Presentation

1. How Languages are Learned
Pasty M. Lightbown and Nina Spada
Fourth edition
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Tshen Tashi, Naresuan University, Thailand

2. 1: LANGUAGE LEARNING IN
EARLY CHILDHOOD

3. First Language Acquisition
• Language acquisition
impressive and fascinating aspect of human
development
Learning language is an amazing feat
gained attention of linguists and psychologists
3

4. The first three years: Milestones and
developmental sequences
• L1 acquisition – universal
Baby crying
Cooing and gurgling sounds
Distinguish voice of mother from others
• By twelve months
show signs of comprehension – bye-bye
begin producing a word or two
4

5. • By the age of two
produce at least 50 words
combine words into simple sentences –
Mommy juice
telegraphic sentences - leave out such things
as articles, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs
• developmental sequences are related to
children's cognitive development
5

6. Grammatical morphemes
• Roger Brown’s study in 1960s
• A longitudinal study of the language dev.
• 3 children (Adam, Eve, and Sarah)
• Found 14 grammatical morphemes acquired
in similar sequence
• Mastered grammatical morphemes at the
bottom of list also mastered list at the top
• Reverse was not true
6

7. Negation
Learn negation very early – 4 stages
• Stage 1: No. (No cookie. No comb hair.)
• Stage 2: Negative before the verb (Daddy no
comb hair. Don't touch that!)
• Stage 3: Other forms of negative (I can't do it.
He don't want it.)
• Stage 4: Negative element attached to correct
form of auxiliary verb (You didn't have supper.
She doesn't want it.)
7

8. Questions
Remarkable consistency in the way children learn to
form questions
• 'What‘ – as a chunk ('Whassat?')
• 'Where' and 'who' emerge very soon
• 'Why' – end of the second year
• Finally 'how' and 'when’ – manner and time
Child: When can we go outside?
Parent: In about five minutes
Child: 1-2-3-4-5! Can we go now?
8

9. Involve six stages:
• Stage 1: single words or simple two- or three-word
sentences with rising intonation
 Cookie? Mommy book?
 Where's Daddy? What's that? – correct questions
• Stage 2: Declarative word order + rising intonation
 You like this? I have some?
• Stage 3: notice the structure of questions
 Can I go? Are you happy?
 Fronting – something at the front of a sentence
 Is the teddy is tired? Do I can have a cookie?
9

10. • Stage 4: use subject-auxiliary inversion and add
'do' in sentences
Are you going to play with me?
Do dogs like ice cream?
• Stage 5: form Wh- and 'yes/no' questions
correctly
• Are these your boots? Why did you do that?
• Why the teddy bear can't go outside? (negative)
• Stage 6: Children are able to correctly form all
question types
10

11. The pre-school years
• By the age of four
ask questions, give commands, report events,
create stories
mastered the basic structure of their language
acquire less frequent and more complex linguistic
structures
more interaction with unfamiliar adults
acquire the aggressive language
know difference between adults and baby talk
11

12. • Begin to understand how language varies in
different situations
• Develop metalinguistic awareness - the ability
to treat language as an object, e.g. being able
to define a word, or to say what sounds make
up that word.
3 year old children would speak ‘drink the
chair’ but they would never say ‘Cake the eat’
But 5 year old would know ‘drink the chair’ is
wrong in a different way from ‘Cake the eat’
12

13. The school years
• Develop more sophisticated metalinguistic
awareness
Knowing that words and sentences can have
multiple meanings
• Understanding that a 'word' is separate from
the thing it represents
‘caterpillar’ is longer than ‘train’, even though
the object it represents is substantially short
13

14. • Growth of vocabulary
at the rate of several hundreds to a thousand
words in a year
depends on how much and how widely children
read
• The acquisition of different language registers
Register: A style or way of using language that is
appropriate for a particular setting
speaking and writing require different registers
the register used in writing a research report is
different from that used in writing a letter to a
friend
14

15. Explaining first language
acquisition
3 main theoretical positions
Behaviorist
Innatist
Interactional/ developmental
15

16. The behaviorist perspective
• Behaviorism was very influential in the 1940s
& 1950s
• The best-known proponent: B. F. Skinner
• When children imitate the language they hear
around them, they receive ‘positive
reinforcement’
• Positive reinforcement = praise or just
successful communication
16

17. • Environment as the source of everything the
child needs to learn
• imitation and practice as the primary process
in language development until they form
‘habits’ of correct language use
• Imitation – word-for-word repetition
Mother: Shall we play with the dolls?
Lucy: Play with dolls
• Practice – repetitive manipulation of form
He eat carrots. The other one eat carrots.
They both eat carrots
17

