Chapter 2

First Language
Acquisition

DR. HAYA ALDAWSARI

 Why Is It Important to Study and Understand First Language
Aaquisition?
The reasons for this are clear. We have all observed children acquiring
their first language easily and well, yet individuals learning a second
language, particularly in an educational setting, can meet with great
difficulty and sometimes failure. We should therefore be able to learn
something from a systematic study of that first language learning
experience.
A coherent grasp of the nature of first language learning is an invaluable
aid, if not an essential component, in the construction of a theory of
second language acquisition.
This wave of research in child language acquisition led language teachers
and teacher trainers to study some of the general findings of such
research with a view to drawing analogies between first and second
language acquisition, and even to justifying certain teaching methods and
techniques on the basis of first language learning principles.
 Concerns about Comparisons between L1 & L2
Acquisition
o The direct comparisons must be treated with caution,
however.
o There are dozens of salient differences between first and
second language learning: the most obvious difference, in
Loading…
the case of adult second language learning, is the
tremendous cognitive and affective contrast between
adults and children.
 Theories of First Languages Acquisition
o Theories of language acquisition attempt to answer some
questions about how people can have the amazing language
acquisition ability.
o There are two polarized positions in the study of acquisition.
One is an extreme behaviorist position. It claims that
children’s environment, rather than their nature, can affect the
children. On the other hand, the constructivist claims that
children came into the world with very specific innate
knowledge and that they learn to function in a language
through interaction. (p.26)
Three Positions in First Language Acquisition

Behavioristic Position Nativist Position Functional Position

 Characteristics of the Behavioral Approaches

Children come into this world with a tabula rasa (a clean slate bearing no
preconceived notions about the world or about language) and that these children are
then shaped by the environment and slowly conditioned through various schedules
of reinforcement.
A behaviorist might consider effective language behavior to be the production of
correct responses to stimuli. If a particular response is reinforced, it then becomes
habitual, or conditioned. Thus, children produce linguistic responses that are
reinforced. Loading…
The behaviorist views imitation and practice as primary processes in language
development.
- Imitation: Word for word repetition of all or part of someone else’s utterance.
e.g. Mother: Would you like some bread and peanut butter? Katie: Some
bread and peanut butter
- Practice: Repetitive manipulation of form.
e.g. Michel I can handle it. Hannah can handle it. We can handle it.
Children’s imitation is selective and based on what they are currently learning.
 Skinner’s Behavioral Model
One of the best-known attempts to construct a behavioral model of linguistic
behavior was embodied in B.F. Skinner's classic, Verbal Behavior (1957).
Skinner’s model was an extension of his general theory of learning by operant
conditioning.
Operant conditioning is the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form
of behavior. It refers to conditioning in which the human being produces a response,
or operant (a sentence or utterance) without necessarily observable stimuli. This
operant is maintained (learned) by reinforcement (e.g., a positive verbal or nonverbal
response from another person). If a child says, “want milk” and a parent gives the
child some milk, the operant is reinforced and, over repeated instances, is
conditioned.
According to Skinner, verbal behavior, like other behavior, is controlled by its
consequences. When consequences are rewarding, behavior is maintained and is
increased in strength and frequency. When consequences are punishing, or when
there is a total lack of reinforcement, the behavior is weakened and eventually
stopped.
 Challenges to Behavioral Approaches
➢ Skinner's model of verbal behavior still left many questions about
language unanswered. It failed to account for:
- the capacity to acquire language,
- language development itself,
- the abstract nature of language,
- the relationship between meaning and utterance,
- the child's creativity,
- and the interactive nature of language acquisition.
Challenges to Behavioral Approaches: Chomsky’s Criticisms

o Noam Chomsky argues that the behaviorist theory fails to recognize what
has come to be called “the logical problem of language acquisition‟. This
logical problem refers to the fact that children come to know more about the
structure of their language than they could reasonably be expected to learn
on the basis of the samples of language which they hear. Children do not
learn and reproduce a large set of sentences, but they routinely create new
sentences that they have never learned before. They internalize rules rather
than strings of words (e.g., it breaked /mommy goed).
o The language the child is exposed to in the environment is full of confusing
information. (e.g., false starts, incomplete sentences, or slips of the tongue).
o Children are not systematically corrected or instructed on language points.
Parental corrections are inconsistent or even non-existent. When parents do
correct, they tend to focus on meaning and truth values and not on language
itself.
 The Nativist Approach

