1 FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

First language acquisition

By Yassine El Khorbati

Learning a new language is not quite easy. It requires learning new rules of Grammar,
memorizing endless lists of vocabulary and acquiring many new sounds that are hard to
produce. But still, children lean the phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, and overall
master their very first language without deliberate efforts of teaching and before they learn how
to do simpler tasks. Infants’ capacity to acquire language has provoked a lot of debate between
many researchers, mainly linguists and psychologists, who have tried to unravel the secrets of
the learning and acquisition of language.
The process of language learning in children is quite fast. However, it does not happen
overnight. Children start without any linguistic knowledge, yet, they utter their first word around
their first birthday. Around their second birthday, children are able to form short sentences, and
by the time they are five years old, they can utter long, abstract sentences and engage in more
complex conversations. The ease and speed with which children pick up language makes the
subject challenging but quite interesting (Matthews, 1996).
The goal of this research paper is to explore the phenomenon of language acquisition. It begins
by discussing different studies about the subject. After that this paper will try to cover the main
development stages of language and answer the question: How do children acquire the sounds
and words of their first language? This discussion is then followed by a description of the
phonological development of Moroccan Arabic speaking infants.

CHAPTER 1 LANGUAGE LEARNING THEORIES

The main concern of this chapter is to discuss the major theories concerning language
acquisition. The aim is here to provide some knowledge about language acquisition theories as
well as knowledge about the acquisition process before we proceed to the next chapters.
In the last decades many scholars have studied how children acquire language. Thus, a wide
range of research has emerged explaining language acquisition and investigating how learning
is accomplished.
In this chapter, four major theories concerning early language acquisition are going to be
discussed. The first two theories are proposed by Piaget and Vygotsky while the last two
theories are proposed by Skinner and Chomsky. It is important to note that these theories are
mainly influenced by two disciplines: psychology and linguistics.

PIAGET'S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

The first theory this chapter will deal with is Piaget’s theory of cognitive development which is a
theory that focuses on understanding the nature and development of human intelligence and
how children acquire knowledge. This theory claims that children transition through four stages
of intellectual development in order to understand the world around them (Piaget, 1952) (Piaget,
1959) (Piaget, 1976).
The first stage is referred to as the sensorimotor stage and it starts at birth and ends at 2 years of
age. The main achievement during this stage is object permanence, and it is the
understanding that an object still exists even though it cannot be seen. This achievement is very
important because through knowing that objects are separate things and that they exist outside
the individual’s perception, kids begin to attach names or words to objects.
The second stage is the preoperational stage and it starts at 2 years of age and ends at 7.
During this stage, children learn to think symbolically. In other words, they learn to make a word
2 FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

or an object stand for something other than itself. However, kids at this stage tend to be
egocentric and have difficulties in seeing things from the viewpoint of others.
The third stage is called the concrete operational stage and it starts at 7 years of age and ends
at 11. In this stage, major developmental changes happen. Children begin to think logically and
in an organized way. That is to say, they start to work things out in their head. Also in this stage,
children become less egocentric as they start to think about how people view a certain situation.
The last stage is the formal operational stage and it starts at 12 years of age and lasts into
adulthood. In this stage, teens develop the ability to understand abstract ideas and think
scientifically about the world.
Piaget’s theory claims that kids learn using schemas. According to this theory, a schema is a
mental representation that organizes knowledge. “In more simple terms Piaget called the
schema the basic building block of intelligent behavior - a way of organizing knowledge.
Indeed, it is useful to think of schemas as “units” of knowledge, each relating to one aspect of the world,
including objects, actions, and abstract (i.e., theoretical) concepts”. (McLeod, S. A., para. 11). To
illustrate this, a kid might have a schema about birds. If all the birds the kid has seen have
feathers and can fly. The kid will think that all birds have feathers, wings, and can fly. However,
when the kid sees a penguin for the first time, the kid will modify his previously
existing schema of birds to include this new type of bird he just saw.
Piaget also argues that once children are able to think in a certain way, they develop a
language to describe those thoughts. Thus, children’s language development is influenced by
their cognitive development.

