First Language Acquisition

1. Explanation and Language
Acquisition
Presented by: Mehdi Taghavi
Ph.D. Candidate
Professor: Dr. P. Rajabi
Malayer University
Iran
Mehditaghavi20120@yahoo.com
@Mehdi_Taghavi20
00989125642177
First Language Acquisition (David Ingram)

2. 4.1 Introduction
 Area of the study
 Descriptive date-base
 Nature of diaries
 Contexts of explanation:
i. Behaviorism
ii. Nativism ; constructionism , maturationism
 Stages in language acquisition
 Child language acquisition: testing theory of
grammar- develop the theory of acquisition

3. 4.2 Child Language Vs.
Language Acquisition
 Psychology (Child L) theory of learning
 Linguistics (LA) theory of grammar
Psycholinguistics

4. Child Language vs. Language Acquisition
Linguistics and some problems
 Linguistics are sometimes unsure about the role
of language acquisition in process of developing
a theory of grammar.
 Language acquisition data are not used in ways
of the linguistics’ interests.

5. Pyscholinguistics and some
problems
 May misunderstood the object of linguistics
 The data are not used in ways of the linguistics’
interests.
 Unaware of current linguistic issues.
 linguistics is expected to provide the ‘correct’ theory
for the psycholinguist to use to understand the child

6. Roger Brown:
 Psychology took from linguistics.
 Linguistics has solved very few practical
problems.
 Linguistic theory changes and poses real
difficulties for psychologist

7. The effect of the misunderstanding
 Virtual cessation
 Descriptive
 Taxonomic
Not to understand the
nature of language

8. The two ways that the psycholinguist
may proceed
 1) To conversant with a linguistic theory and
examine children’s language
 2) To construct a theory of acquisition
 A reconciliation will require more awareness of the
goals of linguistic theory, and the issues in theory
testing:
 A) the role of acquisition data in theory construction
 B) to develop a theory of acquisition

9.  Child Language focuses on data
 Unfair to suggest that it is a theoretical
 Baker (1979) and Dative Movement rule
 a. I gave a book to Mary
 b. I gave Mary a book
 c. I reported the crime to the police
 d. * I reported the police the crime

10.  psycholinguist doing Child Language has
developed techniques that allow him or her
to answer questions like this one.
 The approach would be to resolve:
 1) what children actually do
 2) to discuss the rule under consideration
 The linguist needs to know:
 a) the data base of Child Language
 b) methodological developments
the theory
down
the data up

11. 4.3 A theory of acquisition
 Theory of language (Grammar) :
 A highly structured theory of UG based on a
number of fundamental principles
 Restrict the class of attainable grammars
 Narrowly constrain their form
 Fixed by experience
 Not deal with the possibility that the final
grammar may result only after a series of
stages of acquisition

12. theory of acquisition
 Acquisition is ‘instantaneous’
 Theory of acquisition is as a set of principles
 Distinct from those of UG
 Account for the stages the child goes
through to reach the adult grammar
 Language Acquisition has concentrated on
the theory of language
 Child Language has concentrated on the
theory of acquisition

13. The two distinct components of
theory of acquisition
 set of principles
 competence factors
 psychological processes
performance factors
construction of the grammar
child’s comprehension
and production

14. The category of principles
 1) the acquisition of morphology
a) Generalization principle
b) Lexical principle
c) Uniqueness principle
 2) the acquisition of syntax
a) Principle of structure-dependent rules
b) Performance principles

15. Acquisition of Morphology
a) Generalization principle
Predictions about the child’s grammar not
sufficient to account for the acquisition of
morphological endings

16.  Children overgeneralize morphological
inflectional suffixes in English to irregular
forms:
‘foots’
‘breaked’
 Overgeneralizations are not accounted for by
a theory of language
 It accounts for the form of the rule

17. How can we justify this principle?
 Dresher (1981):
 ‘a learner adopts the most highly valued
rules consistent with, and sometimes
overriding the available data’.
 Plural of foot’ is ‘feet’ is more complex
 This principle accounts for cases like ‘foots’
which occur even though the child never
hears foots.

