The document discusses theories of language acquisition in children. It describes how children progress from early sounds to multi-word sentences as they extract the rules of grammar from the language around them. While behaviorist theories proposed that children learn language through imitation, reinforcement, and analogy, the document argues these cannot fully explain language development. Instead, it supports the innateness hypothesis that children are born with an innate capacity to learn language that allows them to acquire grammar rapidly even from limited and variable input.

1. Language Acquisition
Prepared by: Angelica Grace
Introduction to Language

2. 2
General
 Language acquisition
 Language learning
 First language (L1) learning instead of
Second language (L2) or Foreign
language learning

3. 3
Innateness
 Language learning is gifted
 Nobody is taught language.
 Before children can add 2+2 they learn a
grammar of a language
 You can’t prevent the child from learning it.
(Chomsky 1994)
 The capacity to learn language is deeply
ingrained in us as a species, just as the
capacity to walk, to grasp objects, to
recognize faces. (Slobin 1994)

4. 4
In learning a language
 What a child does not do:
 Storing all the words and all the
sentences in the mental dictionary
 The number of words is finite
 The number of sentences is infinite
 What a child does:
 Constructing the rules themselves from
very “noisy” data

5. 5
Mechanisms of Language
Acquisition
 Based on behaviorism
 Focusing on people’s behaviors which
are directly observable
 Language  verbal behavior
 Children learn through Imitation,
Reinforcement, and Analogy.

6. 6
Imitation
 Children just listen to what is said around
them and imitate the speech they hear.
 However:
 Children produce utterances they never hear
 holded, tooths, two foot, a my pencil
 Children unable to speak for neurological or
physiological reasons learn the language
spoken to them and understand it. When
they overcome their speech impairment, they
immediately use the language for speaking.

7. 7
Reinforcement
 Children learn through positive/negative
reinforcement
 Correction of “bad grammar” and reward for
“good grammar”
 However:
 Reinforcement seldom occurs, and when it
does, it’s usually for correcting pronunciation
or incorrect reporting of facts.
 examples
 “Her curl my hair”  uncorrected
 “Walt Disney comes on Tuesday”  corrected

8. 8
Analogy
 Learning by hearing a sentence and using
it as a sample to form other sentences
 example
 hearing) I painted a red barn
 analogy) I painted a blue barn
 However, consider false analogy
(Gleitman 1994)
 example)
 also hearing) I painted a barn red
 analogy) two words switching possible
 application) * I saw a barn red
 But this sentence is not produced.

9. 9
Structured Input
 Learning through simplified language
 eg) motherese, child directed speech (CDS),
babytalk
 However:
 Motherese is not syntactically simpler.
 examples
 question) Do you want your juice now?
 embedded) Mommy thinks you should sleep now.
 imperative) Pat the dogs gently.
 negative tag Q) We don’t want to hurt him, do we?

10. 10
Therefore
 Analogy, imitation, and reinforcement
cannot account for language development.
 These are based on the assumption that
what the child acquires Is a set of
sentences of forms rather than a set of
grammatical rules.
 “Structured input” theory also places too
much emphasis on the environment

11. 11
Rules & Grammar Theory
 Language learning is not really something
that the child does; it is something that
happens to the child placed in an
appropriate environment. (Chomsky 1988)
 Language acquisition is a creative
process; they must extract rules of the
grammar from the language they hear
around them.
 Innateness Hypothesis

12. 12
Innateness Hypothesis
 We end up knowing far more about
language than is exemplified in the language
we hear around us  Poverty of the stimulus
 An answer to the logical problem of
language acquisition by Chomsky:
 What accounts for the ease, rapidity, and
uniformity of language acquisition in the face of
impoverished data?
 easy: they need not be taught.
 rapid: major part of grammar learned at around 3.
 uniform: children of all languages go through the same
stages.
 Impoverished data: the language they heard is
incomplete, noisy & unstructured.

13. 13
(cntd.)
 Example of impoverished data
 The rules children construct are structure
dependent
(1) *Is the boy who ___ sleeping is dreaming of a new car
(2) Is the boy who is sleeping ___ dreaming of a new car.
 They do not produce questions by moving the
1st auxiliary as in (1). Instead, they correctly
invert the auxiliary of the main clause, as in
(2)

14. 14
Stages in Language
Acquisition
 Linguistic competence develops by stages
 Language acquisition is fast but not
instantaneous
 Those stages are universal
 In different languages
 In spoken languages or in sign languages
 Scientific studies of child language
acquisition
 earlier: diaries kept by parents
 recent: various techniques (eg. hunger,
discomfort. etc.)