18. Children vary in the amount of imitation they do
• Patterns in language – Learning the rules of
word formation and overgeneralizing them to
new contexts
Mother: Maybe we need to take you to the
doctor
Randall: Why? So he can doc my little bump?
• Focus on meaning – Unfamiliar formulas
(When familiar language is used in unfamiliar
ways)
18

19. • Question formation – Randall learned a trick
of forming question (adding ‘are’ at the
beginning of the sentence)
Are dogs can wiggle their tails?
Are those are my boots?
Are this is hot?
• Order of events – mention the event s in order
of occurrence
Randall: You took all the towels away because
I can’t dry my hands (mean to say other way)
19

20. The innatist perspective
• All human languages are fundamentally innate
• Children are biologically programmed for
language
• Develop language same way as other
biological functions
• Children are born with a specific innate ability
• Universal Grammar - an innate linguistic
knowledge that consists of a set of principles
common to all languages
20

21. • The Critical Period Hypothesis - the proposal
that there is a limited period during which
language acquisition can occur
• The strong version of the CPH - There are
biological mechanisms specifically designed
for language acquisition and these cease to be
available at or even before puberty
• The weak version of the CPH - even though
the same learning mechanisms are involved,
second language learning will be more difficult
for older learners
21

22. The interactionist perspective
• language acquisition is an example of the
child's remarkable ability to learn from
experience
• no need to assume that there are specific
brain structures devoted to language
acquisition
22

23. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1951)
• Children's language is built on their cognitive
development
Cognitive understanding of object permanence
(knowing that things hidden from sight are still
there)
the stability of quantities regardless of changes in
their appearance (know 10 pennies spread out
are not more that 10 pennies in tightly squeezed
line)
logical inferencing (properties of rod: size,
weight, materials, etc)
23

24. • Children’s cognitive development would partly
determine how they use language
The use of certain terms such as ‘bigger' or
‘more‘ depends on children’s understanding of
the concepts they represent
Language can be used to represent knowledge
that children have acquired through physical
interaction with the environment
24

25. The psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978)
• language develops primarily from social
interaction
• In a supportive interactive environment,
children are able to advance to a higher level
of knowledge and performance
• The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
the metaphorical place in which a learner is
capable of a higher level of performance
because there is support from interaction with
an interlocutor
25

26. Cross-cultural research
• Catherine Snow (1995) and others have
studied the effects of the ways in which adults
talk to and interact with young children on
language acquisition
• In middle-class North American homes,
researchers observed that adults often modify
the way they speak when talking to little
children
26

27. Child-directed speech
• slower rate of delivery/ higher pitch/ more
varied intonation/ shorter, simpler sentence
patterns/ stress on key words/ frequent
repetition/paraphrase
• It is not universal to all societies
• In some societies, adults do not engage in
conversation or verbal play with very young
children
27

28. • Bambi Schieffelin (1990) found that Kaluli
mothers in Papua New Guinea did not
consider their children to be appropriate
conversational partners
• Martha Crago (1992) observed that in
traditional Inuit society, children are expected
to watch and listen to adults
• Other studies observed young children
interact with older siblings who serve as their
caregiver
28

29. The importance of interaction
• The role of interaction between a language-
learning child and an interlocutor is better
understood by cases where such interaction is
missing
• Jacqueline Sachs (1981) studied language
development of a child they called Jim
He was a hearing child of deaf parents
oral language was through TV, no sign language
Jim could not develop his linguistic features like
normal children
29

30. Usage-based learning/Connectionism
• Language acquisition is the result of exposure
to input. Input frequency is powerful predictor
of what will be learned
• Children learn language from their language
experiences.
• There is no dedicated ‘language acquisition
device’
• In acquiring language, the child’s brain makes
connections between language and meaning
30

31. Language disorders and delays
• Most children move through the stages of
language development without any difficulty
or delay
• Some experience difficulties: dyslexia,
deafness, articulatory problems
• Some children produce recognizable first
words by 1, but some may not speak until 3
• Adult learners – some learn to read almost by
magic but others do not
31

32. Childhood bilingualism
• Development of bilingual or second language
learning children is of enormous importance
• Simultaneous bilingualism – children who are
exposed to more than one language virtually
from birth
• Sequential bilingualism – children who are
exposed to a second language after they have
acquired a first language
32

33. Childhood bilingualism
• Some believe it is too difficult for children to
cope with two languages and can be confused
• Evidences from bilingual proficiency can have
positive effect in academic success
• Bilingual proficiency provide choice for
children to express
• Children with limited knowledge of school
language may fall behind than others
33

34. Childhood bilingualism
• Subtractive bilingualism – Loss of one
language on the way to learning another
• Additive bilingualism – the maintenance of
home language while the second language is
being learned
• Knowledge of more than one language can
increase opportunities for cross-cultural
communication and economic cooperation
among people
34

35. THANK YOU
35