o The term nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that

language acquisition is innately determined, that we are born with a
genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic perception of
language around us, resulting in the construction of an internalized
system of language.
o Innateness hypotheses gained support from several sides.
Chomsky (1965) claimed the existence of innate properties of
language to explain the child’s mastery of a native language in such
a short time despite the highly abstract nature of the rules of
language. This innate knowledge, according to Chomsky, was
embodied in a metaphorical "little black box" in the brain, a
language acquisition device (LAD).
 The Nativist Approach: LAD
o For the LAD to work, the child needs access only to samples of a
natural language. These language samples serve as a trigger to
activate the device. Once it is activated, the child is able to discover
the structure of the language to be learned by matching the innate
knowledge of basic grammatical relationships to the structures of the
particular language in the environment.
o LAD is the imaginary “black box” which exists somewhere in the
brain. It is thought to contain all and only the principles which are
universal to all human languages. (P. 28)
o More recently, Chomsky and his followers no longer use the term LAD,
but refers to the child’s innate endowment as Universal Grammar (UG).
o Chomsky drew attention to the fact that children seem to develop
language in similar ways and on a similar schedule.
 The Nativist Approach: Universal Grammar
o Assuming that all human beings are genetically equipped with
abilities that enable them to acquire language, researchers expanded
the LAD notion by positing a system of universal linguistic rules that
went well beyond what was originally proposed for the LAD.
o Universal Grammar (UG) research attempts to discover what it is that
Loading…
all children, regardless of their environmental stimuli (the
language(s) they hear around them) bring to the language
acquisition process. Such studies have looked at question
formation, negation, word order, and other grammatical phenomena.
 The Nativist Approach

o Research has shown that the child's language is a legitimate

system in its own right:
o Children learn language not as a series of separate discrete items,
but as an integrated system.
o The child's linguistic development is not a process of developing
fewer and fewer " incorrect" structures. Rather, the child's language
at any stage is systematic in that the child is constantly forming
hypotheses on the basis of the input received and then testing
those hypotheses in speech (and comprehension). As the child's
language develops, those hypotheses are continually revised,
reshaped, or sometimes abandoned. (e.g. goed / breaked)
Contributions of Nativist Approaches to our
Understanding of the L1 Acquisition Process

1. Freedom from the restrictions of the "scientific

method'' to explore the unseen, unobservable,
underlying, abstract linguistic structures being
developed in the child.
2. The construction of a number of potential
properties of Universal Grammar.
3. Systematic description of the child's linguistic
repertoire as rule-governed.
 Functional Approaches
o There has been a shift in patterns of research; it was a move even more
deeply into the essence of language (constructivist).
o (1) Researchers began to see that language was just one manifestation of
the cognitive and affective ability to deal with the world, with others, and
with the self. (2) Moreover, the generative rules that were proposed under the
nativist framework were abstract, formal, explicit, and quite logical, yet they
dealt specifically with the forms of language and not with the the deeper
functional levels of meaning constructed from social interaction.
o Examples of forms of language are morphemes, words, sentences,and the
rules that govern them. Functions are the meaningful, interactive purposes
within a social (pragmatic) context that we accomplish with the forms.
 Functional Approaches
o The emphasis of the functional perspective was on Social Interaction & Language
Development.
o Since language is used for interactive communication, some research looked at
the communicative functions of language:
- What do children know and learn about talking with others? the interaction
between hearer and speaker? conversational cues?
o Within such a perspective, the very heart of language - its communicative and
pragmatic function - is being tackled.
It is noteworthy that a complete, consistent, unified theory of first language
acquisition cannot yet be claimed.
Issues in First Language
Acquisition
 Competence and Performance

