Child Language Acquisition – Language

and Linguistics Assignment 2

RESMI REJIMON

1. Why does R L Trask say that "the acquisition of language is arguably the most
astonishing and wonderful feat we accomplish in our entire life"?
The acquisition of language is arguably the most astonishing and wonderful
feat we accomplish in our entire life, and we do it at an age when we can hardly do
anything else. Moreover, it is the one thing that children do better than adults: any
physically normal child will learn perfectly the language surrounding it, whereas
hardly any adults can perform the same feat.

2. Is 'imitation and reinforcement' a good way to explain language acquisition?

Substantiate.
Children learn language when they are positively reinforced, that is, when
they produce correct language; or negatively reinforced when they say something
wrong. Even when children are trying to imitate what they hear, they are unable to
produce sentences outside of the rules of their developing grammar.
Ex: ADULT: He’s going out CHILD: He go out.
ADULT: That’s an old-time train. CHILD: Old-time train.
ADULT: Adam, say what I say. Where can I put them? CHILD: Where I can
put them?
Children learn to produce correct sentences because they are positively
reinforced when they say something grammatical and negatively reinforced when
they say something ungrammatical. 

3. Does language acquisition begin before birth?

By hearing speech patterns and rhythms in the womb, a baby is learning her
primary language. In fact, just hours after a baby is born, he can distinguish
between his native tongue and the foreign language of another mother.

4. What is cooing?
Cooing is also known as gurgling or mewing. At around the age of two
months, the infant begins cooing making those familiar but hard-to-describe baby
noises like ‘Coo’, ‘ga-ga’ and ‘goo’. Around six months, cooing gives way to
babbling, a kind of vocal play typically involving strings of syllables. Child
develops increasing control over vocal chords.

5. What is babbling?
 Around six months, cooing gives way to babbling, a kind of vocal play
typically involving strings of syllables. Sounds begin to resemble adult sounds
more closely. These sounds have no meaning and baby makes far more noise than
before.

6. What is the one-word stage?

Sometime between ten and twenty months, children begin to use a variety of
recognizable single-unit utterances for everyday objects like cup, cat, dog, spoon,
milk, cookie. (Curiously, girls tend to start earlier than boys). They become able to
understand that sounds are related to meanings and hence produce “words”. In this
period, they tend to use simplified versions of words or syllables like “nany and
momi”. Single utterance functions as a phrase or sentence. One word is used in
multiple settings and they give different meanings. But it does not include any
grammatical words like is, might, of, to or the, nor does the child use any
grammatical endings such as plurals or past tenses.

7. What is the two-word stage?

Around 18 to 24 months, the child begins to produce utterances which are
two words long: things like daddy sock, want juice and gimme spoon. This two-
word stage is well named: the child cannot produce any three-word utterances, like
mummy get ball, but it can say mummy get and get ball. Importantly, a child at this
stage hardly ever says anything like ball get, with non-adult word order. Already
the child is acquiring some grammar. However, there are no grammatical words or
endings.

8. What is the vocabulary burst?

There will be a Rapid increase in the rate of word learning in very early
childhood. The child’s vocabulary begins to grow much more rapidly than before,
and parents can no longer keep track of the words their child knows. By the age of
five, the average child is thought to know around 10,000 words, which means that
it must have been learning almost 5 words/day. Utterances suddenly become much
longer: four, five, six, seven, ten words and more. Grammatical words and endings
appear and, in a matter of months, the child is using almost the whole range of
adult grammatical forms of words. All kinds of new constructions appear like
negation, subordinate clauses, questions and are quickly used with increasing
accuracy and confidence.

9. What is the morphosyntactic burst?

Between the ages of roughly two and three years, children acquire the vast
majority of the grammar of the language they are learning. By age five, they have
mastered practically everything, apart from a few elaborate constructions which are
not learned until later.

10. What does the results obtained from the 'wug test' indicate?
The Wug Test was an experiment carried out by Jean Berko in 1958 which
aimed to investigate the acquisition of the plural and other inflectional morphemes
in English-speaking children. test showed that children have productive rules: they
don’t learn by hearing every possible form but by applying linguistic rules that
they subconsciously know. Using the wug test a child is shown a cute little figure
and told ‘Here’s a wug.’ A second, similar, figure is introduced, and the
investigator says ‘Look -here’s another wug. Now there are two-’ A child who says
wugs, with the ending correctly pronounced like a z, has learned to make plurals.
Most four-year-olds get this right, and practically everyone gets it right by age six.
Now the child has never heard the made-up word wug before, and therefore can
never have heard the plural wugs. The results proved that the subject did acquire
naturally the studied morphemes and the Wug test shows some aspects of the
interlanguage development related to the acquisition of morphemes done by the
subject of the study.

