General

Linguistics
1-2023
Today’s Lesson

• First Language Acquisition • Reading Activity:

• Theories of Language • Yule’s First Language Acquisition
chapter (on Canvas)
Acquisition:
• Behaviourist Approach
• Innateness Hypothesis
• Universal Grammar
Think about the topic

How do children
How is language What is involved
acquire their first
taught to them? in this process?
language?
First Language Acquisition

Fundamental Questions
❖What are the rules and mental representations that underlie our ability
to speak and understand a language?
❖How does a child learn this system of rules and mental
representations?
❖What accounts for the ease, rapidity, and uniformity of language
acquisition in the face of impoverished data? (Logical problem of
language acquisition, posed by Chomsky)
Theories of Language Acquisition

• How do we acquire language?

Behaviourist Approach

⮚ Children come to this world as a tabula rasa.

⮚ Children are then shaped by the environment and slowly conditioned
through various schedules of reinforcement.
Behaviourist Approach

• Traditional behaviourists believed that language learning is the result of

imitation, practice, feedback on success, and habit formation.

Stimulus > Response > Feedback > Reinforcement

=
An effective language behaviour
Behaviourist Approach

‘The child’s own utterances were not seen as possessing a system in

their own right. They were seen as a faulty version of adult speech. The
‘mistakes’ were simply the result of imperfect learning; the process of
habit-formation had not yet had time to run its full course’ (Littlewood,
1998, p. 5).
Verbal Behaviour

• One of the best-known attempts to construct a behaviourist model of

linguistic behaviour was embodied in B.F. Skinner's classic, Verbal
Behavior (1957).
• According to Skinner, verbal behaviour, like other behaviours, is
controlled by its consequences.
• When consequences are rewarding, behaviour is maintained and is
increased in strength and perhaps frequency.
• When consequences are punishing, or when there is a total lack of
reinforcement, the behaviour is weakened and eventually extinguished.
Evidence to criticise the Behaviourist
theory

Although ‘imitation’ is involved to some extent in language acquisition,

there is much more than just imitation.

• The basic view of language is no longer acceptable.

• What children learn is an abstract knowledge of rules.
• Almost every sentence you speak or write is novel, never before uttered
either by you or by anyone else. These novel utterances are even
created by very young children as they "play" with language.
Evidence to criticise the Behaviourist
theory
• Children say things that they have never heard before.
E.g., Overgeneralisation errors: goed, runned, doed.
• Although children are exposed to different actual speech, they arrive at
the same underlying rules as other children in their community.
• ‘Through correction and reinforcement children learn what is accepted
and not accepted’ However, correction might not always work.
Evidence to criticise the Behaviourist
theory
Poverty of the stimulus (POS)
• Plato’s problem: How can people come to possess such a large store of
knowledge when only exposed to a limited set of examples?
• What children hear is very limited, compared to their own production.
However, they come to know aspects of grammar about which they
receive no information.
• The language we are exposed to is impoverished. It is less than what is
necessary to account for the richness and complexity of the grammar
we attain.
 The Innateness Hypothesis

‘Nature’ vs. ‘Nurture’ debate.

• Language acquisition is innately
determined.
• We are born with a genetic capacity
that predisposes us to a systematic
perception of language around us,
resulting in the construction of an
internalised system of language.
The Innateness Hypothesis

• Eric Lenneberg (1967) proposed that certain modes of perception and other
language related mechanisms are biologically determined.
• Similarly, Chomsky (1965) claimed that the existence of innate properties
reside in the "little black box", a language acquisition device (LAD).
• For the LAD to work, the child needs to access only samples of a natural
language. These language samples serve as a trigger to activate the device.
• Once it is activated, the child is able to discover the structure of the language
to be learned by matching the innate knowledge of basic grammatical
relationships to the structures of the particular language in the environment.
The Innateness Hypothesis

The child's linguistic development is:

• Not a process of developing fewer and fewer "incorrect" structures.
• Not a language in which earlier stages have more "mistakes" than later stages.

Rather, the child's language at any stage is systematic in that the child is constantly:
• Forming hypotheses on the basis of the input received.
• And then testing those hypotheses in speech (and comprehension).
• As the child's language develops, those hypotheses are continually revised, reshaped,
or sometimes abandoned.
The Wug Test

• Jean Berko (1958) demonstrated that children learn language not as a

series of discrete items (separate and different from each other), but as
an integrated system.
• Using a simple nonsense-word test (Wug Test), Berko discovered that
English-speaking children as young as four years of age applied rules
for the formation of plural, present progressive, past tense, third person
singular, and possessives.
The Wug Test

• By completing these sentences, the

children demonstrated that they know
rules for the formation of plurals and past
simple in English.
• By generalising these patterns to words
they have never heard before, they show
that their language is not just a list of
memorised word pairs such as
'book/books' and ‘nod/nodded.'
Universal Grammar

• The answer to the logical problem of language acquisition is that

children do not start from scratch (tabula rasa), UG provides them with a
significant start.
• “Language properties inherent in the human mind” (Cook 1985) framed
within principles and parameters.
• Principles are said to be universal to all grammars while parameters are
determined by language input. This means the input triggers or activates
UG by providing the information to set the appropriate parameters.
Universal Grammar

• This unconscious language knowledge is what

allows us to recognise or comprehend complex
grammatical features that are not inferable from
the Native Language.
• Imagine language is a puzzle we have to solve,
we are all given the same pieces (principles) but
we all put them together differently (parameters)
to build a grammar according to the language
we are exposed to.
 • Get the reading from Canvas

Reading • In groups of 2 to 3, read the document and answer the

questions on the next slide.

Activity • Post your answers in the assignment created on Canvas for

that purpose.
Answer the following questions
1. Describe four typical features of caregiver speech.
2. At what age is an infant capable of distinguishing between [ba] and [pa]?
3. Why are some of the infant's first sounds described as "cooing"?
4. Describe two gestures that one-year-olds produce along with babbling.
5. During which period do children produce holophrastic speech?
6. During which stage do children typically first produce syllable sequences similar to mama and dada and how old are
they?
7. At about what age do children typically begin producing varied syllable combinations such as ma-da-ga-ba?
8. Which of these utterances would be described as telegraphic speech?
(a) hit ball (b) what's that (c) daddy go bye-bye (d) my teacher holded the baby rabbits
9. Which of these expressions is likely to be used before the others?
mommy books or mommy's book or mommy reading or mommy goed
10. Which of these expressions is likely to be used before the others?
What book name? or How that opened? or Where kitty go?
11. Which of these two utterances was produced by the older child and why?
(a) I not hurt him (b) No the sun shining
12. What is the term used to describe the process involved when a child uses one word like ball to refer to an apple, an
egg, a grape and a ball?