VYGOTSKY’S ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT

While Piaget puts little emphasis on social factors in his theories. Vygotsky’s theory suggests
that children learn through social and language interactions with their environment. This theory
claims that language acquisition also works this way. Vygotsky, the founder of socio-cultural
theory, argues that children develop language through social interaction with adults who already
know the language. Also, as opposed to Piaget, who believes that children do not learn from
adults, Vygotsky believes that learning happens from the outside in (Vygotsky, 1978).
Vygotsky’s theory claims that the interaction that happens between a more knowledgeable other
(MKO) and a child is what leads to learning. Vygotsky (1978) also identifies a Zone of Proximal
Development (ZPD) which is a stage where the most sensitive instruction or guidance should be
given to children because at this stage children are more sensitive to the information they
receive.
Vygotsky emphasizes the importance of language and the relation it has with thinking.
According to Vygotsky, thought is a result of language. He believes that language develops
from social interactions for communication purposes. Later, language becomes internalized as
thought. That is to say, the ability to think for ourselves comes from language. Vygotsky also
emphasizes the importance of internal speech to children. He suggests that children who
engage in internal speech frequently are much more competent than children who don’t.

SKINNER’S BEHAVIORISM

Behaviorism is a theory which suggests that all behaviors are acquired through interaction with
the environment. “Behaviorism, a movement in psychology that advocates the use of strict
experimental procedures to study observable behavior (or responses) in relation to the
environment (or stimuli)”. (Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia, para. 1). The goal of this
theory is to approach psychology from an observable, measurable way and Behaviorism had a
huge success with this strategy.
3 FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

B.F. Skinner, a pioneer of behaviorism, provided one of the first explanations of language
acquisition. He argues that positive reinforcement will stimulate a behavior to be repeated while
negative reinforcement will reduce a certain behavior. Thus, children learn to associate words
with concepts through reinforcement (awards and punishment). For example, when a baby is
producing syllables, mothers reinforce the baby’s behavior if the random syllables he produces
are similar to real words. According to this theory, when the baby says ‘ma ma’, the mother
praises the baby and gives it more attention. Thus, the baby is likely to repeat this behavior over
and over. But when the baby says something that doesn’t correspond to the mother, she
ignores him. As a consequence, the baby is likely to reduce this behavior. Similarly, grammar is
learnt the same way. Thus, language acquisition, according to Skinner, is a process of habit
formation (Skinner, 1957).
However, Skinner’s theory doesn’t explain how children are able to produce words they have
never heard before or how they are able to produce unique sentences.

CHOMSKY’S UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (UG)

Behaviorism was heavily questioned by Noam Chomsky (1959), an American linguist who
argues that children cannot learn language by simply repeating what adults say, because
children can produce new sentences that they have never heard. According to Chomsky,
children learn language not by hearing and repeating what they say, but by extracting the rules
which they apply to create new sentences. Chomsky believes that children acquire language
easily because they possess an inner ability in their minds and not because they are affected by
adult’s speech and their environment. That is to say, Chomsky (1976) believes that children are
pre-disposed to learn language. In Chomsky’s view, humans have a Language Acquisition
Device (LAD) in their brains that allows them to learn language and a Universal Grammar that
has common properties in all human minds which makes the structures of all human languages
similar (Chomsky, 1965).
According to Chomsky, Universal Grammar consists of an inner structure for processing
language which allows the production of endless types of sentences. This Universal Grammar
also allows humans to decide whether a sentence is correctly formed or not. Consequently,
when we hear Chomsky’s famous sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, we
recognize that it is grammatically correct even though it is meaningless. But on the other hand,
when we hear the sentence “a cat mouse chases the” we recognize that it is not correct even
though we might have an idea of what it means.
One of the core ideas which Chomsky believes in is that language learning is genetically
encoded. Chomsky argues that humans are born with the ability to acquire language and that
children are genetically pre-disposed to learn grammar. That is to say, humans have a language
instinct. This language instinct contains what he called a set of Principles and Parameters which
are cross linguistically universal (Dąbrowska, 2015). Principles are a set of abstract rules. To
illustrate this, this is an example of a principle: when we see anaphoric pronouns in sentences,
they must have proper antecedents. For example, in the two following sentences John likes tea
and he likes tea, we know that John and he are the same person. But in the following sentence
he likes John’s tea we know that John and he are not the same person.
According to Chomsky, Parameters are specific switches that are either turned on or off,
depending on the language. Thus, in learning languages, people already possess the switch.
They only have to decide whether to switch it on or off. For instance, some languages, such as
English, require the subject to be openly expressed. But there are other languages that have no
problem with leaving out the subject. Another example of a parameter is the position of the head
in relative clauses. In English, relative clauses consist of the head first then the relative clause.
However, in some other languages, it is preferred to have the head at the end of the clause.
4 FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS

The poverty of the stimulus argument is an argument used by Chomsky to reinforce his theory
of Universal Grammar. It was introduced in ‘Rules and Representations’ in 1980. This argument
suggests that it is impossible for kids to acquire their first language solely based on listening to
adults. Chomsky argues that language is so complicated and too complex for children to learn it
from the input that they get because the input is noisy. This means that adults offer a distorted
and imperfect source of data and learning grammar from adults is nearly impossible.
Furthermore, children are not exposed to enough data to acquire every feature of language.
Yet, children learn their first language fast, effortlessly and accurately (Dąbrowska, 2015). This
suggests that the ability to learn language is innate.