15. 15
Stages (cntd.)
 Stages
 First Sounds
 Babbling stage
 First words
 The two-word stage
 Telegraphic stage
 Infinity

16. 16
The First Sounds
 Newborn ~ 6 months
 Prelinguistics stage:
 earliest cries, whimpers, of newborn,
or neonate
 The sounds produced are noises
 involuntary responses to stimuli
 e.g.) hunger, discomfort

17. 17
(cntd.)
 Infants are highly sensitive to certain subtle
distinctions in their environment
 Newborn infants respond to phonetic contrasts
 Sucking rate experiment
 [pa] [pa] [pa] [pa]…[ba]
 They can learn contrasts of any language
 Japanese(Korean) children distinguish between [r] & [l]
 But they don’t respond to sounds that never signal
phonemic contrasts
 Eg) intermediate sounds between [pa] & [ba]
 They ignore non-linguistic aspects
 Eg) gender differences

18. 18
(cntd.)
 Children can learn any human
language  natural ability
 After 6 months, they begin to lose the
ability
 Eg) Japanese infants no longer can
distinguish bet [r] & [l]
 They begin to learn the sounds of the
language of their parents

19. 19
Babbling
 Around 6 months old
 Learn to distinguish bet right & wrong sounds of
their language
 Is this stage necessary?
 Earlier: not required for lg. acq.
 Recently: the earliest stage in lg. acq.
 Prosody begins to resemble adults’
 Eg) pitch, intonation contours
 Babbling is not linguistic chaos
 The 12 most frequent consonants in the world’s
languages make up 95 % of the consonants of
babbling
 Earlier babbles: repeated Cs and Vs sequences
 Eg) mama, gaga, dada
 Deaf infants produce babbling

20. 20
First Words
 Sometime after 1 year
 Begin to use the same string of
sounds repeatedly to mean the same
thing
 Realize that sounds are related to
meanings
 Discover where one word begins and
another word ends
 Produce their 1st true words

21. 21
(cntd.)
 Called holophrastic stage
 One-word utterances convey a more complex
message.
 Eg) Say “down” to mean
 “put down”
 “the toy has fallen down from the shelf”
 Developing use of language for social purposes
 Naming function and meaning extension
 “Cheerios” can mean
 The box of cereal in front of him
 Asking for some Cheerios
 They use universal sounds first
 [b, m, d, k] [a]

22. 22
Two words
 Around 2 years old
 Begin to put two words together
 Two-word sentences
 Acquisition of syntax begins
 Examples
 Bye-bye boat, all gone sticky, sweater chair,
 Grammatical characteristics
 No grammatical inflections
 Rare use of pronouns (except “me”)
 Ambiguity
 E.g.) “Mommy Sock” to mean
 A. subj+obj relation: mom is putting the sock on the
child
 B. possessive: Mommy’s sock

23. 23
From telegraph to infinity
 No 3-word sentence stage
 Mean Length of Utterances (MLU)
 Frequently used for comparing children’s
progress
 Biological age is not indicative anymore, as it
varies
 E.g.) Grammatical acquisition stage
 MLU 2.3-3.5 morphemes length
 Characteristics of telegraphic speech
 Function words/morphemes missing
 Sounds as if reading a Western Union
message
 E.g.) “Cat stand up table”, “what that”, “Cathy build
house”, “No sit there”

24. 24
Development of Grammar
(Linguistic Knowledge)
 Acquisition of phonology
 Acquisition of word meaning
 Acquisition of morphology
 Acquisition of syntax
 Acquisition of pragmatics

25. 25
Acquisition of phonology
 Children first acquire the small set of sounds
common to all languages of the world
 Eg) [p, s, b, m, d, k] but not [T]
 Order of acquisition
 Manner:
nasals>glides>stops>liquids>fricatives>affricates
 Place: labials>velars>alveolars>palatals
 Voicing
 In early stages children may not distinguish voicing
of consonants
 If they distinguish bet p/b, they also distinguish
others like t/d, s/z

26. 26
(cntd.)
 Errors are rule governed, not random
 Children perceive or comprehend
many more phonological contrasts
than they can produce
 Eg) they hear “light[lait]” although
they say “yight[jait]”

27. 27
Acquisition of Word Meaning
 Children learn approximately 14 words a day
until 6 years old  5000 words/year
 Frequent meaning extension
 Eg) Up (get up), dog (animals), papa (all men)
 Syntactic bootstrapping
 Syntax helps the child acquire meaning
 A child shown a picture of a funny animal
jumping up and down hearing “see the blicking”
or “see the blick”
 Will jump up and down when asked to show a blicking
 Will point to the funny animal when asked to show a
blick

28. 28
Acquisition of Morphology
 Morphological errors in morphology:
another evidence of rules
 E.g.) overgeneralization: bringed, goed,
singed, foots, sheeps
 Later they learn exceptions to the rules
 Plural formation” experiments (Berko-
Gleason 1958)
 Children applied the regular plural-formation
rule to words never heard before
 a wug  two wugs

29. 29
Acquisition of Syntax
 In the holophrastic stage, children have
knowledge of some syntactic rules.
 17-month-old children distinguish between
“Ernie is tickling Bert” and “Bert is tickling
Ernie.”
 relying on word order rules (syntax)
 Age 2;0
 Begin to put words together
 Age 3;0
 consistent use of function morphemes
 complex sentence structures such as
coordinated sentences and embedded
sentences of various kinds.

