LIGHTBOWN & SPADA

HOW LANGUAGES ARE

LEARNED
CHAPTER 1

LANGUAGE LEARNING IN
EARLY CHILDHOOD
What is this chapter about?
• How do children learn their first language?

• What enables a child not only to learn words, but to put

them together in meaningful sentences?

• What pushes children to develop complex grammatical

language?

• Does child language develop similarly around the

world?
The First Three Years

• high degree of similarity in the early language of

children all over world

• there are developmental sequences of first language

acquisition
The First Three Years (cont.)
(early weeks of life)
◦ involuntary crying

◦ cooing and gurgling

◦ babies can hear very little differences between the sounds of

human language
◦ Babbling (few months later)
The First Three Years (cont.)

• By the end of first year:

◦ understanding many frequently
repeated words
• e.g. waving when someone says ‘bye-bye’

• At twelve months:
◦ producing one or two words that everyone recognizes
The First Three Years (cont.)
• By the age of two:
◦ producing at least fifty different words
◦ beginning to combine words into simple sentences
(e.g. ‘mommy juice’ ‘baby fall down’).
• ‘telegraphic sentences’
• leave out articles, prepositions, or auxiliary words.

◦ What makes them ‘sentences’?

• the word order reflects the word order of the language children are
hearing
• combined words have a meaning relationship, not just a list of
words
 The First Three Years (cont.)
(grammatical morphemes)
• predictable patterns (developmental
sequences/stages)
• these stages are related to children’s
◦ cognitive development
◦ their gradual mastery of linguistic elements (plurality)
• see ‘wug test’ on p. 2 (grammatical morp.) Gleason,
1950s
• see the study on p. 4 (developmental seq.) Brown, 1973
 Acquisition of
Grammatical morphemes
Roger Brown’s study (1973):
- approximate order of acquiring grammatical
morphemes
◦ Present progressive –ing (running)
◦ Plural –s (books)
◦ Irregular past forms (went)
◦ Possessive -’s (daddy’s hat)
◦ Copula (am/is/are)
◦ Articles (a/an/the)
◦ Regular past –ed (walked)
◦ Third person singular simple present –s (he runs)
◦ Auxiliary ‘be’ (He is coming)

8
Overgeneralization
• Child will generalize grammar rules
so they apply the rules too broadly.
• Example: “I dugged in the sandbox”
rather than “I dug in the sandbox”
Overgeneralization
The First Three Years (cont.)
Negation & Questions

• see Pages 5-6 for the stages in the development of

‘negation’

• see Pages 6-9 for the developmental stages ‘questions’

Acquisition of Negation
Lois Bloom’s study (1991) – four stages
◦ Stage 1: ‘no’ – e.g., “No go”. “No cookie.”

◦ Stage 2: subject + no – e.g., “Daddy no comb hair.”

◦ Stage 3: auxiliary or modal verbs (do/can) + not

(Yet no variations for different persons or tenses)
e.g., “I can’t do it “, “He don’t want it.”
◦ Stage 4: correct form of auxiliary verbs
(did/doesn’t/is/are) + not
e.g., He didn’t go. She doesn’t want it.
But sometimes double negatives are used
e.g., I don’t have no more candies.

12
 Acquisition of Questions
Lois Bloom’s study (1991):
Order of the occurrence of wh- question words
• “What” - Whatsat? Whatsit?
• “Where” and “who”
• “Why” (emerging at the end of the 2nd year and
becomes a favorite at the age of 3 or 4)
• “How” and “When” (yet children do not fully
understand the meaning of adults’ responses)
e.g., Child: When can we go outside?
Mother: In about 5 minutes.
Child: 1-2-3-4-5! Can we go now?

13
Acquisition of Questions
Lois Bloom’s study (1991):
Six stages of children’s question-making
◦ Stage 1: using single words or single two- or three-word
sentences with rising intonation
(“Mommy book?” “Where’s Daddy?”)

◦ Stage 2: using the word order of the declarative sentence

(“You like this?” “Why you catch it?”)

◦ Stage 3: “fronting” - putting a verb at the beginning of a

sentence
(“Is the teddy is tired?” “Do I can have a cookie?”)

14
Acquisition of Questions

Lois Bloom’s study (1991) – six stages (II)

◦ Stage 4: subject-auxiliary inversion in yes/no questions
but not in wh-questions
(“Do you like ice cream?” “Where I can draw?”)

◦ Stage 5: subject-auxiliary inversion in wh-questions, but

not in negative wh-questions
(“Why can he go out?” “Why he can’t go out?”)

◦ Stage 6: overgeneralizing the inverted form in embedded

questions
(“I don’t know why can’t he go out.”)

15
The First Three Years (cont.)

• What do all these examples of developmental

sequences mean?

