PSYCHOLINGUISTICS:

Later Language Acquisition

Written by :
Indra Kurniawan (1514025025)
Muhammad Muttaqin (1514025152)
Muhammad Ridwan (1714025002)
Priskila Ekawati A. P. (1514025124)

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

FACULTY OF CULTURAL SCIENCES
MULAWARMAN UNIVERSITY

SAMARINDA
2020
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I .................................................................................................................. 2
INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 2
CHAPTER II ................................................................................................................. 4
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ................................................................................ 4
2.1. Later Grammar ............................................................................................... 4
2.1.1. Acquisition of Morpology ....................................................................... 4
2.1.2. Later Syntactic Developent ..................................................................... 6
2.1.3. Cross-Linguistic Differences in Later Grammar..................................... 7
2.2. Metalinguistic and Discourse ......................................................................... 7
2.2.1. The Emergence of Linguistic Awareness ............................................... 7
2.2.2. Discourse Process in Children ................................................................ 9
2.3. Language in the School ................................................................................ 10
2.3.1. Communicating in the Classroom ......................................................... 10
2.3.2. Reading and Language Development ................................................... 11
2.4. Bilingualism and Second-Language Acquisition ......................................... 12
2.4.1. Contexts of Childhood Bilingualism..................................................... 12
2.4.2. Bilingual First-Language Acquisition ................................................... 13
2.4.3. Second Language Acquisition............................................................... 13
2.4.4. Cognitive Consequences of Bilingualism ............................................. 14
CHAPTER III ............................................................................................................. 15
CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 15
BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................... 16

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 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

Linguistics is the study of language that has different types and sizes of
various building blocks that combined to make up a language. To do interesting
things, their forms are change and to make this happens the sounds are brought
together. To adjust the meaning, words are usually arranged in a certain order and
sometimes the beginning and the endings are changed. The arrangement of words and
the knowledge of the speaker about what the hearer or addressee will understand can
be affected with the meaning itself. Linguistics is the study of all this and there are
various branches of linguistics study that has their own name such as Phonetics,
Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Discourse Analysis, Semantics, Sociolinguistics,
Psycholinguistics, etc.

Psycholinguistics is one of the branch of linguistics study which the

disciplines combination of psychology and linguistics. Psycholinguistics is concerned
with the relationship between the human mind and language as it examines the
process that occurs in brain while it is producing and perceiving both spoken and
written discourse. Psycholinguistics is the study of psychological and neurobiological
factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. Psychological is
the study where the focuses are upon the comprehension and production of language.
Like any other disciplines and study, psycholinguistics has evolved into the three
primary processes investigated such as language comprehension, language
production, and language acquisition.

Language acquisition is the process of learning the curve of skills by which

the children acquire language. Language acquisition skills contain the ability to
perceive and comprehend a language and also the ability to produce the words and
sentences to communicate. The term of language acquisition is normally refers only

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to a person’s first language. The reason for this is because the acquisitions of the first
language as a child create the skills of language such as attaching meanings to
phonemic groups. This skills is including how to reproducing sounds to express
thoughts, understanding the importance of grammar and syntax.

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 CHAPTER II
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

2.1. Later Grammar

From the previous topic, Early Language Acquisition, we know that children
around 2 to 3 years old already can make impressive strides in their acquisition of
grammar. Around these ages, they can already develop the ability to form simple
and functional utterances to express their meaning directly. As their early
accomplishments, later grammar acquisitions are built at these ages. At this stage
children begin to learn more about grammatical such as: acquisition of
morphology, later syntactic development, and cross-linguistic differences in later
grammar.

2.1.1. Acquisition of Morpology

Brown (1973a) considered several possible explanations for this sequence
of development.
1. The frequency with which the child hears these morphemes in adult
speech.
2. The relationship between linguistic complexity and order of
acquisition.
a. Grammatical Morphemes
Grammatical morphemes are conspicuously absent in children’s
early word combinations. Children initially use word order to convey
meaning, even those children acquiring highly inflected languages.
But as their mean length of utterances in morphemes (MLU)
approaches 2.5, morphemes such as the past tense and plural
inflections and prepositions such as in and on begin to appear.
The first major study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes
was conducted by Brown and Cazden (Brown, 1973a; Cazden, 1968)

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 as part of an extensive longitudinal study of three children. They
looked at 14 morphemes in the English language; these are shown, in
their order of emergence.

