Name : Luh Desi Purnamawati

NIM : 2012021001
Subject : Introduction to Linguistics
Language Acquisition
Language acquisition involves development in the various components of lexicon,
phonology, morphology, and syntax, as well as pragmatics. It is the process by which humans
acquire the capacity to understand and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use
words and sentences to communicate. Language is very complex, but children already know
most of the grammar of their mother tongue before they are five years old, children acquire
language without being taught grammar rules by their parents. The innate hypothesis states that
children do not need to learn universal principles such as structure dependence because it is part
of the Universal Grammar called stimulus poverty.
Children acquire language at a similar rate throughout the world, when children acquiring
language, they are not speaking in the degenerate form of adult language. Babies show the ability
to distinguish and recognize speech sounds, they will even respond to linguistic contrasts when
such contrasts are not present in the language(s) spoken around them. Babies seem to be born
with the ability to understand and focus on sounds that are essential to language, so they can
learn any human language.
Babbling begins around 6 months and is considered the initial stage of language
acquisition. Babies may babble on phonemes that do not appear in their acquired language. After
one year of age, children learn that sounds are related to meaning and begin to produce their first
words. Usually children go through the holophrastic stage, where their one-word utterances can
convey more meaning.
Children tend to acquire the same sounds for all languages first, followed by the less
common sounds of their own language. So they know more about phonology than we can by
listening to them speak. When children learn the meaning of words, they must learn the relevant
features of the class of objects to which the word refers. When learning words, children often
exaggerate the meaning of a word. The acquisition of morphology clearly shows the rule-
regulated nature of language acquisition, they pass through three stages in the acquisition of
irregular forms.
At about two years of age, children begin to put words together to form two-word speech.
A child must know the syntactic categories of words to apply syntactic rule, semantic bootstrap
is the idea that children first use the meaning of a word to figure out its syntactic category.
Children often have problems with shifting reference of pronouns, children may refer to
themselves as "you".
Parameters greatly reduce the difficulty of acquiring language because, rather than
starting from scratch, a child only has to choose between a small set of linguistic options based
on what he/she hears. Deaf babies acquire sign language in the same way that hearing babies
acquire spoken language. When deaf babies are not exposed to sign language, they will create
their own signs, complete with systematic rules, this shows the urge that humans have to
communicate.
Children produce utterances that they never hear from the adults around them, they
cannot imitate adults fully when acquiring grammar, and children who develop speech skills later
in childhood, they can understand the language spoken around them even if they cannot imitate
it. Most adult language learners never become fully proficient in their second language. Learning
a second language is a different process from learning a first language. One clear difference
between L1 and L2 acquisition is that in L2 acquisition a speaker already knows a language.
Learners often transfer phonological, syntactic, and morphological rules from their first language
to their second language.