Knowing a language

1.Knowing the Linguistic Code

2.Vocabulary
3.Grammar
4.Sounds of the language/pronouncation
5.Language comprehension
-listening comprehension
-reading comprehension
6.Language pproduction
-speaking
-writing

Communicative competence
The ability to use a language corectly to communicate appropriately and e ectively
in a variety of social situations. The communicative competence model consists of
4 competence areas

Linguistic competence
Knowing the language as a system: grammar, vocabulary, spelling, pronounciation,
punctuation, syntax, morphology, semantics, phonology, phonetics.

Sociolinguistic competence
The ability to apply social and cultural rules which govern appropriate language
use: formality, politeness, forms of address - e.g Pan/Pani, political correctness.

Discourse competence
An essential component of communicative competence and central to the mastery
of academic writing.

Strategic competence
Useful when you cannot verbally or non-verbally communicate with other
speakers. Using other strategies

The linguistic genius of babies

Basic facts
- Language is quintessentially human.
- It constitues of integral part of our lives. We use it to convey our needs, wants,
desires, plans, opinions, beliefs, thoughts, concerns and fears. Language
understood as communication seems to be as natural and fundamental as
breathing.
- We use spoken and written language on a daily basis
- Language is extremely complex.
- There is an overwhelming number of words in most modern languages.
- The lexicon of average adult native speaker of English has been estimated to be
at the level of 17k words
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 First language acquisition
- Chomsky argued that the behaviourist theory did not account „for the logical
problem of language acquisition”. In other words the behaviourist theory failed
to explain how it happens that children know more about the structure of their
language than they can learn from the samples to language they hear
- Chomsky argued that children’s minds are not blank states which will be lled by
imitating the language heard in the environment
- According to Chomsky, children are born with an innate ability to work out the
rules of the language system for themselves. They are able to do so on the basis
of the samples of a natural language they are exposed to. This inborn faculty -
language acquisition device (LAD) - contains the principles which are universal
to all human languages.
- Children, pre-equipped with such universal grammar (UG), learn the ways in
which the language they are acquiring makes use of these principles

Language acquisition mechanisms

- Developmental psycholinguistics abounds in theories concerning the
psychological mechanisms taking part in the process of language acquisition.
- Behaviourism - focus on directly observable human behavior rather than on the
mental processes underlying the behavior.
- Language was viewed as a form of verbal behaviour.
- An assumption evolved that children acquire language by means of imitation,
reinforcement, analogy and similar processes.
- One of the founders of behaviourist psychology - B.F. Skinner - proposed in
his book verbal behavior (1957) a model of language acquisition based on such
behaviourist principles and assumptions.

Imitation and reinforcement

• One of the assumptions of linguists in the behaviourist tradition was that
children just listen to what is said around them and imitate the speech they hear
• Consider the following examples to utterances produced by two and three-year-
olds

A. A my pencil
B. Two foot
C. Other one pants
D. What the boy hinted
E. Tooths, holded, eaten, comed

Behaviourist theory
- American behaviourist and psychologist B.F. Skinner developed the
behaviourist theory of language acquisition
- This theory suggests that learning a language is much like learning any new skill
through observation, imitation repetition, errors, rewards, and punishments. Or
what Skinner calls Operant Conditioning
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 - Behaviour theorist posit that language development is a learned behaviour.
When babies rst speak, they are trying to imitate the behaviour of their parents
and adults around them.
- A language would develop as responses to stimuli from the environment.
Hugging the baby for their rst words a reward that pushes them further on the
learning curve.
- Kids in schools could get either rewarded or punished for their language
learning acquisition process.
- Another suggestion within the behaviorist tradition is that children learn to
produce grammatically correct sentences because they receive positive
reinforcement when they say something right and negative reinforcement earn it
is not correct

Myths
- we cannot assume that children just listen to what is said around them and
imitate what they hear
- Even when they are trying to imitate what they hear they are not able to produce
sentences which they would not produce spontaneously
- There is ample evidence of imitation but the early language prouduced by
children proves they are not simply imitating adult speech
- As for the suggestion that children learn language through structured input I.e.
because adults speak to them in a simpli ed language: mothers, informally
referred to as baby talk. In this theory, the emphasis is placed on the role of the
environment in facilitating language acquisition
- While infants prefer to listen to motherese than to normal adult speech,
controlled studies have shown that the impact of mothesrese on a child’s
language development is not signi cant
- Analogy, imitation, reinforcement and structured input based theories control
cannot account for language development. They place too much emphasis on
the environment rather than on the linguistic creativity that children have and
their grammar-making abilities

The critical period hypothesis

- the innatist is often linked to the critical period hypothesis I.e. the hypothesis
that humans are genetically programmed to acquire certain knowledge and skills
at speci c times in life
- In the light of CPH once the critical moments have passed it is extremely
di cult, if not completely impossible to acquire such abilities
- As far as language development is concerned, the CPH argues that children
deprived of access to language in infancy and early childhood for example due t
isolation will not be able to acquire if this deprivation lasts too long
- Historically there have been a few „natural experiments” where children have
been deprived of contact with language. They provide evidence which seems to
support the CPH (the girls with no language - Ginnie Wiley)
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 - A more suitable test of the CPH is the case of children born to loving and caring
parents who do not have access to language at the usual time which is the case
for some profoundly deaf children who have hearing parents
- Children learning to sign as a rst language go through similar stages to those
encountered by hearing children who are learning spoken language. Even
though they are deprived of speech, they ful ll their urge to communicate by
means of a manual system. Existing longitudinal research studies support the
hypothesis that there is a critical period for rst language acquisition, whether
that language is oral or gestural