Average Order of Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes

Order Morpheme Examples

1 Present progressive I driving
2-3 Prepositions In, on
4 Plural Balls
5 Irregular past tense Broke, fell threw
6 Possessive Daddy’s car
7 Uncontractible copula This is hot
8 Articles A, the
9 Regular past tense She walked
10 Third person present tense, He works
regular
11 Third person present tense, She does
irregular
12 Uncontractible auxiliary The horse is winning
13 Contractible copula He’s a clown
14 Contractible auxiliary She’s drinking

For example, suppose an adult holds up a book and asks a child,

“What is this?” and the child responds, “That book”. It may be
inferred that the child meant to say, “That is a book” and thus omitted
two obligatory grammatical morphemes, the copula is and the article
a.

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 b. Productivity in Morphology
An aspect of children’s morphological productivity that has been
intensively studied is the presence of overregularizations in their speech
(Cazden, 1968; Ervin, 1964; Slobin, 1973). An overregularization is the
child’s use of a regular morpheme in a word that is irregular, such as the past-
tense morpheme in breaked and goed.

2.1.2. Later Syntactic Developent

Children acquire grammatical morphemes gradually, over a period of
years. During this time, their sentences get longer and more complex. Some of
the changes in sentence length reflect the fact that children are now able to
express agent, action, and object in a single sentence. For instance, whereas a
younger child might express agent and action or agent and object in a
sentence, a somewhat older child can express all three, as in “Daddy throw
ball”. Children also develop the ability to use different types of sentences,
such as negatives, questions, passive sentences, and complex sentences.
For example of negation developments:
According to Brown’s study, there are 3 stages of grammatical
developments of English Negative Sentence.
1st Stage = (Use of NO at the start of sentence)
- No the sun shining
2nd Stage = (Use of NO inside the sentence but no auxiliary or BE verb)
- There no Rabbits
3rd stage = (Use of NOT in appropriate abbreviation of auxiliary or BE)
- It’s not raining

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 2.1.3. Cross-Linguistic Differences in Later Grammar
Cross-linguistic studies support a distinction we saw earlier between
conceptual complexity and formal complexity. Many of these studies have
examined the development of a particular concept, such as negation, in
different languages. If the formal complexity of negation—the manner in
which negation is marked linguistically—does not differ in a pair of
languages, then we would expect to see similarities in the age of acquisition
across languages. That is, if negative sentences are no harder to master in one
language than another, we would expect children to acquire them whenever
they can conceptualize negation. On the other hand, if one language is more
formally complex than another with regard to a particular concept, then that
aspect of language tends to be acquired later.

2.2. Metalinguistic and Discourse

2.2.1. The Emergence of Linguistic Awareness
There are two types of awareness in linguistic awareness. The first one is
Metalinguistic awareness and the second one is phonological awareness.

Metalinguistic awareness is when learning a language, that the rules of

that language (grammatical, phonological, pragmatic, etc.) are an arbitrary
linguistic code independent of meaning. After experiencing an increase in
vocabulary and grammar during elementary school age, children will also
experience a development in metalinguistic awareness of language.
Metalinguistic awareness in children makes them think of the language they
use, understand the meaning of the word they use, and even defining it. This
can improve the knowledge they have. It is likely that the developmental
course of metalinguistic awareness skills may be very different than that of
the “primary” linguistic skills of speaking and listening. According to the last
sentence that Cazden’s implies, Metalinguistic awareness skills are almost

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surely acquired later than the corresponding “primary” skills that provide the
raw data for linguistic analysis.

For example are the child’s communication skills. To communicate

effectively with a diverse group of people, a speaker must learn to select
words that are appropriate to the situation and the listener. This ability is
related to the speaker’s metalinguistic ability to analyze words and their
communicative effects.

Phonological awareness is a skill that allows kids to recognize and work

with the sounds of spoken language. In preschool, it means being able to pick
out rhyming words and count the number of syllables in a name. It also
involves noticing how sounds repeat themselves (alliteration). For example,
“Susie sold six salami sandwiches.”There are five tasks of phonological
awareness:

• Supply Rhyme
Given a word (for example, fish), supply a rhyme.
• Strip Initial Consonant
Given a word (for example, task), identify what is left when
the first consonant is removed.
• Identify Different Initial Consonant
Given four words (for example, bag, nine, beach, bike), choose
the word with the different initial consonant.
• Identify Different Final Consonant
Given four words (for example, rat, dime, boat, mitt), identify
the one with a different final consonant.
• Supply Initial Consonant
Given two words (for example, cat, at), identify the sound
present in one that is missing in the other.

