Recent perspectives on the role

of previously knownlanguages

BY : KRISTIANI (1800888203015)
 1. Theories of learning

research on child language acquisition, during the

1950s and 1960s there were challenges to the
behaviorist theory of language and language
learning.
Language came to be seen not as a set of automatic
habits, but as a set of structured rules.
There are 3 examples that prove it :

Example 1
Child : My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted
them.
Adult : Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits?
Child : Yes.
Adult : What did you say she did?
Child : She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
Adult : Did you say she held them tightly?
Child : No, she holded them loosely.
Example 2
Child : Nobody don’t like me.
Mother : No, say “nobody likes me.”
Child : Nobody don’t like me.(eight repetitions of
this dialogue)
Mother : No, now listen carefully; say “nobody likes
me.”
Child : Oh! Nobody don’t likes me
Example 3
Child :I don’t see no trees.
Mother : I don’t see any trees. Not no trees, any
trees.
Child : No any trees. No any trees.
Mother : I don’t see any trees.
So, Children do not just soak in what goes on around
them but actively try to make sense of the language
they are exposed to. They construct grammars.
2. Child second language acquisition

Child second language acquisition is a central and

important part of the field of second language
acquisition.
There are 2 hypotheses :

1. regression hypothesis
the child uses the language skills used in first language
acquisition with L2data but “at a very primitive and
rudimentary level”.

2. recapitulation hypothesis
The child recapitulating the learning process of a native
speaker of the target language. In other words, when a child
learns a second language she or he uses the same processes
available to children of the target language.
3. Child second language morpheme order
studies

child second language acquisition was similar to

child first language acquisition. This came to be
known as the L1 = L2 Hypothesis.

In order to challenge the concept of transfer,

studies were conducted to show the percentage of
errors attributable to the native language :
For example , George (1972) claimed that one
third of the errors in his corpus were attributable
to the NL.
Thank you <3