Language Acquisition

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION We are designed to walk… That we are taught to walk is impossible. And pretty much the same is true of language. Nobody is taught language. In fact you can’t prevent the child from learning it. Noam Chomsky, The Human Language Serie 2 (1994)

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Language is extremely complex
Children before 5 already know the complex system that make up the grammar of a language:
Syntactic
Phonological
Morphological
Semantic and pragmatic rules of grammar
Children acquire a system of rules that enables them to construct and understand sentences, most of them have never produced or heard before.
Children are creative in the use of language
Nobody teach grammatical rules to the children

Mechanism of language acquisition REINFORCE MENT ANALOGY IMITATION BEHAVIOURISM

COMPUTER MODEL CONNECTIONISM MODEL No grammatical rules are stored anywhere ANALOGY Child’s environment has Specific properties. Reinforcement

MOTHERESE
HYPOTHESIS
Emphasize on the role of the environment in facilitating language acquisition Adults speak to children in a special language CDS

Analogy, imitation, and reinforcement
Cannot account for language development.
What the child acquires is a set of sentences rather than a set of grammatical rules

Language Acquisition is a creative process
The innateness Hypothesis
Language faculty Children acquire Children create Brain is
Is innate. The a complex grammar grammars based equipped
Infant is endowed quickly and easily on the linguistic for
With a UG. Input and are acquisition
UG helps children guided by UG of human
to extract the rules language
of their language. grammar

STAGE IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Babbling: linguistic ability. Auditory input
Holophrastic stage. Children’s utterance is one word.
Telegraphic stage: Starting to put words together into sentences.
The words and sentences that children produce at each stage of development conform to the set of grammatical rules.
Humans are born with a predisposition to discover the units that serve to express linguistic meaning.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF GRAMMAR PHONOLOGY SYNTAX PRAGMATIC MORPHOLOGY Children acquire the small set of sounds Common to all languages Overgeneralization. Children Acquire rules of their particular language Children understand word order rules. Language in context By manner of articulation: nasal, glides Stops, liquids, fricatives, and africates. Children’s utterances reflect Their internal grammar. Child assumes that his listener knows Who is talking about. By place of articulation features: Labials, velars, alveolars and palatals

KNOWING MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE
Second language acquisition or 2 acquisition, refers to the acquisition of a second language by someone who has already acquired a first language.
Bilingual language acquisition refers to the simultaneous acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy. (before 3)
Some amount of language mixing is normal part of early bilingual acquisition process and not necessarily an indication of any language problem.

THEORIES OF BILINGUAL DEVELOPMENT
The unitary system hypothesis children initially construct
one lexicon one grammar
The separate system hypothesis the bilingual child builds a
distinct lexicon and
grammar for each
language.
Bilingual children develops their grammar along the same line as monolingual children.
The rule of the thumb is that children receive equal input in the two languages to achieve native proficiency in both.

Second Language Acquisition
L2 learners construct grammars of the target language.
Fundamental difference hypothesis: L2 acquisition is different from L1
Interlanguage grammar- stages
Transfer of grammatical rules from L1 to L2
Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition

Second language Teaching Methods Synthetic Approach Bottom- up method Analitical Approach Top- down method Teaching of the grammatical, lexical, phonological, and functional Units of the language The goal is to select topics, tasks that are relevant to the needs and Interests of the learner Grammar translation Content- based instruction

Language Acquisition

by Milton Gomez on Oct 10, 2009

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