Research on first language acquisition focuses on how and why children succeed in learning language. It examines the acquisition of rules and structures through approaches like social context comparisons and studies of language disabilities. Acquisition refers to learning language rules while development refers to using rules across contexts. The CHILDES database is a collection of child language corpora accumulated by researchers. When working with children, researchers must consider their shorter attention spans, curiosity about equipment, and need to build relationships and get permission. Common research topics examine longitudinal case studies, pre-linguistic development, lexical and semantic development, phonology, comprehension, metalinguistic awareness, color terms, and sources of variation.

1. Psycolinguistics and
Language Acquisition
Group I
Ahmad Rusli
Indah Nindia Iswar
Iin Widya Lestari

2. First Language Acquisition and
Development
Research in First language acquisition and
development addresses the central question of
why and how children succeed in acquiring the
language. Research focuses on the acquisition and
rules and structure.
Approaches to research → Social Context,
gender, and social group, cross cultural
comparison, language disability and abnormal
delay.
Acquisition refers to learning of language structures
or rules, especially those of grammar, phonology and
so on. Development refers to the child’s use of the
acquired language rules and structures in widening
variety of language contexts

3. The CHILDES Database
• Child Language Data exchange System refers
to a computer system based collection of
corpora accumulated by individuals and
group of researcher.

4. Working with Children
• Dealing with school, researcher should write formally letter
to head teacher about the research that will relate to
children.
• Children may well wonder about the research, so the
researcher should realize about it and anticipate it soon.
• Children have shorten attention than adult, so researcher
should realize about it.
• If using some media such as pictures and etc, make sure to
check that children at particular age can make sense of
picture.
• Children usually are curious about research equipment
such as recorder, and etc, so be careful

5. • Make sure that researcher establish good
relationship with them.
• Children tend to be active and like to move
around, so researcher has to be able in
handling to record or use video
• Dealing with recording or et as documents,
researcher should realize that the reording
need to be save in right hands.
• introduce them to avoid misinterpretation of
children’s voice

6. Central themes and Projects Ideas
Longitudinal Case
Study
It takes long time and commitment over a
considerable period. It’s not just from the
researcher but also from child and family.
For instance :Brown et al analyze the
development child’s Mean Length of
Utterance (MLU) and stages of grammatical
morpheme development.

7. Pre-Linguistic Development
It deals with children working on
their language development before
they can produce their first word.
So it investigate aspects of
paralinguistic such as one word
For instance : Halliday (1975)
investigate prelinguistic
utterance for evidence of
growing patterns of meaning
and function his son’s
utterance.

8. Over and under- extension : Lexical and
Semantic Development
It investigates how young children use
words in way which suggests thaey have
different understanding of them compared
to adult usage. They may use a word to
refer too wide category. (over extension).
Ex: apple for all fruits
They use a word to refer to too
small category of things . For
example : dog (it’s for pet) not
for next door neighbor. (Under
extension )

9. Development of Phonology and
Intonation
Phonology deals with sounds in
language. in this research, researchers
carry out research about
mispronunciation of children under five
language.

10. Comprehension of complex grammatical
structure
Children’s Metalinguistic awareness
Colour Terms
Carer Language (child –directed
speech)
Conversational development →the differences
in conversation that children encounter when
making the transition from home to school.

11. Children’s Metalinguistic awareness
Children’s awareness of what word, sounds and
sentence etc is and what age or stage of awareness
each types of structure emerges
the role of language games and nursery rhymes in
promoting metalinguistic awareness
The link between metalinguistic awareness and the
development of literacy.
Children’s appreciation of verbal jokes and puns.

12. Colour Terms
It ‘s relatively little studied
aspects of child language
development. It can be studied as
part of overall lexical and
semantics development.

13. Source of Variation in child
Language
It appears as a part as reaction to the
tendency for child language researcher to
focus on the average or normal child as
though all children develop identically. So
the researchers consider a range of
sources of variation in term how they might
influence children's long term language
development and how they could affect the
way that children behave as subjects
fieldwork project.

14. Example of First Language Acquisition
and Development
• Dr. Casasola (Associate Professor in the
Department of Human Development, Cornell
University) analyzed how language and
learning interact in everyday circumstances
She seeks to understand how babies learn
words and how learning language helps to
solidify what babies already know and,
perhaps, how it leads babies to learn what
they may not have learned otherwise.

15. One strategy that adults use to develop babies’ language acquisition is
labeling. By labeling an object, a parent or caregiver identifies the
names of specific objects for the baby. For example, when a baby picks up
a ball, a parent may respond, “that’s a ball.” Researchers assert that
babies’ early vocabulary development is stimulated when adults label
items, thereby facilitating babies’ ability to associate words with
objects.
In one experiment, Casasola & Bhagwat examined the extent to which
labeling objects helps babies learn. In this study, 18-month-old infants
were shown 4 different videos of a support relation (two objects placed
together): a car placed on top of another car, a cup placed on an inverted
bowl, a Duplo figure placed on a Duplo car, and a turtle placed on a pole.
One group of infants heard a novel word to describe the objects occupying
the space as they viewed these events: “Wow! She puts it toke.” A second
group of infants received the same novel word as a count noun (“Wow! It is
a toke.”) A third group simply viewed the events in silence to establish
how infants attend to the support relation when not hearing any language.

16. The results demonstrate that providing a label to
an event helps
infants learn about what they see. Providing a
spatial word, even an unfamiliar one, can aid 18-
month-old infants in recognizing a support
relation as familiar.
Infants learn language according to a highly
organized set of rules containing five systems:
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and
pragmatics.