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Chapter 8: Language
Acquisition

• THEORIES ABOUT HOW CHILDREN AQUIRE LANGUAGE:

• Imitation
• Correction & Reinforcement (behaviorist)
• Analogy
• Connectionism (behavior, analogy, & reinforcement)
• Structured Input
• Innateness Hypothesis
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• Imitation
• Early utterances are not copies of adult ones, but different, and also
novel, e.g. goed instead of went

• Reinforcement
Children are corrected for bad grammar and rewarded for good grammar
But adults rarely correct grammar; content is more likely (truth)
Attempts to correct a child’s language are doomed to failure

• Analogy
Children would put words together to form phrases and sentences by using
sentences they hear as models (samples)
The book says this doesn’t work. Why?
The child hears:
Was the boy sleeping < The boy was sleeping
Then, why doesn’t he say: *Is the boy who __ sleeping is dreaming about a new car?
Analogy supposedly fails because sometimes it doesn't work when we might
expect to, e.g. we say of a fly ball that it flied out (not that it flew out); and we say
Mickey Mouses (not Mickey Mice)
Some linguists and psychologists feel that this is a simplistic version of what
analogy is all about. They believe that a more complex theory of analogy can be
made to work.
e.g. connectionism: a computer modeling of language representation in the
brain and acquisition through analogy: no rules are stored anywhere; we extract
patterns from the data as needed to form new expressions (Reinforcement &
Analogy)
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• Structured input

Children learn to speak so easily because adults speak to them in a

simplified language: Motherese, baby talk, child directed speech

But motherese is not syntactically simpler, it is not syntactically restricted,

and it is not used in every culture (or by everyone in our culture)

• Children construct grammars

Language acquisition is a creative process; children are not given explicit information
about the rules by either instruction or correction; they somehow extract the rules of
the grammar.
The developmental stages in which this occurs are similar for all children, possibly
universal
Innateness hypothesis: children are equipped with an innate template or blueprint for
language: Universal Grammar
Evidence for this: poverty of the stimulus: Argument for innateness of UG:
The language children hear is impoverished; it is less than it is necessary to account for
the richness and complexity of the grammar they attain
It is incomplete, noisy and unstructured: slips of the tongue, false starts,
ungrammatical and incomplete sentences, and there is no information as to what
is well formed. i.e. it is
e.g. Structure dependency of rules: auxiliary movement
“No amount of imitation, reinforcement, analogy or structured input will lead the child
to formulate a phrase structure tree or a principle of structure dependency.” Does this
make sense to you?
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• Universal grammar contains abstract principles: e.g. you can extract out of
PP but not out of coordinate structures.
Innateness hypothesis (Chomsky) the child extracts from the linguistic
environment those rules of grammar that are language specific, such as word
order and movement rules. However, they do not need to learn universal
principles of UG like structure dependency and the coordinate structure
constraint, or general rules of sentence formation, such as the fact that heads
of categories can take complements.
The innateness hypothesis is the hypothesis, presented by Noam Chomsky,
that children are born with knowledge of the fundamental principles of
grammar. Chomsky asserts with his theory that this inborn knowledge helps
children to acquire their native language effortlessly and systematically despite
the complexity of the process.
Auxiliary inversion rule: takes time to acquire; initially uninverted aux’s:
Where mommy is going? What you can do?
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Stages in language acquisition

• Process is quick but not instantaneous

• First words to adult competence: 3-4 years

• At each stage of development, the child’s language conforms to a set

of patterns/rules, a grammar. Child grammars differ somewhat from
adult grammars

• Children do not respond to correction

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The perception and production of speech

sounds
• Children are not born blank slates; children are more sensitive to
some distinctions in their environment than others
• Newborns respond to phonetic contrasts found in human languages
but not to those which are not found (loudness, pitch, etc.)

• BABBLING is not linguistic chaos: the 12 most frequent consonants in

the world’s languages make up 95% of the consonants infants use in
babbling. It is illustrates the readiness of the human mind to respond
to linguistics input from a very early stage.

