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First Language Acquisition

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15 views22 pages

First Language Acquisition

1 first

Uploaded by

wredsan
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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First language

Acquisition
Muneerah Al Shuhail
Introduction

 Acquiring a first language is an amazing process to witness for


several reasons:

1. Every language is complex.


2. Before the age of 5, the child knows most of the complicated system
of grammar.
 Use the syntactic, phonological, morphological and semantic rules of
the language.
 Join sentences.
 Ask questions.
 Use appropriate pronouns.
 Negate sentences.
 Form relative clauses.
Basic requirements
1.A child requires interaction with other language-users in order to

bring the general language capacity s/he has into operation.

 Genie

 Cultural transmission

2.The child must be physically capable.

 Being able to speak

 Being able to hear

 Is hearing enough?

 Interaction (The crucial requirement)

 All these requirements are related.


The acquisition schedule

 All normal children develop language at roughly


the same time, along the same schedule.

 The biological schedule is related to the


maturation of the infant’s brain to cope with the
linguistic input.

 Young children acquire the language by


identifying the regularities in what is heard and
applying those regularities in what they say.
Caregiver speech

 A type of simplified speech adopted by


someone who spends time interacting with a
child is called caregiver speech.

 Caregiver speech is characterized by:


 Frequent use of questions
 Simplified lexicon
 Phonological reduction
 Higher pitch- extra loudness
 Stressed intonation
 Simple sentences
 A lot of repetition
cont.,

 Caregiver speech is also called ‘motherese’.


 caregiver speech Assigns interactive roles to
young children
 E.g.
MOTHER: Look!
CHILD: (touches picture)
MOTHER: what are those?
CHILD: (vocalizes a babble string and smiles)
MOTHER: yes, there are rabbits
CHILD: Vocalizes and smiles
MOTHER: (laughs) yes, rabbit
Cooing

 Cooing:
1. Few weeks: cooing and gurgling,
playing with sounds. Their abilities are
constrained by physiological limitations
2. They seem to be discovering phonemes
at this point.
3. Producing sequences of vowel-like
sounds- high vowels [i] and [u].
Babbling

 Babbling:
1. Different vowels and consonants ba-ba-
ba and ga-ga-ga
2. 9-10 months- intonation patterns and
combination of ba-ba-ba-da-da
3. Nasal sounds also appear ma-ma-ma
4. 10-11- use of vocalization to express
emotions
5. Late stage- complex syllable
combination (ma-da-ga-ba)
The one-word stage

 12-18 months.

 recognizable single-unit utterances.

 single terms are uttered for everyday objects “milk”,


“cookie”, “cat”, “cup”, and “spoon” [pun].

 Holophrastic (wasa = what's that)


The two-word stage
 Vocabulary moves beyond 50 words

 By 2 years old, children produce utterances ‘baby chair’,


‘mommy eat’

 Interpretation depends on context

 Adults behave as if communication is taking place.

 The child not only produces speech, but receives feedback


confirming that the utterance worked as a contribution to the
interaction.

 By this age, whether the child is producing 200 or 300 words,


he or she will be capable of understanding 5 times as many
Telegraphic speech
 2-2½ years:

1. The child produces ‘multiple-word’ speech.

2. The child has already developed sentence-building capacity & can get
the word order correct („cat drink milk‟, „daddy go bye-bye’)

3. A number of grammatical inflections begin to appear.

4. Simple prepositions (in, on) are also used

5. Vocabulary is expanding rapidly.

 3 years:

1. Vocabulary has grown more.

2. Better pronunciation
The acquisition process
 The child does not acquire the language by
imitating adults- but by trying out constructions
and testing them. They also do not respond to
grammatical corrections.

 CHILD: my teacher holded the baby rabbit and


we patted them
MOTHER: did you say your teacher held the baby
rabbit?
CHILD: yes. she holded the baby rabbit and we
patted them
MOTHER: Did you say she held them tightly?
CHILD: no, she holded them loosely
Developing Morphology

 By 2-and-a-half years old- use of some


inflectional morphemes to indicate the
grammatical function of nouns and verbs.

 The first inflection to appear is –ing after it comes


the –s for plural.

 Overgeneralization: the child applies –s to words


like ‘foots’ ‘mans’ and later ‘feets’ ‘mens’
Developing
morphology
 The use of possessive ‘s’ appears ‘mommy’s bag’

 Forms of verb to be appear ‘is’ and ‘are’

 The –ed for past tense appears and it is also


overgeneralized as in ‘goed’ or holded’

 Finally –s marker for 3rd person singular preset


tense appears with full verbs first then with
auxiliaries (does-has)
Developing syntax

 The development of two syntactic structures- three stages


 Forming questions
 Forming negatives
Forming questions
 1st stage:
 Insert where and who to the beginning of an
expression with rising intonation
E.g. sit chair? Where horse go?
 2nd stage:
 More complex expression
E.g. why you smiling? You want eat?
 3rd stage:
 Inversion of subject and verb
E.g. will you help me? What did I do?
Forming negatives

 Stage 1:
 Putting not and no at the beginning
e.g. not teddy bear, no sit here
 Stage 2:
 Don’t and can’t appear but still use no and not before
VERBS
e.g. he no bite you, I don’t want it
 Stage 3:
 didn’t and won’t appear
e.g. I didn’t caught it, she won’t go
Developing Semantics

 During the two-word stage children use their limited


vocabulary to refer to a large number of unrelated
objects.
 Overextension: overextend the meaning of a word on the
basis of similarities of shape, sound, and size.
e.g. use ball to refer to an apple, and egg, a grape and a
ball.
 This is followed by a gradual process of narrowing down.
Developing Semantics

 Antonymous relations are acquired late

 The distinction between more/less, before/after seem to be later


acquisition.
FLA (L1A) vs SLA (L2A)
Assignment

 What are the differences between FLA and SLA? And


what makes SLA more difficult and less successful?
Thank You!!

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