CHAPTER 2 LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

This chapter is concerned with linguistic development in children as well as the major
phonological stages of development.
Since the time they are born, children start to learn language by listening to huge numbers of
words and sentences. Then they start to distinguish different sounds and segment the stream of
speech that they are exposed to when hearing adults speaking in order to understand each
word (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995). When the brains and bodies of children are developed enough,
they start to pronounce words.

THE CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS

There is a period in which a child’s language acquisition happens easily and automatically. This
period is called the critical period and it is the first few years of childhood. After this period of
brain development, it becomes difficult to acquire a language. Also, after the critical period, it
becomes nearly impossible to acquire a language with native speaker fluency. “After puberty,
mastery of the pronunciation and mastery of the grammar is unlikely to be identical to that of a
native speaker, although word learning does not appear to be as sensitive to age and remains
good throughout life” (Kuhl, 2011, p. 131). However, the time of development of different
aspects of language varies. “Studies in typically developing monolingual children indicate, for
example, that an important period for phonetic learning occurs prior to the end of the first year,
whereas syntactic learning flourishes between 18 and 36 months of age. Vocabulary
development ‘‘explodes’’ at 18 months of age.” (Kuhl, 2011, p. 131)
Children usually learn their first word around their first birthday. But before that, they learn to
differentiate between the sounds of their native language and the sounds of other languages.
Dr. Patricia Kuhl examined how children respond to the sounds of their language as well as the
sounds of foreign languages by conducting an experiment where she compared a group of
American babies and a group of Japanese babies in differentiating between the sounds “/Ra/”
and “/La/”. This experiment showed that six months old American babies and six months old
Japanese babies can both distinguish between the sounds “/Ra/” and “/La/”. However, by
eleven months, the American babies became better at distinguishing between the sounds “/Ra/”
and “/La/”, while the Japanese babies became worse at the same task.
Dr. Patricia Kuhl explains this by suggesting that until about six months of age, babies can
distinguish between all human sounds. But once they reach ten or eleven months, they can only
distinguish between the sounds of their own languages. And since /l/ and /r/ are in the same
phonemic category in Japanese, Japanese babies became worse at distinguishing between the
sounds. “Japanese-learning infants have to group the phonetic units r and l into a single
phonemic category (Japanese r), whereas Englishlearning infants must uphold the distinction to separate
rake from lake.” (Kuhl, 2011, p. 132)
Dr. Patricia Kuhl believes that after birth and for a short period, babies have the ability to hear
differences between all the sounds used in the all-human languages. Dr. Kuhl refers to babies
at this period as “citizens of the world”. By the time babies are eleven months old, they are no
5 FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

longer “citizens of the world”. They become “culture bound” listeners, specialists in one
language. “The baby’s task in the first year of life, therefore, is to make some progress in
figuring out the composition of the 40 odd phonemic categories in their language(s) before
trying to acquire words that depend on these elementary units.” (Kuhl, 2011, p. 132)
Although babies at this point are able to differentiate between speech sounds and can tell
whether a sound belongs to their native language or not, they are not ready to utter their first
words yet.

THE STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT

This part will look at the development children undergo throughout their early years by
discussing the five major stages of development: The prelinguistic stage, the babbling stage,
the holophrastic or one word stage, the two-word stage then, the telegraphic or multi word
stage.

THE PRELINGUISTIC STAGE

As early as two days after they are born, babies are able to discriminate between the sounds /a/
and /i/, and by three days of age they can recognize their mother’s voice. By 0;1 young infants
can distinguish between the sounds /ba/ and /pa/ and /da/ and /ta/, and from 0;1 onwards they
start making cooing sounds (Matthews, 1996).

THE BABBLING STAGE

At about four months of age, infants are able to recognize differences in speech and soon they
start developing the ability to use words.
From about six to eight months of age, children start babbling. “The babbling period begins with the
production of short utterances and progresses eventually to include production of quite long utterances
which can be characterized as sounding subjectively very much more language-like than their
predecessors.” (Moskowitz, 1970)
During this period, children start to produce consonant-vowel syllables (CV) such as [baba],
[dada] and [mama] (Matthews, 1996), and they repeat these sounds over and over until they
begin to sound like real words. At this stage, children can hear phonetic distinctions with great
accuracy and differentiate between human sounds and non-human sounds. At this stage, also,
kids are able to vary pitch, rate, and volume, they start vocalizing pleasure and displeasure and
they try to reduplicate syllables and overall play with vocals.