11. What is significant about the way children learn to make negative statements?
First, they just stick a negative word (usually no) at the front of the sentence:
No I want juice. After a while, that negative word is moved to the front of the verb:
I no want juice. Finally, the rather complicated English negative auxiliaries appear:
I don’t want juice. but she will continue to use her current pattern for making
negatives until she’s ready for the next stage. And negatives are in no way
exceptional. Precisely the same thing happens with every aspect of language
acquisition.

12. Why is language acquisition considered to be an 'active' process?

Language acquisition is an active process as children actively construct their
language. The child is not just passively soaking up bits of language which come
her way, instead, she is constructing the language as she goes. This is one of the
central findings of modern linguistics, and it destroys forever any simpleminded
notions of imitation or reinforcement.

13. What is the logical problem of language acquisition?

Children’s knowledge of language goes beyond what could be learned from
the input they receive. The language which a child hears contains performance
errors, that is, slips of the tongue, false starts, and other ungrammatical forms. 
14. What is Chomsky's innateness hypothesis?
In the view of a famous American linguist Noam Chomsky, children are
born knowing what human languages are like and that is, a very considerable part
of the structure of human language is innate. Chomsky argues that our species has
simply evolved a language faculty which is built into our brains, and that language
in large measure just grows in children, the way their visual faculties grow.

15. What evidence of innateness can be found by observing deaf children and
children born to deaf parents?
  Deaf children of deaf parents acquire sign language in the same way that
hearing children of hearing parents acquire a spoken language. Deaf children coo
and babble like other children, but, their babbling soon dries up and they remain
silent. However, if they observe people around them using sign language, they
eagerly begin babbling with their hands. If their parents are deaf and hence fluent
signers, such children go on to learn sign language normally and perfectly, and
they go through all the same stages as speaking children. These children develop
gestures as the first stage of language development.

16. Why does Ray Jackendoff say that children 'look for language'?
The linguist Ray Jackendoff says that children look for language because
they look first for spoken language; failing that, they look for sign language;
failing that, they look for anything in the environment which might resemble
language, and do their best to turn it into a fully developed language.

17. How does the formation of creoles from pidgins support the innateness
hypothesis?
A pidgin is a contact language that developed in a situation where speakers
of different languages need a language to communicate. A pidgin becomes a creole
when it is adopted as the native language of a speech community. A pidgin has no
fixed vocabulary and no fixed grammar at all. The children take the pidgin and turn
it into a real language. They settle on a fixed grammatical system, including, for
example, a fixed word order, which pidgins don’t have. They introduce all sorts of
new grammatical elaborations which are absent from the pidgin: verb tenses,
subordinate clauses, everything you’d expect a language to have. This new
language is called a creole, and the children who create it are the first native
speakers of the creole.

18. What is so special about Nicaraguan Sign Language?

Nicaraguan Sign Language is the only language spontaneously created,
without the influence of other languages, to have been recorded from its birth. Kegl
found a flourishing and happy community of children ‘chattering’ eagerly and
constantly in a totally new language which they had invented from zero. The
deaf children who created the language's unique vocabulary, grammar, and syntax.
The older children who had been the first to use NSL had only an incomplete
version, a pidgin. But the younger children were completely fluent in it, and so
they should have been and it was their mother tongue. When new deaf children
arrived at the school, they quickly learned the language from the
children already there.

19. What is the critical period for language acquisition?

In the 1960s the neurologist Eric Lenneberg proposed an explanation:
children have a distinctive faculty for learning language which is ‘switched off’ by
the body at around age twelve or thirteen. This hypothesis of a cutoff age for
language acquisition implies that there is a for acquisition, after which it becomes
impossible to learn a language.

20. What is Williams Syndrome and how does it support the modularity of
language hypothesis?
Williams syndrome is a rare genetic disorder. It was discovered some years
ago that a particular defect on chromosome number eleven induces a disorder of
calcium metabolism in our bodies, with highly consistent consequences. Williams
children are small and slight, with several abnormalities of the internal organs and
a striking ‘pixie-like’ face. What the Williams syndrome shows is that even fairly
devastating damage to mental and cognitive processes may leave the language
faculty virtually intact. Certain children who otherwise appear to be normal,
healthy and intelligent none the less have great difficulty in learning a first
language. Often they start very late, progress slowly, speak slowly and painfully,
have trouble completing their sentences, and make lots of mistakes. Some of them,
though, speak rapidly and fluently, but with an absolutely horrendous number of
grammatical mistakes. Most affected children eventually acquire a more or less
adequate command of language, but the disability none the less continues
throughout life.