• U N I V E R S I D A D N A C I O N A L A U T O N O M A D E H O N D U R A S

T E A C H E R : P A T R I C I A C A R O L I N A G A R C Í A

A S S I G M E N T: B L O G

S T U D E N T S :

D A R I E L C Y M A R G E L S I L V A S Á N C H E Z 2 0 1 9 1 0 0 6 0 7 6

F R A N C Y D A N I E L A D Í A Z 2 0 1 5 1 0 2 1 3 3 8

K A R L A L I S B E T H H E R R E R A B O N I L L A 2 0 1 7 1 0 0 4 5 0 3

M E L A N Y S H E R L Y N C R U Z M E N D O Z A 2 0 1 9 1 0 0 1 4 0 7

N O V E M B E R 2 6 T H , 2 0 2 1
 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION:

• The capacity to learn is deeply ingrained in us as a species, just as the capacity to walk, to grasp objects, to
recognize faces. We don´t find any serious differences in children growing up in congested urban slums, in
isolated mountain villages, or in privileged suburban villas.
• Language is extremely complex. Yet very young children before the age of five already knows most of the
intri cate system that is the grammar f their language. Before they can add small numbers or tie theirs
shoes, children are inflecting verbs and nouns, embedding clauses and effortlessly producing and
understanding a limitless number of sentences they never heard before.
 T H E L I N G U I S T I C C A PA C I T Y O F C H I L D R E N

• Clearly, children do not learn a language simply by memorizing sentences. No one teaches children the rules
of grammar or provides them with any kind of explicit language instruction, parents unless they are lin-
guistis, are generally no more aware of the phonological, morphological, syntac-tic and semantic rules of
their language than their children.
• Children exposed to different languages un- der different cultural and social circumstances all develop their
native language during a narrow window of time, going through similar, possibly universal, de- velopmental
stages. Even deaf children of deaf signing parents acquire signed languages in stages that parallel those of
children acquiring spoken languages.
• The uniformity of language development in the face of varying environ- ments and ( as we will see)
impoverished input leads many linguistics to believe that children are equipped with an innate template or
blueprint for language- which we have referred to as universal grammar and that this blue print aids the child
in the task of constructing a grammar for her language.
• The process of acquiring language is rooted in human biology and supported by linguistic input from the
environment. One of the central goals of linguistic theory is to solve the logical problem of language
acquisition.
• What accounts for the ease, rapidity, and uniformity of language acquisition In the face of impoverished
data? A partial answer is that children are able to acquire a complex grammar quickly and easily without any
particular help beyond exposure to the lan- guage because they do not start from scratch.
 S TA G E S I N L A N G U A G E A C Q U I S I T I O N

• Children do not wake up one morning with a fully formed grammar in their heads. In moving from first words
to adult competence children pass through linguistic stages. They begin by babbling, they then acquire their
first words, and in just a few months they begin to put words together into sentences.
• The earliest studies of languages acquisition come from diaries kept by par- ents. More recent studies
include the use of tape recordings, videotapes and controlled experiments
• Linguistics record the spontaneous utterances to study the children´s production and comprehension
researchers have also invented ingenious experimental techniques for investigating children´s
comprehension, and even for studying the linguistic abilities of infants, who are not yet speaking.
• The perspective of the adult grammar, children´s utterances often con- tain grammatical error, but such
´´errors´´ most often reflect the child´s current stage of linguistic knowledge and therefore provide
researchers with a window into their grammar. Children are biologically equipped to acquire all aspects of
grammar.
• Children are biologically equipped to acquire all aspects of grammar. In the following sections we will look at
development in each of the components of language, and we will illustrate the role that universal grammar
and other factors play this development.
 THE PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION OF SPEECH SOUNDS

• Any notion that a person is born with a mind like a blank slate is belied by a wealth of evidence that
newborns react to some subtle distinctions in their en- viroment and not to others. Infants will respond to
visual depth and distance distinctions, to defferences between rigid and flexible physical properties if ob-
jects, and to human faces rather than to other visual stimuli. Infants also show a very early response to
different properties language.
• A newborn will respond to phonetic contrasts found in human languages even when these differences are
not phonemic in the language spoken in the baby's home. A baby hearing a human voice over a loudspeaker
saying will slowly decrease her rate of sucking rate increases dramatically. Adults find it difficult to
differentiate between the allophones of a phoneme, but for infants it comes naturally.
• Japanese infants can distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated stops even if students in an
introductory linguistics course cannot.
• Babies can discriminate between sounds that are phonemic in other parents. For example, In Hindi, there is
a phonemic contrast between a retroflex t ( made with the tongue curled back) and the alveolar t. to English
speaking adults, these may sound the same; to their infants, the do not.
• Babies will not react to distinctions that do not correspond to phonemic contrast in any human language,
such as sounds spoken more or less loudly.
 BABBLING

• The child´s linguistic environment shapes not only the child´s perceptions of speech sounds but also his
productions. Babbling illustrates the readiness of the human mind to respond to linguist input from a very
early stage. At around six months, the infant begins to babble. The sounds produced in this period include
many sounds that do not occur in the language of the household.
• At this point English speaking adults can distinguish the babbles of an English babbling infant from those of
an infant babbling in Cantonese or Arabic. During the first year of life, the infant´s perceptions and
productions are being fine- tuned to the surrounding languages. Studies of babbling in nearing children and
deaf children support the view that babbling is a linguistic ability related to the kind of language input the
child receives.
• At the same age, deaf children exposed to sign language produce a restricted set of signs. They use more
than a dozen different hand motions repetitively, all of which are elements of the sign languages used in deaf
communities around the world. In each case the forms are dawn from the set of possible gestures found in
spoken and signed languages. The generally accepted view is that humans are born with a predisposition to
discover the units that express linguistic meanings, and that at a geneti- cally specified stage in neural
development.
 FIRST WORDS

• Some time after the age of one, the child begins to use the same string of sounds repeatedly to mean the
same thing, thereby producing her first words. The age of the child when this occurs varies and has nothing
to do with the child´s intelligence.
• The child´s first words may differ from the words of the adult language.
• What is important is not that these words differ from the adults, but that they represent a fixed sound-
meaning pairing.
• Most children go through a stage in which their utterances consist of only one word. This is called the
HOLOPHRASTIC or whole phrase stage because these one- word utterances seem to convey the meaning
of an entire sentence.
 SEGMENTING THE SPEECH STREAM

• Speech is a continuous stream broken only by breath pauses. The intonation breaks that do exist do not
always correspond to word, phrase, or sentence boundaries. The adult speaker can use his knowledge of
the lexicon and grammar of a language to impose structure on the speech he hears. But how do babies, who
have not yet learned the lexicon or rules of grammar.
• Infants are also sensitive to phono tactic constrains and to the distribution of allophones in the target
language. Languages differ in their stress patterns as well as in their allophonic variation and phono tactics.
This means the infant would first need to figure out what stress pattern he is dealing with, or what the
allophones and possible sounds combinations are.
 CONCLUSIONS

• Language acquisition is usually parallel to physical development, there is no correlation between these.
• Generally, babbling happens around the time the baby begins to sit up. they say a word before they start
walking. grammar becomes relative as hand-finger coordination develops.
• Language acquisition is innate and follows a logical order and sequence, there is no clear cut answer as to
how language acquisition take place.