THE HOLOPHRASTIC STAGE

EARLY ACQUISITION OF WORDS

Finally, around the age of 1;0, children enter the holophrastic stage where they become able to
pronounce one-word utterances (Matthews, 1996). But how do kids learn words? A common
answer to this question is that kids learn words through pointing and naming. Although this
answer may be partly true, it presents many problems. For example, how do children know that
what you are pointing at and what you are saying are the same thing?
EARLY ACQUISITION OF NOUNS
In order to find an answer to our main question which is how do kids learn words, we will take a
look at the types of children’s first words. If we look at a child’s first words, we find general
nominals, names, some action words, some social words and modifiers. That is to say,
children’s early vocabulary contains a high ratio of nouns.
THE NATURAL PARTITIONS HYPOTHESIS
One of the hypotheses that try to explain why children’s first words are nouns is the natural
partitions hypothesis which claims that early nouns refer to concrete objects and children can
easily identify these concrete objects from the context. “The natural partitions hypothesis
6 FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

predicts that nouns will form the child’s first referential mappings from language to the world.
The mapping between nouns and concrete entities can be achieved even at the very outset of language
understanding. These first connections provide an easy first case of a reference
relation and perhaps give the child the idea that other more opaque words must also have
referents. And once learned, nouns provide semantic and syntactic frames to aid in mapping the verb to its
meaning. In this way, the early acquisition of simple nouns may pave the way for
learning verbs and other relational terms.” (Gentner & Boroditsky, 2009, p. 27)
THEORIES OF WORD LEARNING - THEORIES OF CONSTRAINTS
Theories of constraints suggest that children have an innate word learning ability that guides
them to limit possible word meanings when learning new words.
“A tennis ball has a colour (yellow), a material (rubber), a shape (a sphere), a purpose (it’s for
tennis), an age (new or worn-out), and other characteristics (bouncy, breaks windows, etc). If
someone who spoke another language pointed to a tennis ball and said Shradditch, how would
you know which of these attributes they actually meant? It could be the name for the ball, it
could be the colour, it could be anything else at all the speaker wanted to say.” (Cook, para. 5)
According to the theories of constraint, when a child hears the word tennis ball for the first time,
he will assume that this new word refers to a whole object. This is referred to as the whole
object constraint. However, when a child hears a new word that refers to something that he
already knows, the child assumes that the new word refers to a part, a property or an action
associated with that new word. This is referred to as the mutual exclusivity constraint.
THEORIES OF WORD LEARNING - SOCIAL PRAGMATIC THEORIES
In contrast to the theories of constraints, social pragmatic theories argue that the simple
association of sound and entities is not enough for children to learn the meaning of words.
According to social pragmatic theories, children learn words in social contexts because words
become meaningful in situations where the caregiver is talking to the child about objects,
actions or events. In this respect, the social context and the caregiver are crucial for children to
understand the meaning of words.
THEORIES OF WORD LEARNING - JOINT ATTENTION
“Joint attention refers to moments when a child and adult are focused on the same thing, but for
most researchers it also includes the notion that the participants are both aware that the focus
of attention is shared.” (Baldwin, 1995). Before nine months of age, children can only engage in
dyadic joint attention. But around nine months of age, they can engage in triadic joint attention
which means they can inspect an object together with their caregiver. As soon as children can
engage in triadic joint attention, they start to learn words and enlarge their vocabulary size.

THE TWO WORD STAGE

After they acquire new words and start to pronounce them, kids move on to the next stage of
development which is the two word stage. This stage starts at around the age of 1;6 and ends
when at around the age of 2;0 (Matthews, 1996). During this stage, children produce two word
utterances with simple semantic relations.
“In some cases, early multiple-unit utterances can be seen as concatenations of individual
naming actions that might just as well have occurred alone: "mommy" and "hat" might be
combined as "mommy hat"; "shirt" and "wet" might be combined as "shirt wet". However, these
combinations tend to occur in an order that is appropriate for the language being learned.” (The
Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, para. 25)
Children at this stage start to use phonological processes which are patterns of sound errors to
simplify adult speech as they are learning to pronounce words.
7 FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

THE TELEGRAPHIC STAGE

The telegraphic or multi-word stage is the last stage of language development. This stage starts
around the age of 2;0 and lasts until the age of 3;0. During this stage kids go beyond two words
and can now form 3 to 4 word sentences with subjects and predicates (Matthews, 1996).
Kids add ten or more words to their lexicon each day and their understanding of language
progresses and their linguistic development fastens.

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