First Language Acquisition

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From Sound to Word

• Babies manage to communicate in very vocal and physical ways,

through various forms and intensities of crying, cooing, other sounds,
and by using physical movements and gestures.
• By 12 months of age many children are already uttering their first
words.
• Research has shown that infants appear to come into the world
equipped to acquire the language they are exposed to in their
environment.
• Per linguists, they are “pre-wired” to acquire / learn the language.

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• According the Chomsky, the child does not need to be taught to walk,
he or she simply begins to put one foot ahead of the other.
• Acquisition-wise, children do not need to be deliberately “taught” to
speak, they simply begin to do so.

• Substantial evidence supports the idea of a genetic predisposition for

language.
• Infants showing preference to human’s voice, especially that of the mother,
as young as three days old.
• In High Amplitude Sucking (HAS) technique, which is used to measure
the sucking rate on pacifier, the rate increases when babies hear
sound.
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• Another remarkable finding is that young children from many
different cultures and languages of origin are able to perceive a
multitude of sound differences, even those not occurring in the
language of their environment, an ability known as ‘sound” or
“auditory discrimination”, before the age of 10 or 12 months.
• /V/ & /W/ sound contrast.

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• Another argument that children come “prewired” for language is the
fact that babies all over the world appear to go through similar
linguistic stages and reach linguistic milestones.
• The first recognizable pre-linguistic stage is that of “babbling,”
occurring as early as three to four months of age, usually taking the
form of a consonant-vowel sequence, such as “ma ma” or “pa pa”.
• Between seven and ten months, children seem able to comprehend
their first word.
• A landmark in linguistic development occurs at approximately 1 year
of age.
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From Word to Sentence
• At about 18 months old, children often begin to put two words
together in the same intonational phrase unit  “Mama juice” or
“Baby up”…
• At about 18 months, some children have been observed to go
through a “word spurt” period, during which new words spring up in
the child’s vocabulary on an almost daily basis.
• One proposed explanation for the word spurt is “fast mapping”; that
is, children are able to remember a word after very limited exposure
to that word.

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• Another important stage occurs when children begin to link together
more than two words, and enter what has been termed the
“telegraphic stage.”
• Children may produce strings of two-, three-, and even four- or more
words long unit.
• “Baby Allison comb hair.”

• Charles Darwin used “Mean Length of Utterance” (MLU) to measure

the early linguistic development of “Morphemes”.
• In a longtitudinal study carried out by Roger Brown, between the ages
of 20 and 36 months, children acquired grammatical morphemes in a
strikingly similar order, regardless of the forms in the input.

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• In other studies, evidence points to the fact that children are able to
generalize rules to items they have never been exposed to.
• In the “Wug” test, designed by Jean Berko, children were asked to
pluralize the item, along with its image.
• At least, 76% of them were able to provide the correct answer.
• This shows that children are able to apply underlying rules to new
exemplars.

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• Studies also reveal that children reorganize their growing
grammatical knowledge in systematic ways.
• For instance, children may produce a correct irregular form, such as
“went,” early on, then overregularize or over-generalize the form as
“goed,” only to finally produce once again the correct target form
“went.”
• This instance of U-shaped Development is evident that children
restructure their knowledge to make it more fine-tuned.

• By the age of five or six, complex syntactic constructions and virtually

the entire phonological repertoire of their language are well in place
in most children.
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Theoretical Views of L1 Acquisition
Behaviorist View
• B.F. Skinner was the best known proponent.
• The child as a passive recipient, subjected to environmental influences.
• In this view, language was considered as “verbal behavior,” and only what
was observable and measurable was accepted as a means to evaluate
language acquisition.
• Made use of “Classical Conditioning” or the pairing of a stimulus and a
response  milk associated with nutritive substance.
• In “Operant Conditioning”, which is used for productive vocabulary, When
the child utters a word that produces the desired effect, then the child is
more likely to reproduce that word and, in contrast, words that do not trigger
hoped-for responses tend to disappear.

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• Universal Grammar (UG) or The Nativist Approach
• UG views the environment as serving essentially only as a trigger for language
development.
• It suggests that humans possess what can be considered as a “language
faculty,” i.e., a universal set of underlying principles, which allows children to
form hypotheses / understanding about language when they are exposed to a
finite set of examples from their environment.
• Children cannot be exposed to all input of a language; hence, something else
must be helping children induce the rules of the language, and that
something is the proposed “Universal Grammar” they are born with as part of
their genetic endowment.

