Republic of the Philippines

UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN PHILIPPINES

University Town, Northern Samar
Website: http//uep.edu.ph Email: uepnsofficial@gmail.com
Graduate Studies

Name: Angeli T. Esponilla Student Number: 204558

Professor: Leonila A. Longcop, DALL Date of Submission: February 26, 2021

LEARNING ACTIVITY 3

III. Based on your readings, explain in specific context the following concepts:

1. L1 VS L2
Language acquisition is one of the most impressive and fascinating aspects of human
development. L1 is used to refer to the learner’s first language. One remarkable thing
about first language acquisition is the high degree of similarity in the early language of
children all over the world. L1 is typically acquired at the crucial period of cognitive
development; pre-puberty, when L1 and other crucial life-skills are also acquired or learned.
Children never resist L1 acquisition, any more than they resist learning to walk except in
cases where no linguistic input was exposed to the child such us in the cases of feral
children who were isolated from society and did not experience any interaction from
humans who have the capacity for language.
Second language acquisition is the process of learning another language after the basics
of the first has been acquired, starting at about 5 years of age and thereafter. Second
language acquisition includes learning a new language in a foreign language context. For
example, learning English in Mexico or learning German in the United States. Also, it
includes learning a new language in a host language environment. For example, learning
English in United States or learning German in Germany. The syntax of the L2 is not acquired
unconsciously, or at least not in the way L1 syntax is acquired. Few L2 learners develop the
same degree of unconscious, rule-governed insight into and use of the L2 which they
demonstrate with the L1. Many highly intelligent individuals with impressive learning skills
often have great problems learning an L2. Many L2 learners 'fossilise' at some stage, so that
even if they use the L2 regularly, and are constantly exposed to input in it, they fail to
develop full grammatical or 'generative' competence.

2. Competence vs Performance
There is difference between having the knowledge necessary to produce sentences of a
language and applying this knowledge. It is a difference between what a person knows,
which is known as linguistic competence and how one uses this knowledge in actual speech
production and comprehension, which is referred to as linguistic performance. For example,
speakers of all languages—spoken and signed—have the knowledge to understand or
produce sentences of any length. When they attempt to use that knowledge, though—
when they perform linguistically—there are physiological and psychological reasons that
limit the number of adjectives, adverbs, clauses, and so on. They may run out of breath,
their audience may leave, they may lose track of what they have said, and others. For the
most part, linguistic knowledge is not conscious knowledge. The linguistic system—the
sounds, structures, meanings, words, and rules for putting them all together—is learned
subconsciously with no awareness that rules are being learned. Just as we may be
unconscious of the rules that allow us to stand or walk, to crawl on all fours if we choose, to
jump or catch a baseball, or to ride a bicycle, our unconscious ability to speak and
understand and to make judgments about sentences reveals our knowledge of the rules of
our language.

3. Comprehension vs Production
The historical tradition in psycholinguistics has largely been to study either language
production or comprehension. Child language study traditionally distinguishes between
comprehension (broadly, understanding) and production (broadly, expression). Notably,
relations between these two basic integral facets of language are still somewhat clouded. In
absolute terms, it is usually the case that comprehension precedes production
developmentally and exceeds production substantively, pointing to a degree of
independence in the two. Comprehension and production follow different timetables with
respect to onset, milestone achievement, and trajectory and rate of development (Bates,
Clark & Hecht, Fenson, Dal, Thal & Pethick). Notably according to Bauer in 2002,
comprehension does not always predict production.
Relations between the two were often invoked as causes of language change. Bredsdorff
(1821, 1886) mentioned mishearing, misunderstanding, or misrecollection of sounds as
potential causes of sound change in the speaker. Also indolence of the speaker would affect
articulation and hence the sound patterns perceived by the listener, a view with which
others in particular Wundt (1900), concurred.
The relations between comprehending and producing language took a new turn
following the “cognitive revolution.” The premise that language users are endowed with
linguistic “competence,” a generative grammar of their language, raised the question how
that grammar was implemented in “performance,” in particular in speaking and listening.