30. 30
Acquisition of Pragmatics
 Pragmatic aspects (knowing contexts) are
acquired relatively late
 Wrong use of pronouns (3 or 4-yr-olds)
 “He hit me” when mommy doesn’t know who “he”
is.
 Difficulty in shifting reference
 “You want to take a walk” meaning “I”
 Wrong use of articles
 Use of the definite article as the indefinite article
for introducing a new referent
 They assume that his listener knows who he is
talking about

31. 31
Parameter Setting
 Two aspects of Language
 principles: language universal components
 parameters: language particular components
 Examples
 Head parameter (order of VP)
 VO in English / OV in Korean
 Verb movement
 Moving Verb in Dutch & Italian but moving Aux in
English
 Parameters are set early in development and
cannot be undone

32. 32
Acquisition of Signed
Languages
 Language development in deaf children
parallels the stages of spoken language
 Babbling, single sign stage, single words
(holophrastic stage), telegraphic stage,
combined signs
 Eg) in holophrastic stage, function signs are
omitted
 Deaf children of hearing parents who are
not exposed to sign language from birth
suffer a great handicap in acquiring
language.
 But they develop their own gestures

33. 33
Knowing more than one
Language
 Second language (L2) acquisition
 The acquisition of a second language
by someone who (child or adult) has
already acquired a first language
 Bilingual language acquisition
 The simultaneous acquisition of two
languages beginning in infancy (before
the age of 3 years)

34. 34
Bilingualism
 Bilingual children sometimes “mix” the two
languages in the same sentences
 Eg) English words & French syntax
 His nose is perdu (His noise is lost)
 A house pink (A pink house)
 That’s to me (That’s mine)
 Some amount of language mixing Is a normal
part of the early bilingual acquisition process,
and not necessarily an indication of any
language problem.

35. 35
Theories of Bilingual
Development
 Unitary system hypothesis
 A bilingual child initially constructs only one
lexicon and one grammar
 Evidence: mixing of words
 However, there is enough overlap of vocabulary
 Separate systems hypothesis
 A bilingual child builds a distinct lexicon and
grammar for each language
 Evidence
 using different word order for each language,
 Setting up two distinct sets of phonemes and
phonological rules

36. 36
Second Language Acquisition
 Fundamental difference hypothesis of L2
acquisition
 L2 acquisition is something different from L1
acquisition
 Adults do not simply “pick up” a second
language. It usually requires conscious
attention.
 Adult L2ers do not often achieve nativelike
grammatical competence especially with
respect to pronunciation.
 L2 errors may fossilize

37. 37
(cntd.)
 Interlanguage grammars
 The intermediate grammars that L2ers creat
on their way to the target
 Native language influence in L2 acq.
 Transfer of grammatical rules
 Example)
 Korean L2ers’ confusion of [l] and [r]
 French L2ers’ confusion of [z] and [D]
 German L2ers’ saying [haf] for have
 English L2ers’ confusion of Italian ano and anno

38. 38
(cntd.)
 Critical period for L2 acquisition?
 Age is an important factor in achieving
nativelike L2 competence
 Sensitive period instead of critical period
 There is a gradual decline in L2 acquisition abilities
with age
 The sensitive period for phonology is the shortest
 To achieve nativelike pronunciation of an L2
generally requires exposure during childhood.
 Other aspects of languages, such as syntax, may
have a larger window.

39. 39
L2 teaching methods
 Grammar-translation
 Students memorize words, inflected words,
syntactic rules, and use them to translate from
L1 to L2 and vice versa
 Direct method
 Simulating L1 acquisition
 Abandoning memorization
 L1 is never used in class
 Comparison & difference is not discussed
 Audio-lingual method
 Based on imitation, repetition & reinforcement
 Combination of many methods is required

40. 40
Can Chimps Learn Human
Language?
 Recently, much effort has been expended
to determine whether nonhuman primates
can learn human language.
 Limitations
 Highly stereotyped limited number of
messages
 Vocabularies occur primarily as emotional
responses to particular situations
 It is still controversial whether they have the
capacity to acquire complex linguistic
systems similar to human language

41. THANK YOU FOR
LISTENING!
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