Summary

 Language Adcquisition

 

A.    Language Adcquisition

1.     The Linguistic capacity of children

a)    Children do not learn a language by memorizing sentences, they acquire a system of grammatical rules extracted from the language they hear around them all on their own.

b)    Children exposed to different languages all develop their native language during a narrow window of time, going through similar developmental stages. Even deaf children of deaf signing parents acquire signed languages in stages that parallel those of children acquiring spoken languages.

B.    What’s Learned, What’s Not?

1.     The innateness hypothesis

a)    The grammars people ultimately end up with contain many abstract rules and structures that are not directly represented in the linguistic input they receive. This argument is called the poverty of the stimulus.

b)    Children are not given information about structure dependency, they are not explicitly informed about any abstract property of grammar. The input children receive is a sequence of sounds or signs.

c)     The child does not need to learn structure dependency or any other universal principles of sentence formation. These aspects of grammar are part of the innate blueprint for language.

2.     The process of acquiring language

a)    Children acquire the language(s) they hear spoken in their community, not any random language.

b)    The process of acquiring language is rooted in human biology and supported by linguistic input from the environment.

c)     Children are able to acquire a complex grammar without any particular help beyond exposure to the language.

C.    Stages in Language Acquisition

In moving from first words to adult competence children pass through linguistic stages. They begin by babbling, they then acquire their first words, and in just a few months they begin to put words together into sentences. Children are biologically equipped to acquire all aspects of grammar.

1.     Babbling

a)    At around six months, the infant begins to babble. Babbles begin to sound like words, although they may not have any specific meaning attached to them.

2.     First words

a)    After the age of one, the child begins to use the same string of sounds repeatedly to mean the same thing, thereby producing her first words. The age of the child when this occurs varies and has nothing to do with the child’s intelligence.

3.     Holophrastic stage

a)    Most children go through a stage in which their utterances consist of only one word.

4.     Telegraphic stage

a)    It describes a phase when children tend to omit function morphemes such as articles, subjects, pronouns, auxiliaries and verbal inflection.

D.    The Perception and Production of Speech Sounds

a)    Infants show a very early response to different properties of language.

b)  They respond to phonetic contrasts found in human languages even when these differences are not phonemic in the language spoken in the baby’s home.

c)     They are born with the ability to perceive just those sounds that are phonemic in some language, it is possible for them to learn any human language they are exposed to.

E.    Segmenting the Speech Stream

1.     The speech

a)    Speech is a continuous stream broken only by breath pauses.

b)    Infants are remarkably good at extracting information from continuous speech.

c)     Infants can use the stress pattern of the language as a start to word learning.