18. Features of this principle
 1) it makes predictions about the child’s
grammar for comprehension as well as
production
 2) the young child should at the time of
producing ‘foots’ also have ‘foots’ in
comprehension as an acceptable utterance.

19. Acquisition of Morphology
b) Lexical principle:
 Learn individual paradigmatic alternations as
separate lexical items
 The child first acquires paradigmatic variants
like ‘cat, cats’, ‘dog, dogs’
 Then realizes a separable plural morpheme ‘-s
 The lexical principle predicts that the child
will initially get foot, feet’ correctly
 Later he will change feet to ‘foots’.

20. Acquisition of Morphology
c) Uniqueness principle
 The child could conclude that there are two
forms of the plural for ‘foot’
 The child selects only one forms of plural
 The one that is used in the child’s linguistic
environment

21. Acquisition of syntax:
a) Principle of structure-dependent
rules
 a. The man who is tall is in the room
 b. Is the man who is tall in the room?
 c. * Is the man who tall is in the room?
 structure-dependent rule
 verb agrees with its subject
 structure-independent rule
a verb agrees in number with a preceding
noun
UG contains the principle that all such rules

22. Acquisition of syntax:
b) Performance principles
 Slobin (1973):
 ‘operating principles’
 ‘Pay attention to the ends of words’
 Acquisition of suffixes is easier than the
acquisition of prefixed morphemes.
 A child may know several words, but may
have trouble in retrieving them.

23. 4.4 Theoretical assumptions about
language acquisition
 A field which works from acquisition data and
a theoretical perspective
 To construct a theory of grammar and to
develop a theory of acquisition
 How acquisition data can be used to:
 (i) To provide evidence for or against adult
theories of grammar
 (ii) To provide insight into the child’s linguistic
competence

24. 4.4.1 Acquisition data and
linguistic theory
 Relation between the child’s grammar and
the adult’s grammar
 Behaviorism sees learning as incremental, in
that habits are established gradually over
time
 Maturationism predicts two extreme possibilities:
 A) Strong inclusion hypothesis
 B) Restructuring hypothesis

25. 4.4.1 Acquisition data and
linguistic theory
 A) Strong inclusion hypothesis:
 The child’s grammar from the onset is seen as
essentially adult-like
 B) Restructuring hypothesis:
 It allows restructuring rules which occurs
under late in acquisition because the
sentences that the child needs to hear to
trigger the appropriate principle are not
heard.

26. Rare in spoken language
 a. Backwards pronominalization: When he
arrived, Mickeyi was hungry
 b. Subject complement clauses: That he is
late is possible
 c. Passives with ‘by’-phrases: The cat was
chased by the dog

27.  Under the maturationist positions, the goals
of Language Acquisition are limited.
 Under the strong inclusion hypothesis, it
becomes a field concerned with performance
factors.
 Under the restructuring hypothesis, it
focuses on one two things:
 to document when children hear specific
sentence structures in acquisition
 to determine the relative times when
principles mature

28. The Constructionist Assumption:
 The form of the child’s grammar at any point
of change which we shall call stage n will
consist of everything at stage n plus the new
feature(s) of stage n + I .

29. Five hypothetical productions of a
child
 a. time 1: (grunt)
 b. time 2: cookie
 c. time 3: want cookie
 d. time 4: want eat cookie
 e. time 5: I want to eat a cookie

30. Competence Assumption
 Child’s linguistic performance is relatively
close to the child’s linguistic competence.
That is, do not propose a linguistic construct
until there is evidence for it in the child’s
performance.
 Child’s data that potentially could have a
particular structure
 Child has a productive rule of grammar

31. Sources of variation among
children
 Three sources for variation between children:
 Performance variation
 Environmental variation
 Linguistic variation

32. Performance variation:
 variation due to biologically determined
individual capacities or abilities of the child
that lead to preferences for, or better skill at,
particular linguistic subsystems

33. Environmental variation
Variation due to environmental effects, from
obvious ones such as the need to hear a
language to speak it, to more subtle ones
such as the effect of frequency on specific
language forms.

34. Linguistic variation:
Variation due to the range of structural
possibilities allowed by Universal Grammar.
pro drop languages
 a typical or unmarked way to do things
 an unusual or marked way

35. Thank you all