Ongoing debate on FLA

- the innatist theory, therefore, appears to be partly based on evidence that there
is a critical period for language acquisition
- As such it is also seen as theory which accounts for the logical problem of
language acquisition I.e. the question of how adult speaker master the
complexities of their rst language even though they are - more often than not -
only exposed to very limited samples of language
- Developmental and cognitive psychologists, on the other hand focus on the
interplay between children’s innate learning ability and the environment in which
they develop
- They argue that the innatists focus too much on the nal outcome (adult native
speaker competence) and not enough on the developmental aspects of
language acquisition. For them language acquisition is only one of mant
examples of child’s ability to learn from experience, which is why they do not
see any reason why we should assume that there is a speci c train structure
devoted to acquiring language

Cognitive and interactionist developmental theories

- one of the earliest proponents of the view that children’s language is built on
their cognitive development was the Swiss psychologist - Jean Piaget
- Piaget placed acquisition of ;language within the context of a child’s mental or
cognitive development . He argued that a child has to rst understand a concept
before they can acquire the particular language form which expresses that
concept
- Based on his observations of young children in their play and in their
interactions with objects and people. Piaget traced development of the
children’s cognitive (understanding of such phenomena as object make them
sink or oat on water)
- The developing cognitive understanding arises from the interaction between the
child and the things that can be observed or manipulated. For Piaget, language
can be used to represent knowledge that children hav acquired through physical
interaction with the environment

Language di erences
- languages di er and do not follow the same patterns. This results in di erences
in the process of language acquisition
- They di er in the range and combination of sounds they use, their lexical and
grammatical repertoires the meanings carried by the words and structures etc.
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 - Despite the countless di erences languages are usually internally consistent:
they display consistent phonological, structural and lexical patterns
- Such internal consistencies in a language facilitate the process of language
acquisition and subsequent e ective language use. They allow the speakers of a
given language to have expectations and to make predictions about the type of
information which may come next in the utterance.
- Languages also di er in terms of their complexity for learning (the complexity of
ideas expressed in language I.e. conceptual complexity; or the complexity of
forms used to express the given concepts I.e. formal complexity
- Various language forms can express the same conceptual complexit. For
instance, in English the concept of „more than one” is generally expressed by
adding one letter „-s” to a noun
- Generally, the pace of children’s cognitive development is similar across
languages and follows similar stages

Stages of FLA in children

- the earliest vocalizations are the sounds produced by babies when they are
crying to communicate the message that they are hungry, in pain or discomfort
- A little later come the cooing and gurgling sounds made by pleased babies,
lying in their cots admiring the toy above them
- Despite the limited control over the sounds they make in these early weeks of
life, babies are capable of di erentiating not only between the sounds made by
their parents but also between the sounds of human languages
- Quite importantly, however, to learn or retain their ability to distinguish between
sounds, babies must interact with a human speaker. Mere exposure to language
sounds from electronic devices will not su ce. Constant interaction and an
interlocutor who responds to the child
- Language development follows a predictable sequence
- The age of which children reach given milestone varies
- It takes quite a few months for babies’ own vocalizations to begin to resemble
the characteristics of the language they hear
- It takes even longer for them to develop a connection between language sounds
and speci c meaning
- Children’s language development is usually characterized by gradual acquisition
of particular abilities. For instance, the grammatically correct use of English
verbal in ection usually emerges over a period of a year or more, starting from a
stage where verbal interactions are always left out and ending in a stage where
they are nearly always used correctly

Early FLA

1. crying
• First weeks: automatic response to anxious stimuli: preparation for vocal
communication practice in timed breathing
• Initially iconic: a direct link between the sound and its communicative intent
• The degree of discomfort - proportional to the intensity of the signal
• Month 1 - 2: symbolic crying - cries subtly associated with the baby’s needs
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 2. cooing
• Emerges at around 2 moths of age
• Soft, gurgling sounds as if to express contentment

Babbling
• 5-6 months of age
• Strings of consonant-vowel syllable clusters, like vocalic-play

Marginal babbling: a few random consonants

Canonical babbling (8months): vocalizations of syllables approximating the
syllables in L1

• First: all kids of segments; not necessarily the segmental phonemes (individual
consonants and vowels) of their L1; also consonants occurring in their languages
• Babies begin to learn the suprasegmental sounds pf their mother tongue
• Babblong: 1st psycholinguists stage which provides evidence of the impact of
month soft intensive exposure to L1

First words
• Idiomorphs: words invented ny babies
• Words which come from the child’s L1
• First come words which refer to everyday objects the child can manipulate
(evidence for Piaget’s egocentric speech)
• After the acquisition of st few words - the beginning of a rapid vocabulary
development, which begins to gradually slow down at about the age of six

The emergence of grammar

• The holophrastic stage: the use of holophrases I.e. single words as skeletal
sentences
• In a journal devoted to his son’s FLA, Charles Darwin noted that the single word
milk could be a statement, a request, an exclamation
• Holophrastic speech - the bridge which allows the child to move from cries, coos
and words into the world of phrases, clauses, sentences
• Di erent stages of grammatical development, often measured by the average
number of words per utterance
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