◦ Children’s language develops systematically.

◦ Their language is not just a list of

memorized word pairs.

◦ In order to create new forms and structures,

children go beyond what they have heard.
The pre-school years
• mastering the basic structures of the language
• asking questions, giving commands, reporting real
events, and creating stories
• using correct word order and grammatical markers most
of the time
• learning several new words a day
• beginning to acquire more complex linguistic features
(e.g. passives).
The pre-school years (cont.)

• developing the ability to use language in a social

environment

• using the language in various social environments

The pre-school years (cont.)

• ‘metalinguistic awareness’

◦ the ability to treat language as an object separate from the

meaning it conveys
“drink the chair vs. cake the eat”

◦ knowing ‘about’ the language

 The school years
• the language abilities expand and grow

• more sophisticated metalinguistic awareness is

developed

• an astonishing growth of vocabulary

• the acquisition of different language ‘registers’

i.e. a style or way of using language that is typical of or appropriate for a
particular setting
Explaining First Language
Acquisition
• Three main theoretical positions to explain first
language acquisition:
◦ The behaviourist perspective
◦ The innatist perspective
◦ Interactionist / developmental perspectives
The Behaviourist Perspective
◦ Children imitate the language and receive positive
reinforcement
• The reinforcement may be:
• praise
• just successful communication

◦ They imitate and practice until they form ‘habits’ of correct

language use (see examples on page 10).
The Behaviourist Perspective

◦ Important factors:
• quality and quantity of the language the child hears
• the consistency of the reinforcement

◦ Environment is the source of everything the child

needs to learn
The Behaviourist Perspective

• Fallacies of the behaviorist perspective:

◦ Children imitate selectively.
• They imitate what is new and useful to them, not simply what is
‘available’ in the environment (see example on Page 11).

◦ Many of the things children say show that:

• they use language creatively (overgeneralizing)
• not just repeat what they have heard (see examples on Pages 13-14)
The Behaviourist Perspective
• Therefore:
◦ Imitation and practice alone cannot explain some of the forms
created by children.

◦ Children pick out patterns and generalize them to

new contexts.

◦ They create new forms or new uses of

words.

◦ Classical behaviorism is not a satisfactory

explanation for the acquisition of complex
grammar.
The Innatist Perspective

• All human languages are fundamentally innate and the

same universal principles underlie all of them.

• Children are biologically programmed for

language.

• The environment makes the basic

contribution, and the child will do
the rest.
 The Innatist Perspective
• Behaviorism cannot explain language acquisition because:
◦ Children know more about the language than they hear from the
environment.
◦ Children are sometimes exposed to incorrect use of language (e.g.
false starts, incomplete sentences) but they learn the correct use of
language.
The Innatist Perspective

• Therefore:
◦ Children’s minds are not blank plates to be filled
by imitation.

◦ Children are born with a specific innate ability

to discover the underlying rules of the language
they are exposed to.

◦ Children are born with a template which contains the principles

that are universal to all human languages –
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (UG).
The Innatist Perspective

• Critical Period Hypothesis

◦ There is a critical period for first language acquisition.

◦ Children who are not given access to language in infancy

and early childhood will never acquire language (see
examples on p. 19-21).
 Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives
• Language learning is just another remarkable learning
ability of human beings.

• There is no need to think that there are specific brain

structures devoted to language
acquisition.

• Even though there is a powerful learning mechanism in

human brain, environment is also very important.
 Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives

• Piaget:
◦ Children’s language is built on their
cognitive development.

◦ Their cognitive development would

determine how they use language.

◦ Language can be used to represent knowledge that children

have acquired through physical interaction with the
environment.
 Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives
• Vygotsky:
◦ Language develops primarily from social interaction.

◦ Zone of Proximal Development

• In a supportive interactive environment:
• children can do more than they are
capable of doing independently
• they can advance to a higher level of
knowledge and performance
 Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives

• Child-directed Speech:
◦ slower rate of delivery
◦ higher pitch
◦ more varied intonation
◦ shorter, simpler sentences
◦ stress on key words
◦ frequent repetition and paraphrase

• Child-directed speech is not universal, but in every

society children hear language that is meaningful to
them.
 Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives
• The importance of interaction:

◦ See the example of Jim on Page 25

◦ One-to-one interaction gives the child access to language

that is adjusted to his or her level of comprehension.
 Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives
• Connectionism:
◦ When children hear a word, a connection is created in the
child’s mind between the word and what it represents.

◦ Language acquisition is a process of

associating
• words with objects
• words with other words
• words with grammatical morphemes.

◦ All this is possible because of the child’s general ability to

develop associations
 Childhood Bilingualism

• Simultaneous Bilinguals

• Sequential Bilinguals

• Subtractive Bilinguals