First Language Acquisition

1. by
Parisa Mehran
Raheleh Hajizadeh
Roya Pashmforoush

2. A Shift in Patterns of Research
Researchers began to see that language was just one
manifestation of the cognitive and affective ability to deal with
the world, with others and with the self.
The generative rules that were proposed under the nativist
framework were abstract, formal, explicit, and quite logical, yet
they dealt specifically with the forms of language and not with
the deeper functional level of meaning constructed from social
interaction.

3. Examples of Form of Language:
Morphemes
Words
Sentences
The rules that govern them

5. Lois Bloom

6. 1. Agent-action: Mommy is putting the sock on
2. Agent-object: Mommy sees the sock
3. Possessor-possessed: Mommy’s sock
“Mommy sock”:

8. Argument about Meanings of Words
Humpty Dumpty:“When I use a word, it means just what
I choose it to mean neither more or less.”
Alice: “The question is whether you can make words mean
so many different things.”
Humpty Dumpty: “The question is which is to be master-
that’s all.”

9.  Children interaction with their environment
 What children learn about language is
determined by what they already know about
the world

10. On the functional level, development is paced by the
growth of conceptual and communicative capacities,
operating in conjunction with innate schemes of
cognition.
On the formal level, development is paced by the
growth of perceptual and information-processing
capacities, operating in conjunction with innate
schemes of grammar.

11. A reciprocal behavioral system operates between the language-developing
infant-child and the competent[adult] language user in a socializing-teaching
nurturing role.
Some research looked at the interaction between the child’s language
acquisition and the learning of how social system operates.
Some investigation of child language acquisition centered on discourse.
Of interest in this genre of research is the renewed interest in the
performance level of language.
Even some of the contextual categories described by-of all people- skinner,
in the verbal behavior, turns out to be relevant!
The linguist can no longer deal with abstract.

12. Tabula rasa
Stimuli: linguistic responses
Conditioning
reinforcement
Mediating
response

13. Innate predisposition
Systematic, rule-governed
acquisition
Creative construction
“Pivot” grammar
Parallel distributed
processing
Constructivist
Social interaction
Cognition and language
Functions of language
Discourse

14. Competence: one’s underlying knowledge of a system,
event, or fact.
Performance: the overtly observable and concrete
manifestation or realization of competence.
Competence: one’s underlying knowledge of the system
of a language.
Performance: is actual production or the comprehension
of linguistic events.

15. Chomsky likened competence to an idealized
speaker-hearer.
A theory of language has to be a theory of
competence.
Brown and Bellugi gave us a delightful example
of the difficulty of attempting to extract
underlying grammatical knowledge from
children.
“Pop go weasel” effect.

16.  The child obviously had no interest in the adult’s
grammatical interrogation and therefore said
whatever he wanted to!
 The researcher is thus forced to devised method
of judging competence .
• tape recording
indirect
• Transcription
of countless
speech
indirect
• Administration of
imitation,
production or
comprehension tests
direct

17.  A five year old,
monolingual , English
speaking girl whose
recounting of an
incident viewedon
television is transcribed:
 They heard ‘em underground ca-cause
they went through a holey-a hole- and
they pulled a rock from underground and
then they saw a wave going in that the
hole-and they brought a table and the
wave brought ‘em out the k- tunnel and
then –they went away and then –uh-m-
ah-back on top and it was-uh-going under
a bridge and they went –then the braves
hit the- the bridge-they- all of it- th-then
they looked there-then they- then they
were safe.

18.  On the surface it might appear that this child is
severely impaired in her attempts to communicate.
is defined as an impairment of language
function due to localized cerebral (brain) damage
which leads to difficulty in understanding and/or
producing linguistic forms.

19.  The classification of types of aphasia is based on
the primary symptoms of an aphasic:
It is characterized by a reduced amount
of speech, distorted articulation and slow , often effortful
speech.
S.o. who suffers from this disorder
can produce fluent speech ,however , difficult to make
sense.
Individuals suffering from this
disorder have disrupted rhythm because of pauses and
hesitation.