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2.2.2. Discourse Process in Children
There are two aspects of children’s discourse skills. The first one is
conversational skills where the children have the ability to relate their
linguistic goals to those of their conversational participants. The second one is
narrative skills where the children have the ability to tell a coherent story.

Conversational skills is when a discourse of conversational involves a

number of implicit rules related to taking turns, sharing conversational topics,
taking the listener’s needs into account, and formulating requests in a socially
appropriate manner. Children are developing the both ability to respond
appropriately to another’s topic of conversation and the ability to select their
own conversational topics. There are five categories of child utterances:

• Nonadjacent
Those are the utterances that occurred without a previous adult
utterance or with a definite pause after a previous adult
utterance.

• Adjacent
Those are the utterances that occurred right after an
adult utterance.

• Non contingent
Those are the utterances that did not share the same
topic as the preceding adult utterance.

• Imitative
Those are the utterance that shared the same topic with
the preceding utterance, but did not add information; that is, all
or part of the preceding utterance was repeated with no change.

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 • Contingent
Those are the utterance that both shared the same topic
with the preceding utterance and added information to it.

Another important conversational skill is the ability to adapt one’s

speech to the listener. In particular, we tend to speak in more simplified form
when talking to a person we view as less linguistically advanced.

Narrative Skills include the ability to tell stories, as well as describing

things and events. This skill set is important for reading comprehension; in
simpler terms, it is grasping meaning from a story. With these skills children
are gaining skill at holding a conversation, they are also developing the ability
to tell good story. Narrative emerges out of conversations (Polanyi, 1989) and
suspends the ordinary rules of conversational turn taking for the time being.

2.3. Language in the School

The language skills brought by a child into the school environment are
one of the most important things that can be used as the dominant teaching
tool in a variety of subjects. However, children should be able to adjust to
language differences that exist in schools with home language and
playground. Entering the formal school sphere, we will discuss about oral
communication in the classroom, and then discuss the relationship between
reading and language development.
2.3.1. Communicating in the Classroom
Communicating in the classroom environment contains a wealth of
verbal interaction that has been explored by sociolinguists, psycholinguists,
and educational researchers (Cazden, 1986; Mehan, 1979; Wilkinson, 1982).

a. Classroom Discourse
Teachers are enables to assess student learning with the
initiation-reply-evaluation sequence, in which a teacher poses a

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 question to a student, receives a reply, and then evaluates the student’s
answer (Mehan, 1979). Teachers’ language to children is also more
formal than most language to which children are accustomed. Teacher
language in the classroom thus is somewhat more formal relative to
everyday, colloquial speech. The skills and abilities of teachers to pay
attention to each child simultaneously are also very much needed in
the process of classroom discussion. Teachers as authority figures,
determine how conversational turns are allocated.

b. Acquiring Classroom Skills

Acquiring Classroom Skills, for example, first-grade children
read aloud or silently in groups and then completed a workbook, drew
pictures, or otherwise demonstrated their understanding of what they
read. As the teacher moved from group to group around the room,
opportunities arose for students to ask each other for assistance. Those
children found to be the most effective speakers were those whose
responses were direct, sincere, relevant to the task at hand, and
addressed to a specific listener. Children who used this form of speech
received a much higher degree of compliance than those who did not.

2.3.2. Reading and Language Development

The beginning reader is already a fluent language user. That is,
the early reader is consumed with the task of identifying even familiar
words in a new and unfamiliar mode. Early readers thus are less able to
attend to the overall meaning of a text and to apply those comprehension
strategies acquired in the acquisition of oral language.

Although children come to school with oral language skills and

experience with printed materials, successful reading requires children to
identify written words rapidly, a reading-specific skill that depends on

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 metalinguistic processes. Successful reading requires a mix of top-down
and bottom-up processes. The ability to identify words automatically, an
asset in reading, enables readers to devote resources to higher-level
processes, thereby promoting comprehension.