4. Critical Age Hypothesis/Critical Period Hypothesis

This theory posits that there is a time in human development when the brain is
predisposed for success in language learning. Developmental changes in the brain, it is
argued, affect the nature of language acquisition, and language learning that occurs after
the end of the critical period may not be based on the innate biological structures believed
to contribute to first language acquisition or second language acquisition in early childhood.
Rather, older learners may depend on more general learning abilities—the same ones they
might use to learn other kinds of skills or information. It is argued that these general
learning abilities are not as effective for language learning as the more specific, innate
capacities that are available to the young child. It is most often claimed that critical period
ends somewhere puberty, but some researchers suggest it could be even earlier.
For example, in 1970, a child called Genie in the scientific reports was discovered. She
had been confined to a small room under conditions of physical restraint, and had received
only minimal human contact from the age of 18 months until almost 14 years. She was not,
regardless of the cause of isolation, was able to speak or knew any language at the time of
reintroduction to society.
 Another example is a woman named Chelsea. She was born deaf in Northern California,
isolated from any major urban center, and wrongly diagnosed by incompetent doctors as
retarded. Her devoted and caring family never believed this to be so but did not know she
was deaf. When she was 31, a neurologist finally correctly diagnosed her deafness and she
was fitted with hearing aids. She received extensive language therapy and was able to
acquire a large vocabulary, but, like Genie, has not yet reached the syntactic level of even a
3-year-old child.
It is difficult to compare children and adults as second language learners. In addition to
possible biological differences suggested by the Critical Period Hypothesis, the conditions
for language learning are often very different. Younger learners in informal language
learning environments usually have more time to devote to learning language. They often
have more opportunities to hear and use the language in environments where they do not
experience strong pressure to speak fluently and accurately from the very beginning.
Furthermore, their early imperfect efforts are often praised or, at least, accepted. Older
learners are more likely to find themselves in situations that demand more complex
language and the expression of more complicated ideas.

5. Linguistic Universals
In Fromkin’s Introduction to Language, John Fell states that linguists must find out the
laws of a language and the laws that pertain to all languages instead of making them. Those
laws that pertain to all human languages, representing the universal properties of language,
constitute the universal grammar. Alsted first used the term general grammar as distinct
from special grammar. He believed that the function of a general grammar was to reveal
those features “which relate to the method and etiology of grammatical concepts. They are
common to all languages.” Pointing out that “general grammar is the pattern ‘norma’ of
every particular grammar whatsoever,” he implored “eminent linguists to employ their
insight in this matter.”
Sign languages of the deaf provide some of the best evidence to support the notion that
humans are born with the ability to acquire language and these languages are governed by
the same universal properties. Deaf children of deaf parents who are exposed to sign
language learn sign language in stages parallel to language acquisition by hearing children
learning oral languages. If human language is universal in the sense that all members of the
human species have the ability to learn a language, it is not surprising that nonspoken
languages have developed as a substitute for spoken languages among nonhearing
individuals.
Today, the idea that all languages are at least in part cut from the same pattern is
perhaps not particularly controversial. Joan Bybee in Language Two, approaches linguistic
universals from the viewpoint of the usage-based theory of language. She argues that from
this perspective, there are very few synchronic universals in the sense of features that can
be found in all languages. The only synchronic universal that she reports having found in her
work on morphology is that all languages have at least some minimal derivational
morphology. More generally, she argues that language change has to be taken into account
in order to understand language universals. Factors relating to language use—such as
frequency of usage—lead to grammaticalization, which tends to follow specific
developmental paths. For example, she notes that discourse adverbs develop first from verb
modifiers to clause modifiers, from a narrow scope to covering the whole clause, from
concrete senses to more abstract ones, and from denoting specific content to indicating the
speaker’s attitude at the discourse level.

6. Language and Thought

Traditionally, it has been assumed that language is a conduit for thought, a system for
converting our pre-existing ideas into a transmissible form (sounds, gestures, or written
symbols) so that they can be passed into the minds of others equipped with the same
language machinery. During the early and mid-20 th century, however, several linguistic
anthropologists, most notably, Benjamin Whorf and Eric Sapir, proposed that language is
not merely an interface but also lays a formative role in shaping thought itself. At its
strongest, this view is that language “becomes” thought or becomes isomorphic to it. This
view entails that linguistic categories serves as “program and guide for an individual’s
mental activity” including categorization, memory, reasoning, and decision-making.
There are discussions with the many difficulties involved in radical versions of the
linguistic “determinism” position, including the fact that language seems to underspecify
thought and to diverge from it as to the treatment of ambiguity, paraphrase, and deictic
reference. Moreover, there is ample evidence that several forms of cognitive organization
are independent of language such as: Infants who have no language are able to entertain
relatively complex thoughts; for that matter, they can learn languages or even invent them
when the need arises.
However, there are evidences spanning half a century of investigation in many
cognitive-perceptual domains that document systematic population differences in
behaviour, attributable to the particular spoken language. Quite the contrary, recent
positions range from those holding that specific words or language structures cause “radical
restructuring of cognition” to those that maintain—based on much the same kinds of
findings—that there is a “remarkable independence of language and thought.”