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Interactionist Approach
• Gives explicit acknowledgment to the contribution of both innate structures
and the role of the environment
• Social interactionists give importance to the interplay between linguistic
structures, cognitive abilities, and the social and linguistic environment.
• Interactionists point out that a crucial aspect of the linguistic environment is
the speech adaptations to which children are exposed, known as child-
directed speech (CDS).
• CDS’s characteristics include shorter utterances, more stress on certain words
or syllables, substantial repetition, use of paraphrases, heavy reliance on
questions, and marked intonation contrasts. (Please refer to an example on
Page 16.)
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Emergentism – Connectionist View
• In Connectionism, language development is no longer seen as a process of
acquiring abstract rules.
• A language-specific learning device is not considered to be innately specified,
as proposed by the UG approach.
• Instead, language emerges out of a complex network of interconnections
between neurons.
• Connectionism proposes that language is learned through exposure to
language in the environment, the input.
• This exposure allows the construction of associations among units, i.e., sound
sequences, words, sentence patterns, etc.
• The L1 develops therefore through ongoing exposure to language in the
environment with increasing exposure to certain units leading to greater
associative strengths.
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Con’t

• When the associations are strong enough, the units and patterns become
permanently acquired, an instance of which can be the acquisition of past
tense.
• In U-shaped Development, the correct irregular past tense form “went”
appeared first, followed by the incorrect over-regularization “goed” or
“wented,” finally returning to the correct form “went.”
• The connectionist viewpoint therefore suggests overregularization behavior
can be explained by the child’s sensitivity to the frequency of the forms in the
input

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L1 and L2 Acquisition - Contrasts

Age
• All L1 learners are exposed to their first language in the earliest stages of life
at a time when many other developmental processes are just beginning to
appear.
• The development of the brain and cognition are at an early stage.
• Hence, infants are incapable of advanced reflective thinking and planning.
• As the child develops, basic cognitive capacities increasingly emerge, an
example of which is Object Permanence.
• Means-ends awareness is conceptualized at the age of 1, among children.
• Symbolic play emerges during the second year and indicates that the child is
capable of increasing mental abstraction in representing objects.

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• L2 learners, on the other hand, have already gone through a number
of fundamental cognitive stages, with basic concepts (object
permanence, means-ends awareness) already attained.
• Their cognitive development allows them metalinguistic awareness.
• Hence, L2 learners are more equipped to deal with language learning
tasks.
• For instance, some L2 learners may and often do prefer to learn
through explicit exposure to the grammatical rules of the target
language.

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One linguistic system already in place
•For L1 learners, learning an L1 is essential to satisfying a person’s basic
needs for food, as well as ensuring other basic care and security.
•For the older learner of an L2, one linguistic repertoire is already in
place to ensure efficient communication to satisfy basic needs and
desires.
•While the child’s crucial first events and emotions are accompanied by
communication in the L1, for individuals learning an L2 those deeply
embedded feelings are already linked with their native language and as
a result similar feelings are less tightly linked to the L2.

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• L2 learner language illustrates the ubiquitous phenomenon of transfer
or interference that occurs when aspects of the L1 are used in the L2, an
instance of which can be found in the use of Tenses.

• From the perspective of the social context, expectations are very

different in the two cases.
• The child learning to speak his first words is not expected to carry on a
conversation easily with interlocutors.
• For the older L2 learner, particularly adults learning a language in a new
country, social expectations may be relatively high: it is expected that an
adult should normally be able to communicate accurately and fluently.
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• The context of learning also contributes to the significant difference
between learning the first language and learning a second.
• A young child normally learns his first language in the home, as well
as through interactions with caregivers outside the home.
• For the older learner, school age and above, most often L2 learning is
at least partly carried out in an instructional setting, such as in a
public school language class or private language school classroom.

• The amount of exposure time to both languages is also significantly

different.
• The young child learning her L1 is commonly exposed to a significant amount
of that language.
• For the second language learner, apart from cases of total immersion in the
target language environment.
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• In term of the form of language, children learning their native
language are exposed to particular linguistic and paralinguistic
(prosodic) adaptations, also known Child-directed speech.
• Older children and adults, however, learning a second language are
not systematically exposed to a significant amount of adaptation in
the L2 input they hear.

• Finally, the level of language attainment in both L1 and L2 acquisition

is noticeably remarkable.
• While the L1 acquirer invariably becomes a fluent speaker of the
language spoken in the environment, it is rare for an adult L2 learner
to be able to pass for a native speaker in all respects

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L1 and L2 Acquisition - Parallels

• One immediately obvious parallel in both L1 and L2 acquisition is that

the learner needs to be exposed to the target language, also known
as Input.

• Another similarity is the amount of repetition in the production of

the language.

• A related similarity is the way in which both L1 and L2 learners use

prefabricated language units as formulaic sequences or expressions

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• The two language acquirers act similarly is that both young children
and older L2 learners tend to understand much more than they can
produce.

• For both types of language learners, typical errors occur that indicate
that learners are attempting to increase their mastery by relying on
information they already know, or overgeneralization.

• Lastly, there is an observable sequence of acquisition between young

and adult learners, beginning with speaking and listening followed by
literacy-based skills
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