2.4. Bilingualism and Second-Language Acquisition

Up to this point we have discussed how a child is acquires a single
language. In this part, we will discuss about the circumstances under which
children acquire more than one language, and then examine acquisition of
two languages simultaneously and sequentially. Finally, we will turn to the
cognitive consequences of bilingualism.

2.4.1. Contexts of Childhood Bilingualism

When children acquire two languages at the same time, their
bilingualism is referred to as simultaneous bilingualism. Sequential
bilingualism occurs when an individual (child or adult) acquires a second
language after already acquiring a native language. This type of
bilingualism is also referred to as second-language acquisition.
Most commonly, children learn two languages simultaneously
when they are born into a community that is bilingual. For example, De
Houwer (1995) describes the bilingual environment for a child who lives
in the Flanders region of Belgium, where Dutch is the official language
but French is spoken in many places. Although the child would be
instructed only in Dutch in the mainstream educational system, the child
receives French from her maternal grandparents and also from French-
language television. In short, although the community is Dutch-dominant,
the day-to-day reality for the child includes significant exposure to
French.

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2.4.2. Bilingual First-Language Acquisition
Bilingualism is the norm in many parts of the world and younger
children are often regarded as superior language learners than older
children or adults, some believe that young children can effortlessly
acquire two or more languages simultaneously. There are two types of
development in bilingual first language acquisition:

• Course of Development
According to De Houwer (1990) simultaneous bilingual
acquisition as children being exposed to two languages on a regular basis
(such as hearing both language everyday) from birth on. With regard to
the course of development, De Houwer (1995) concludes that
development is very similar. There seems to be substantial agreement that
the processes of bilingual language acquisition are similar to those of
monolingual language acquisition.

• Rate of Development
According to Hoff (2001) it is certainly possible for children to
learn two languages simultaneously but that it is perhaps an overstatement
to state that it is just as easy for children to acquire two languages as it is
to acquire a single language. It has to be granted that children acquiring
two languages are acquiring more than monolingual children and the
exact circumstances of their input may well influence their level of
acquisition of the two languages.

2.4.3. Second Language Acquisition

Second language acquisition is the process of learning and
acquisition of a second language once the mother tongue or first language
acquisition is established. Second language acquisition or SLA is the
process of learning other languages in addition to the native

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 language. The concept of language transfer also influences the acquisition
of their second language. One area of language that does appear to
provide clear evidence for language transfer is phonology. According to
Williams (1980) L2 learners begin by perceiving second language speech
according to the categories of their native language. In any event, transfer
does not mean that “language habits” are automatically transferred from
L1 TO L2. Somewhat, it appears that L2, under some condition,
stimulates a reorganization of existing linguistic knowledge.

2.4.4. Cognitive Consequences of Bilingualism

This phenomenon may be broader than word meaning. It may
be that bilingual children are in general more attentive to language than
monolingual children. But there are two types of consequences that may
appear in bilingual children:
• Cognitive Control
This is the ability to selectively attend to some stimuli and
ignore others. But interestingly, Bialystock et al. (2004) found that
bilingualism has smaller effects and also has advantage in both middle-
aged and other adults. The advantage of bilingual adults is they can
encourage the development of the two languages and have the control
mechanism on them.
• Problem Solving and Creativity
It was once commonly accepted by scholars that bilingualism
led to cognitive impairment. Many early psychologists also conclude that
bilingualism had a detrimental effect on children’s intellectual
development and academic performance.

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 CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION

From the above theories and explanations, we can conclude that children at
the end of preschool age and early years of school experience language development
and can learn more about grammar morphemes. It is also influenced by their
environment. With better grammar understanding, children can arrange words using
the right settings. The words used already have meaning. They become more flexible
and skilled speakers. They use a greater variety of cohesive devices, learn new
genres, adapt their speech to different listeners, and formulate and justify the requests
of others. When children enter school, they have an impressive list of communication
skills.

With all the skills that a child brings to school environment, it can be used as
a teaching tool in various subjects. At school, they will be helped to develop the skills
they already have through lessons taught by the teacher. Through learning, they will
be able to develop their mother tongue, even accepting foreign languages as a second
language. Some believe that young children can easily learn two or more languages
simultaneously, and the language development of other children is hampered by
obtaining several languages.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carrol, David W. 1999. Psychology of Language (5th Edition). US: Wadsworth, Inc.

Scovel, Thomas. 1998. Psycholinguistics. New York: Oxford University Press

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