule.
The biological schedule is related to the
maturation of the infant’s brain to cope with the
linguistic input.
Young children acquire the language by
identifying the regularities in what is heard and
applying those regularities in what they say.
Caregiver speech
A type of simplified speech adopted by
someone who spends time interacting with a
child is called caregiver speech.
Caregiver speech is characterized by:
Frequent use of questions
Simplified lexicon
Phonological reduction
Higher pitch- extra loudness
Stressed intonation
Simple sentences
A lot of repetition
cont.,
Caregiver speech is also called ‘motherese’.
caregiver speech Assigns interactive roles to
young children
E.g.
MOTHER: Look!
CHILD: (touches picture)
MOTHER: what are those?
CHILD: (vocalizes a babble string and smiles)
MOTHER: yes, there are rabbits
CHILD: Vocalizes and smiles
MOTHER: (laughs) yes, rabbit
Cooing
Cooing:
1. Few weeks: cooing and gurgling,
playing with sounds. Their abilities are
constrained by physiological limitations
2. They seem to be discovering phonemes
at this point.
3. Producing sequences of vowel-like
sounds- high vowels [i] and [u].
Babbling
Babbling:
1. Different vowels and consonants ba-ba-
ba and ga-ga-ga
2. 9-10 months- intonation patterns and
combination of ba-ba-ba-da-da
3. Nasal sounds also appear ma-ma-ma
4. 10-11- use of vocalization to express
emotions
5. Late stage- complex syllable
combination (ma-da-ga-ba)
The one-word stage
12-18 months.
recognizable single-unit utterances.
single terms are uttered for everyday objects “milk”,
“cookie”, “cat”, “cup”, and “spoon” [pun].
Holophrastic (wasa = what's that)
The two-word stage
Vocabulary moves beyond 50 words
By 2 years old, children produce utterances ‘baby chair’,
‘mommy eat’
Interpretation depends on context
Adults behave as if communication is taking place.
The child not only produces speech, but receives feedback
confirming that the utterance worked as a contribution to the
interaction.
By this age, whether the child is producing 200 or 300 words,
he or she will be capable of understanding 5 times as many
Telegraphic speech
2-2½ years:
1. The child produces ‘multiple-word’ speech.
2. The child has already developed sentence-building capacity & can get
the word order correct („cat drink milk‟, „daddy go bye-bye’)
3. A number of grammatical inflections begin to appear.
4. Simple prepositions (in, on) are also used
5. Vocabulary is expanding rapidly.
3 years:
1. Vocabulary has grown more.
2. Better pronunciation
The acquisition process
The child does not acquire the language by
imitating adults- but by trying out constructions
and testing them. They also do not respond to
grammatical corrections.
CHILD: my teacher holded the baby rabbit and
we patted them
MOTHER: did you say your teacher held the baby
rabbit?
CHILD: yes. she holded the baby rabbit and we
patted them
MOTHER: Did you say she held them tightly?
CHILD: no, she holded them loosely
Developing Morphology
By 2-and-a-half years old- use of some
inflectional morphemes to indicate the
grammatical function of nouns and verbs.
The first inflection to appear is –ing after it comes
the –s for plural.
Overgeneralization: the child applies –s to words
like ‘foots’ ‘mans’ and later ‘feets’ ‘mens’
Developing
morphology
The use of possessive ‘s’ appears ‘mommy’s bag’
Forms of verb to be appear ‘is’ and ‘are’
The –ed for past tense appears and it is also
overgeneralized as in ‘goed’ or holded’
Finally –s marker for 3rd person singular preset
tense appears with full verbs first then with
auxiliaries (does-has)
Developing syntax
The development of two syntactic structures- three stages
Forming questions
Forming negatives
Forming questions
1st stage:
Insert where and who to the beginning of an
expression with rising intonation
E.g. sit chair? Where horse go?
2nd stage:
More complex expression
E.g. why you smiling? You want eat?
3rd stage:
Inversion of subject and verb
E.g. will you help me? What did I do?
Forming negatives
Stage 1:
Putting not and no at the beginning
e.g. not teddy bear, no sit here
Stage 2:
Don’t and can’t appear but still use no and not before
VERBS
e.g. he no bite you, I don’t want it
Stage 3:
didn’t and won’t appear
e.g. I didn’t caught it, she won’t go
Developing Semantics
During the two-word stage children use their limited
vocabulary to refer to a large number of unrelated
objects.
Overextension: overextend the meaning of a word on the
basis of similarities of shape, sound, and size.
e.g. use ball to refer to an apple, and egg, a grape and a
ball.
This is followed by a gradual process of narrowing down.
Developing Semantics
Antonymous relations are acquired late
The distinction between more/less, before/after seem to be later
acquisition.
FLA (L1A) vs SLA (L2A)
Assignment
What are the differences between FLA and SLA? And
what makes SLA more difficult and less successful?
Thank You!!
