STAGES IN

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cgpfw4z8cw
PRE-TALKING (0-2 months)
COOING (2-6 months)
BABBLING (6-11 months)
 HOLOPHRASTIC (ONE WORD) (11-18 months)
They use their hands
Use of intonation instead when they hear certain
of question words. words.

Can recognize correct

10 to 20 words a pronunciation of similar
month words

Mostly one word Single nouns

Overgeneralization communication.
TWO-WORD (18-24 months)
TELEGRAPHIC (24-30 months)
Multiple combinations
of words They can participate in
turn taking and more
complex interactions.

Pronunciation is adult A) Is - was B) “-ed” - “-s”

They are inventive.
like. C)I - she D) that - where
E)the - a.
LATER MULTIWORD (30+ months)
SCHOOL YEARS Use language to
understand others and
to express their own
Metalinguistic
awareness and
discovery of ambiguity.
meanings.

They can understand

jokes, trick questions By age 6, the child
and riddles. knows about 13,000
words.

By age 5, utterances average By age 8, the child

4.5 words per sentence and knows about 28,300
vocabulary increases by words.
about 20 words per day
The Acquisition of Phonology

target
Children seem to accurately perceive the adult form and
represent it (approximately) on their own lexicon.
The Acquisition of Word Meaning
Dog!

Connection of sound
with an object.
 Word Meaning. Dog = Any
animal

+Children can misinterpret the name of a

particular thing, instead of a category/type.

+So he can refers to a chicken with the word

“dog”.

+Children learn to classify words into

categories. Buildings: house, hotel, They notice the
differences between
hospital, arcade, etc.
the concepts
Overextensions:
Refer to any adult male as
“dad”.

Form over color

Whole object
Syntactic
One name, one thing Bootstrapping:
Learning of word meaning
based on syntax.
 The Acquisition of Morphology

Overgeneralization

eat… eated?
 Derivational morphemes
-er
Storier - Story teller

Language acquisition is a creative process in which

children’s utterances reflect their internal grammar.
The Acquisition of syntax
Word-order rules and how to determine the grammatical relations of subject
and object.

What did the phone hit? What hit the phone?

Dad outside aunt Bad day, today! =

Telegraphic Stage.

(Use of utterances)
The telegraphic sentences of children reflect their linguistic
capacity.

It can take months before a child uses all the grammatical

morphemes consistently!!!

Function morphemes: those which are less important to

comprehension.
Some languages allows children to drop the subject of the
sentence.

Children almost never violate the word-order rules of their

language.
Semantic bootstrapping:
Children create their own rules
You - it or the - one
to determine which words are
nouns, verbs, etc. Verbs: see, do, win

Adjectives: little, big, gray

“If a word refers to action,
it’s a verb.”

Word frames: A group of

words that belong to the
same category
Determiners are function words,
children recognize them and learn
from the function morphemes.

Children respond better when

they hear them in commands.

By age 3 they start to use them...

Coordinated Relative clauses.
sentences.

In less than a year a child can go

from telegraphic utterances to
fully formed grammatical adultlike
sentences.

Potential to produce an infinite

range of sentences..
 The Acquisition of Pragmatics
Context is needed to understand reference about pronouns.

“He gave her flowers her birthday”

Who gave the flowers?

Who receive them?

“Mary and John went to the cinema” Context of an utterance.

 Implicatures are also another part of pragmatics.

Some of the children are playing ball.

(not all the children)
The development of auxiliaries: a case study
Language acquisition involves various components like
lexicon, phonology, morphology, syntax and pragmatics.

In the telegraphic stage children do not use auxiliaries, like

can, we or do.
 The lack of auxiliaries during
the telegraphic stage affects
the formation of negative
sentences.
What he eat?

Where dat train doing?

Have some?
Once the auxiliaries are
introduced into the child’s
grammar the verb “be” can still
be missing in many cases.

I not crying.
Children are
Nick not playing. sensitive to syntactic
rules, just like
phonology.
On their first year of life, children figure out the
sounds of the target language.

TRUE FALSE
Language is not a creative process.

TRUE FALSE
Children usually overgeneralize the verbs in
regular tense and the plural nouns.

TRUE FALSE
The listener and the speaker are an important
part of the context.

TRUE FALSE
By age 3 children start to use determiners

TRUE FALSE
In the telegraphic stage children use auxiliaries

TRUE FALSE
Children almost always violate the word-order
rules of their language.

TRUE FALSE
Overextension are mostly based on color over
form

TRUE FALSE
Children learn to classify words into categories.

TRUE FALSE