WHAT IS LANGUAGE ACQUISITION?

• Language Acquisition versus learning

• The acquisition of a first language is arguably the most wonderful feat we perform
in our whole life
• Language Acquisition
• At birth no comprehension and production of speech
• a relatively brief time, and
• with little apparent effort
• How this is done
• Biological predispositions
• Experience with the language
• First and Second language Acquisition
• what human biology endows the child with and what is derived from the environment
• Theoretical Inputs
• Roman Jakobson – Functions of Language
• B.F. Skinner - Verbal Behavior
• Noam Chomsky - On Nature and Language
• How to elicit data from a one year old child?
• Children’s language comprehension skills generally outpace their production
abilities
• Does language learning begin even before birth?
• naturalness of data -
• representativeness of data –
• Historical Periods of CLA studies
• Period of diary studies
• Parental diaries – Werner Leopold’s diary of his daughter
• Hildegarde’s simultaneous acquisition of German and English
• One observer on one child
• errors and omissions in transcription
• Observational Studies
• Longitudinal studies
• Brown’s classic book, A First Language: The Early Stages
• Three children - Adam, Sarah, and Eve’s
• well-defined stages, called cooing, babbling, the one-word stage and the two-word
stage
• Language socilization practices
• Cross-sectional observational studies
• Sharing the transcript - Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES)
• Period of large sample studies
• Experimental studies
• high amplitude sucking paradigm (HASP)
• ‘Wug’ test
• Truth value judgment

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 STAGES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
• An infant crying in the night:
• An infant crying for the light:
• And with no language but a cry.
• ALFRED LORD TENNYSON, In Memoriam A.H.H., 1849
• Monolingual language Acquisition
• Child: Nobody don’t like me.
• Mother: No, say “nobody likes me”.
• Child: Nobody don’t like me.
• (eight repetitions of this dialog)
• Mother: No, now listen carefully; say “nobody likes me”.
• Child: Oh! Nobody don’t likes me.
• Lack of correlation between instruction and output
• Internally determined staging
• Child have their own language systems
• Lenneberg
• Universal
• Rate may vary + or – one month
• Crying
• Cooing (0-3 months)
• Prelinguistic stage
• Vocalization that resembles vowel sounds
• Babbling (3-6 months)
• Consonant + Vowels
• Resembles the sounds of the native language 90%
• Imitates the adult speech tones
• No meanings attached
• Intonation and tone
• The child is ready for the language input
• Deaf Children also go through the babbling stage
• One word stage (12-18 months) Holophrastic stage
• children have a more complex mental representation than their language
allows them to express
• 50 words – Nouns
• The referential function of words
• Under extension and Over extension
• Two word stage (18- 24)
• N+ V
• Absence of function words
• Sudden increase in the vocabulary
 • syntactic categories the words
• Able to distinguish words from non-words
• Stress, minimal pair sounds, etc.
• Word order is maintained
• Multi-word stage (24-) Telegraphic speech
• Three or more words
• proper grammatical structures
• But inconsistencies in their use of function words
• Sentences with default word order
• Other movements in syntactic structures
• Coordinated sentences
• Embedded sentences
• Wh questions
• Relative clauses
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 STAGES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
• morphological and syntactic development
• Signed language acquisition
• More competence as compared to the performance
• Stages are predictable
• Development of morphology
• mean length of utterance (MLU) – Depending on the no.of morphemes

• Phase 1: The child uses the correct past tense of go, for instance, but does not relate
this past-tense went to present-tense go. Rather, went is treated as a separate lexical
item.
• Phase 2: The child constructs a rule for forming the past tense and begins to
overgeneralize this rule to irregular forms such as go (resulting in forms such as
goed).
• Phase 3: The child learns that there are (many) exceptions to this rule and acquires
the ability to apply this rule selectively.
• Piagetian perspective - ) language was both a social and a cognitive phenomenon
• Sensori-motor (0–2 years) –
• awareness of objects and their permanence – naming of things
• symbolic reference  symbolic sense
• Pre-operational (2–6 years)
• Egocentric – language Echolalia - Monologues
• Concrete operational (6–11 years)
• Responding to outside ideas
• Formal operational (11–15 years)’
• Abstract reasoning – arguments; Hypothetical situations
• Vygotsky’s developmental stages
• Thought and language are unrelated 3 phases:
• thought becomes verbal
• No distinction between private thoughts and public conversation
• thought becomes internalised
• Concept formation 3 phases
• Grouping
• Chain complex
• Unique Attributes
• Cognitive and linguistic development
• Zone of proximal Development
• Crosslinguistic and crosscultural aspects of language acquisition
• Tonal languages
• Verb first acquisition
• developing grammatical competence to attempt to convey similar intents, including,
for instance, possession, location, and volition
• Question formation
• Socializing practices of different culture can affect the way language is learned
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 LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION
MULTILINGUAL CONTEXTS
• Multilingualism is the norm now
• Difference in communicative practices in multilingual contexts
• Different situations – home, educational institutes, etc.
• Children become fluent in all the languages available to them
• There are many advantages –
• cognitive benefits,
• Flexibility in social interaction
• Emotional benefits too
• the linguistic input children receive in their different languages and on their
opportunities to use these languages
• family’s socio-economic status and/or migration background
• Comparison with monolingual language acquisition
• The objective of language learning is also different for multilinguals
• Different language functions
• Language contact
• Multilingualism and Bilingualism
• Language Vitality
• Code switching – code mixing
• study of children’s English/Spanish bilingualism and code-switching practices in a
New York Puerto Rican
• Spanish was lost as well as maintained– in educational institutions, the labor market,
and the urban environment
• Language vitality – shift, death,
• a social group intentionally or unintentionally gives up one language for a usually
more dominant one
• macro-level sociopolitical and economic processes such as globalization and
modernization affecting language acquisition
• language shift in Gapun, Papua New Guinea
• modernity, progress, and masculinity was associated with Tok Pisin
• the home in infancy and early childhood,
• school and peer contexts in childhood and adolescence, and
• occupational or academic contexts in adulthood
• language socialization research gives insights into the construction of identities and
social roles and relationships
• indexicality of language
• understand the social order and (re)produce similarities and differences, group
membership or lack thereof, and relations of power, inclusion, and exclusion
• The process of acquiring language is deeply affected by the process of becoming a
competent member of society.
• The process of becoming a competent member of society is realized to a large extent
through language.

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