REPORT IN FOUNDATION OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

• first language acquisition is a child learning his native language,

• whereas second language acquisition is learning a language besides his
native language.
• Language acquisition is the process through which humans gain the ability to
be aware of language and to understand it as well as to produce and
use words and sentences to communicate. All humans have the ability to acquire
a language. It is this ability that sets them apart from all other living beings.

What is First Language Acquisition

First language acquisition actually refers to infants’ acquisition of their native
language. They acquire language through a subconscious process and are
unaware of grammar rules. Children do usually not require explicit instruction
to learn their first language. They just pick up the language, the same way they
learn how to roll over, crawl and walk.

Moreover, children may acquire more than one first language. For example,
children who grow up in a house where parents speak only English language will
acquire only English. However, children who grow up in a bilingual household
(say French and English) will learn both languages.

FLA Theories
• Behaviorist
 The Behavioural theory of language acquisition, sometimes called the
Imitation Theory, is part of behaviourist theory. Behaviourism proposes
that we are a product of our environment. Therefore, children have no
internal mechanism or ability to develop language by themselves. BF
Skinner (1957) suggests that children learn the language first by imitating
their caregivers (usually parents) and then modifying their use of language
due to operant conditioning.
• What is operant conditioning?
• Operant conditioning is a way of learning that focuses on the reward
(positive reinforcement) or punishment (negative reinforcement) of
desired or undesired behaviour.
• Example: You can train a dog to sit by feeding it a treat when it obeys
your commands, or you can stop it from sleeping on your bed by
ignoring it or verbally discouraging it
• How does operant conditioning apply to language acquisition?
o Skinner suggested that children first learn words and phrases from
their caregivers or others around them and eventually try to say and
use those words correctly. In this case, operant conditioning occurs
when a caregiver responds to the child's attempt at using
language. If the child uses language correctly, the caregiver may
respond by telling the child they're clever or otherwise showing their
approval. If the child makes a request, such as asking for food, the
caregiver may reward the child by providing it. This is positive
reinforcement.

o If the child uses language incorrectly, makes a mistake, or is

incoherent, they are more likely to receive negative reinforcement
from the caregiver. They can be told they're wrong and then be
corrected or simply be ignored. Negative reinforcement teaches the
child which mistakes to avoid and how to correct them.
Cognitive theory (Jean Piaget theory of language acquisition)

The Cognitive theory of language acquisition suggests that the primary drives
behind our actions are our thoughts and internal processes.
Jean Piaget (1923) assumes that children are born with relatively little cognitive
ability, but their minds develop and build new schemas (ideas and
understanding of how the world works) as they age and experience the world
around them. Eventually, they can apply language to their schemas through
assimilation (fitting new information into what is already known) and
accommodation (changing one's schemas to support new information).

Piaget believed that cognitive development had to come before language

development because it would be impossible for children to express things that
they don't yet understand. For example, a younger child with no sense of time
couldn't express things in the future tense or speak hypothetically, no matter
how much they are taught language.

Piaget proposed that this cognitive development could be split into four
stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal
operational stages. Let's take a brief look at them.

Piaget's four stages of cognitive development

First is the sensorimotor stage. This takes place from birth to around two years
of age. At this stage, the child is developing sensory coordination and interacting
with their environment by feeling and playing with things. Their use of language
extends primarily to babbles and few spoken words.

The next stage is the pre-operational stage, which takes place from ages two to
seven. At this stage, children are able to use language with a better grasp of
grammatical structure, context, and syntax. Child thinking at this stage is still
very egocentric (their understanding of the world is limited to how it affects
them).

Next is the concrete operational stage. It takes place from ages seven to
eleven. At this stage, children understand concepts such as time, numbers, and
object properties and gain reasoning and logic, which allows them to rationalise
their beliefs and speak in greater detail about their own thoughts and the world
around them. They can also speak to others about their beliefs and understand
how outcomes or viewpoints may differ.

Finally, we have the formal operational stage. This takes place from twelve
years old to adulthood. At this stage, children can engage in higher reasoning
and think and speak about the abstract, such as hypotheticals, morals, and
political systems. Language is essentially unlimited, as there is no cognitive limit
to one's understanding of the world at this stage.

• Constructivism (Jerome Bruner)sees learning as a process by which the

learners construct new knowledge based on their current knowledge by
integrating the incoming information. With respect to language acquisition, it
is conceptually related to acquisition theories such as emergentism (with a
focus on how new qualities/representations arise from the interaction of
incoming and existing information, for example, how linguistic categories are
constructed from distributional information, and usage-based theories which
focus on the homology between the information attested in the input and the
child’s developing language use. The focus is on the child’s ability to generalize
over the input by studying the affordances of the input through targeted corpus
analyses of Child Directed Speech; the way in which the child extracts
information and generalizes it to new, related situations; and the generalization
processes as such, like the speed and nature of schema and category formation,
in dependence of the frequency and functional transparency of the input.
o Jerome bruner, the person associated most prominently with formulating
constructivist approach to language learning, sketched the language
learner as threefold(Bruner, 1983): TO LEARN the linguistic
system(syntax), TO LEARN TO REFER and EXPRESS MEANING
(semantics), and to get get something done with words and communicate
effectively (PRAGMATICS).

MENTALISM THEORY
The core of Chomsky’s mentalism theory is that speech is a part of human
evolution and not purely a learned behavior. He postulates that a genetic
mutation approximately 100,000 years ago gave humans an innate ability for
language.
He points to the similarities of all languages across history and geographical
locations as evidence of this theory. Children’s development of language at the
same age and at the same rate no matter the language or society shows it is a
biological function more than a social one.

Chomsky believed the opposite; that humans are born with the capacity for
speech hard-wired into their biology. He suggested that children will learn a
language without someone actively teaching them. As long as a child is exposed
to the language on a regular basis simply by people speaking around them, they
will develop a language.
His belief came from childrens’ seemingly natural ability to string words together
appropriately without being specifically taught the structure of language. For
example, children will instinctively pair a noun with a verb even when they are
too young to be taught grammar structures.