First words (holophrastic stage: complete

phrase/sentence
Around age 1, children begin to use repeatedly the same string of
sounds to mean the same thing; children realize
that sounds are connected to meanings. First words.
This is an amazing feat: How do they discover where one word begins and
another leaves off?
Not just words: these one-word utterances convey complex messages:
commenting, naming, requesting.
Children’s grammatical competence is ahead of their productive abilities
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• The development of grammar

Children are neurologically prepared to acquire all aspects of grammar, from
phonetics to pragmatics

• Acquisition of Phonology
First words, generally monosyllabic with Consonant Vowel form
Acquisition begins with vowel sounds
Phonological inventory is much smaller than an adult’s
Children first acquire the small set of sounds common to all languages of the
world; later they learn the less common sounds

• General order of acquisition:

Manner of articulation: nasals, glides, stops, liquids, fricatives, affricates
Place of articulation: Labials before velars before alveolars, before palatals

Children perceive or comprehend more phonological contrasts than they

can produce

Substitutions: mouse for mouth; yight for light , wabbit for rabbit;
phonological substitutions are rule governed
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Acquisition of word meaning

Early vocabulary provides insight into how children use words and construct word
meaning
One word = holophrastic utterances
J.P: UP – get me up, get up
SOCK = sock, undershorts
A child may extend the meaning of a word from a particular referent to encompass a
larger classes
CAT: particular object, class of objects, what characteristics?
DOG: same thing; may become extended to any 4 legged creature
PAPA, DADDY: father; then may be extended to all men
Children learn approximately 14 words a day for the first 6 years of their lives (~ 5000
words per year)
Words help with syntactic bootstrapping: children use their knowledge of syntax to
learn the syntactic category of a word (cf. blicking)

Acquisition of Morphology
Clearest evidence of rule learning: overgeneralization: bringed, goed, foots,
mouses
Funny thing: 3 phases: broke > breaked > broke; brought > bringed > brought;
went > goed > went
Phase two: Children look for general patterns, for systematic occurrences
Classic study: wug[z], vs. bik[s]; small children follow the pattern
Languages with inflectional morphology: children
learn agreement and casemorphology at a very early age; also irregular
morphology
Derivational rules: children show knowledge of derivational rules; e.g. English
pattern: a microwave > to microwave; a hammer > to hammer; children will say:
to scale (for weigh), broom (for sweep), key (for opening
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Acquisition of Syntax (around age 2)

Around age two children begin to put words together
At first combinations of two holophrastic utterances
Later: Two word sentences with clear syntactic and semantic relations, one intonation
contour.
MLU: mean length of utterances (in number of morphemes)
Telegraphic speech: function words are left out
Different morphemes reach the 90% correct criterion level at different times, e.g.
3rd person singular marker (comes) and possessive (Daddy’s) reach it 6 months to a year
after the identical plural ("s")
The sentences reflect the child’s grammar at that particular stage of language
development. Children do not leave out function words on purpose.
(Still, sentences now appear to have hierarchical structure and rules similar to the adult
grammar; e.g. word order is a subset of the adult word order in Russian, Turkish)
Case markers are acquired quickly in Turkish and Russian for example
Language Explosion: sometime between ages of 2;6 and 3;6 there is a virtual language
explosion

Pragmatics
• In addition to rules of grammar, children must learn the appropriate
use of language in context: pragmatics, e.g. pronouns
• Children aren’t always sensitive to the needs of their interlocutors and
may fail to establish the referents of pronouns
• Younger children (age 2) have problems with sifting reference: I vs. you
• Problems with definite articles: overuse, the child assumes that the
listener is familiar with entities s/he is familiar with
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The development of auxiliaries (case study)

• Language acquisition involves developments in

various components, which interact in complex ways
• Children in English telegraphic stage do not use auxiliaries; they
are needed for questions or negative sentences; they
have trouble with those constructions
• They understand the pragmatics of questions and negation,
though
• In languages without auxs, children’s questions and negatives
seem more adult-like
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Acquisition of signed languages

Similar stages to oral language

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