o Competence refers to one's

underlying knowledge of a system,o Performance is the overtly
event, or fact. It is the non- observable and concrete
observable ability to do something. manifestation or realization of
o In reference to language, competence. It is the actual doing
competence is one's underlying of something: walking, singing,
knowledge of the system of a speaking.
language—its rules of grammar, itso In reference to language,
vocabulary, all the pieces of a performance is actual production
language, and how those pieces fit (speaking, writing) or the
together. comprehension (listening,
reading) of linguistic events.
 Comprehension and Production
o These two aspects should not be confused with the competence
/ performance distinction; they are aspects of both performance
and competence.
o In child language, most observational and research evidence
points to the general superiority of comprehension over
production:
1. Children seem to understand "more" than they actually
produce.
2. Even adults understand more vocabulary than they ever use in
speech, and also perceive more syntactic variation than they
actually produce.
o Hence, all aspects of linguistic comprehension precede, or
facilitate, linguistic production.
 Nature or Nurture?
o We do observe that language acquisition is universal; every child
acquires language. But how are the efficiency and success of that
learning determined by the environment the child is in?
o The "nature / nurture" controversy: What are those behaviors that
"nature" provides innately, in some sort of predetermined biological
timetable? - and what are those behaviors that are, by environmental
exposure - by "nurture,” by teaching - learned and internalized?
 Universals
o Closely related to the innateness controversy is the claim that
language is universally acquired in the same manner, and moreover,
that the deep structure of language at its deepest level may be
common to all languages.
o One of the keys to such inquiry lies in research on child language
acquisition across many different languages in order to determine the
commonalities.
o Much of current UG research is centered around what have come to be
known as principles and parameters. Principles are invariable
characteristics of human language that appear to apply to all
languages universally,such as word order, reduced reference (e.g.,
pronouns, ellipsis), nouns and noun classes, verbs and verb classes,
negation, and question formation.
 Universals
o Parameters, however, vary across languages. UG includes principles
with a limited number of built-in options (settings or values), which
allow for cross-linguistic variation. Such principles are known as
parameters.
o According to UG languages cannot vary in an infinite number of ways.
Parameters determine ways in which languages can vary.
o According to some researchers, the child's initial state is said to
"consist of a set of universal principles which specify some limited
possibilities of variation, expressible in terms of parameters which
need to be fixed in one of a few possible ways" (Saieemi, 1992, p. 58).
This means that the child's task of language learning is manageable
because of certain naturally occurring constraints.
 Systematicity and Variability
o One of the assumptions of current research on child language is the
systematicity of the process of acquisition. Children exhibit a remarkable
ability to infer the phonological, structural, lexical, and semantic system of
language.
o But in the midst of all this systematicity, there is an equally remarkable
amount of variability in the process of learning. Researchers do not agree
on how to define various "stages" of language acquisition, even in English.
o At any stage of his development, the learner operates according to the
system of rules he has constructed up to that point. A crucial issue is why
his performance is so variable. On one occasion he uses one rule while on
another he uses a different one.
 Language and Thought
o For years, researchers have examined the relationship between
language and cognition.
o Behaviorists think that cognition is too mentalistic to be studied
by the scientific method.
o Piaget (1972) gives an opposing position by claiming that
cognitive development is at the very center of the human
organism, and that language is dependent upon and springs
from cognitive development.
o Vygotsky (1962, 1978) claimed that social interaction, through
language, is a prerequisite to cognitive development.
 Language and Thought
o Thought and language were seen as two distinct cognitive
operations that grow together. (Schinkle-Llano 1993).
o One of the champions of the position that language affects
thought was Benjamin Whorf, who with Edward Sapir formed
the well-known Sapir Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity-
namely, that each language imposes on its speaker a particular
“world view.”
o The issue at stake in child language acquisition is to
determine how thought affects language, how language affects
thought, and how linguists can best describe and account for
the interaction of the two.
 Imitation
o It is a common informal observation that children are good
imitators. So we might think that imitation is one of the important
strategies a child uses in the acquisition of language.
o There are two types of imitation:
(1) Surface structure imitation: where a person repeats or mimics the
surface strings, attending to a phonological code rather than a
semantic code.
(2) Deep structure imitation: where a person concentrates on
language as a meaningful and communicative tool.
* See (Brown, 2002, p. 44) for examples
 Practice
o Do children practice their language? If so, how? What is the role of the
frequency of hearing and producing items in the acquisition of those
items?
o A behavioristic view would claim that practice – repetition and
association – is the key to the formation of habits by operant
conditioning.
o Practice is usually thought of as referring to speaking only. But one can
also think in terms of comprehension practice (the frequency of
linguistic input to the child).
o Is the acquisition of particular words or structures directly attributable
to their frequency in the child’s linguistic environment?
o Brown and Hanlon (1970) found that the frequency of occurrence of a
linguistic item in the speech of the mothers was a strong predictor of the
order of emergence of those items in their children’s speech.
 Input
o The role of input in the child's acquisition of language is undeniably
crucial. The speech that young children hear is primarily the speech
heard in the home, and much of that speech is parental speech or the
speech of older siblings.
o Children react very consistently to the deep structure and the
communicative function of language, and they do not react overtly to
expansions and grammatical corrections. Such input is largely ignored
unless there is some truth or falsity that the child can attend to.
What many researchers have showed is that in the long run, children
will, after consistent, repeated models in meaningful contexts,
eventually transfer correct forms to their own speech and thus correct
past mistakes.
 Discourse
While parental input is a significant part of the child's development of
conversational rules, it is only one aspect, as the child also interacts with peers
and, of course, with other adults.
While it used to be generally held that mere exposure to language is sufficient, it
is now clear that, in order for successful first language acquisition to take place,
interaction, rather than exposure, is required. Children do not learn language
from overhearing the conversations of others or from listening to the radio and
must, instead, acquire it in the context of being spoken to.
While conversation is a universal human activity performed routinely in the
course of daily living, the means by which children learn to take part in
conversation appear to be very complex.
How do children learn discourse rules? What are the key features children attend
to? How do they detect pragmatic or intended meaning? How are gender roles
acquired? These and other questions about the acquisition of discourse ability
are slowly being answered in the research.
Thank You
Loading…