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FIRST LANGUAGE
DEVELOPMENT
EDU 2302

Zainab Ahmad
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Introduction
First language is a big topic to talk about. There are many ideas,
believes and opinions about how children talk. Are they acquire the
language or learn it? How did they acquire the language? Through
Nature or nurture? How did children pick up the language? Are they
pick it up as a chunks? Are there stages that children pass through it to
acquire the language? Or they acquire it without go through stages?

Learnt or acquired?
Some researchers say that the language is learnt, and it happens as a
result of knowing the grammar. Firstly the children learn the sounds,
then understand the words. After that they will know many words
together. But they learn grammatical rules from beginning. Children
learn from their mother tongue by themselves. But we still ask
ourselves: how babies know and learn things? (Bhattacharjee, 2015)
Communications is important for children to learn a language. For
English language, questions is important. About the vocabulary, the
children learn more vocabulary at age of 3 or 4. Like behaviorism
theory which comes up by skinner who is a pioneer of behaviorism, he
said that behaviorism is the way to know how children learn routine
and regular through memorize and repetition. When the parent point at
a ball and say ball every time. The child will memorize the word and
say ball. Then parent will encourage their child to say it again. Then
the repetition will happen and the child will learn that this object called
ball (Language learning in early childhood, 2006). How did children
learn a new language? They learn it naturally by naturally repetitions
and what the interest the children. Of course it will takes time to be
learnt (McGlothlin, 1997)

Others say that first language is acquired. Humans language and

cognitive developed by acquisition. Children acquire the first language
without thinking even if they don't know the grammar. They get feel for
what is right or wrong. At the age of 3, the child acquire the
grammatical morphemes. But its not all children acquire it at the same
age. At age of 3 or 4, the children acquire frequent, more complex
linguistic and words. This give them ability to produce more thousands
words when they grow up. One strategy that adults use to develop
babies language acquisition is labeling. (Kimberly Kopko) Its like
saying the objects name when the child hold it.
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Chunks or system highly organized?

Unlike adults, children don't have any word knowledge. They say words
as chunks. Chunks are some words together in the language. For example:
'by the way' .Researchers confirm that without any external help, the
children acquire the knowledge from analyzing and having information
by using phonological properties of speech. By using their phonetic
knowledge. Firstly, the children identify the shape of the word in the
stream of words. Then they map the words according to its meaning
which they heard it many times with same sound. The WH-questions,
usually learnt as chunk. For example: why did that happen? Children
can learn this question as a chunk. So, they can ask correct questions
because they learnt questions as chunks. When children use chunks
they use higher intonation. (Language learning in early childhood,
2006)

Some researchers idea was that children acquire the meaning of the
words. They may know the meaning and also know the grammatical
parts of speech. For example: they can notice if the word is noun or
verb. Childrens languages improves systematically. (Language
learning in early childhood, 2006)

Stages in L1 acquisition
Many researchers believe that children's L1 developed through
stages and have experiments to acquire language. One of them was
Piaget. These stages are: Prelinguistic Sounds, holophrastic, twoword stage, telegraphic and fine-tuning. Prelinguistic sounds stage
is when the children start saying goo gaa, cooing and babbling. It
from 0-12 months. In the holophrastic or one-word stage, in their
first year the children are able say their first word, naming some
objects and know some words meaning. Third stage which is two2

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word stage illustrate that children will be able to order two words
such as (sister cry). Telegraphic stage (2-5 years) is when children
have ability to pronunciation the words like adults and learn about
20-30 words each day. And fine-tuning stage (5-10 years) which is
the final stage when the children know and use rules of a language,
know grammar and vocabulary. (Acosta, 2012)

Nature, or nurture?
Its a big topic in linguistics to know how children acquire language. We
can't know what is happening in the child's brain. This topic needs
concrete evidence to prove the theories.

The naturist were: Noam Chomsky, who was an American linguistic,

and Howard Gardner (developmental psychologist) and Stephen Krashen who was
a professor in a university. Chomsky had a theory called innatist
perspective. It shows that children acquire the languages innately and
all children born with innate capacity to learn any language. They
made up words and name objects by themselves. (Language learning
in early childhood, 2006).

The nurtures were: Piaget, Ivan Pavlov (Russian psychologist), Lev

Vygotsky (soviet psychologist) and Skinner with his behaviorism theory
Nurture display that children pick up the language from the
environment or people around them. For example: listening to the TV
or Radio or people around them. (McGlothlin, 1997). Jacqueline Sachs
collaborates with colleagues (1981) to study language development of
a child. His name was Jim, he was 4 years and 2 months. He never had
a conversations with parent because they had health case. Jacqueline
and colleagues noticed that Jim were showing very rapid acquisition of
language because of watching TV and listening to radio. (Language
learning in early childhood, 2006). Here we can see that the
environment play a big role in language acquisition.

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Conclusion
There are no specific answer for each question. Its still hard thing to
find the real answers because Researchers have different beliefs
and opinion.

References
Acosta, J. (2012, Apr. 21). Stages of Acquisition of first Language. Retrieved
Sep. 26, 2015, from slideshare.net:
http://www.slideshare.net/kiprus/stages-of-acquisition-of-firstlanguage?from_action=save
Bhattacharjee, Y. (2015). The First Year. National Geographic, 227, 58 77.
Kimberly Kopko. (n.d.). Research Sheds Light on How Babies Learn and
Develop Language. Retrieved Sep. 23, 2015, from :
http://www.human.cornell.edu
Language learning in early childhood. (2006). In P. Lightbown, & N. Spada,
How Languages Are Learned (3rd Edition ed., p. Chapter 1). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
McGlothlin, M. (1997). A childs first steps in language learning. TESL Journal.
Retrieved Sep. 21, 2015, from http://iteslj.org/Articles/McGlothlinChildLearn.html