II – ACQUIRING LANGUAGE

 Language Acquisition I
 Language Acquisition II
 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION I
• FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES IN LINGUISTICS AND
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

• STAGES OF FIRST LANGUAGE

ACQUISITION

• STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT OF FIRST

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

• DRIVING FORCES OF LANGUAGE

ACQUISITION
CENTRAL ISSUES
 MODULARITY
 HUMAN UNIQUENESS
 LANGUAGE & THOUGHT
 LEARNING & INNATENESS
 The natural sounds that babies make.
Infants begin making “comfort
sounds”, typically in response They learn to produce the same
to pleasurable interaction with sounds they have been listening to!
a caregiver.
 Infant is experimenting with uttering articulate
REDUPLICATED sounds. NON-REDUPLICATED
Takes place when babies Production of different sound
repeat the same syllable. combinations and syllables
The child use names for objects, then Children experience a vocabulary
they name actions or motions. explosion, suddenly learning words at a
much faster rate.
 "mini-sentences" with simple semantic relations
"Telegraphic" sentence structures of lexical rather
The child start to add function words and grammatical
than functional or grammatical morphemes
inflections to his utterance.
Grammatical or functional structures
emerge.
 STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT
Phonological development – how the child develops the sound
system of the language a child is exposed to.
Morphological development – the
acquisition of words.
Syntactic development – acquisition of
grammatical rules.
– developing
 DRIVING FORCES IN LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
1. POSITIVE EVIDENCE
Language Acquisition ~ Exposure?
2. IMITATION
Language Acquisition ~ Imitation?
3. REINFORCEMENT
Language Acquisition ~ Strengthening?
4. CHILD-DIRECTED SPEECH
Language Acquisition ~ Speech patterns used by parents or
5. INNATENESS
caregivers when communicating with young children
Language Acquisition ~ holds that at least some knowledge
about language exists in humans at birth.
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION II

• CRITICAL PERIODS

• BILINGUALISM
 CRITICAL PERIODS
Some environmental input is necessary for formal
development, but biology determines when the
organism is Critical
responsive to thatis input.
behavior developed more quickly within a
critical period than outside of it. This period is
biologically determined.
Examples:
 Imprinting in ducks (Lorenz, ; Hess, 1973)
Lenneberg (1967)  Binocular
proposed cells
that in humans
there is a critical
period for human language.
It estimates that language acquisition
must occur before the end of the critical
period.
 EVIDENCE FOR CRITICAL PERIOD
FOR LANGUAGE
• Feral and Isolated Children
Children raised in the wild or with
reduced exposure to human
Suggestive of this position that
language.
there is a
critical period for first language learning.
Two classic cases of this:
 Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron
 Genie

What does these cases tell us?

EFFECTS OF THE CRITICAL PERIOD
SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING
• Learning a new language
What if we already know one language, but
Learning a language:
want to learn another?
Under 7 years: perfect command of the language possible
Ages 8-15 years: perfect command less possible progressively
Johnson and AgeNewport
15 and (1989) Birdsong
above: imperfect command and Molis (2001)
possible
Native Chinese/Korean speakers Spanish/English speakers.
moving to US Did not find a discontinuity around the
Task: Listen to sentences and judge age of 16.
whether grammatically correct.
 SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
BILINGUALS & POLYGLOTS
Contexts of childhood bilingualism
• Many people speak more than one language
• Simultaneous
• What is the impact of knowing/using more than one
Both languages are acquired at the same time
language?
• Factors affecting second language acquisition?
• Interesting effects in bilinguals
• Sequential acquisition
Interference
The second language is learned after a
Code switching
first language is acquired
Cognitive advantages • Frequency of usage of both languages
• Mode of Acquisition
Native Bilingualism
Immersion
Submersion
• Language Dominance effects
 BILINGUAL REPRESENTATIONS

How do we represent
linguistic information in a
bilingual lexicon?
 MODELS OF BILINGUAL LEXICONS
Potter et al (1984): Separate Stores Models

Word Association Model L1 – First Language Concept Mediation Model

L2 – Second Language

CONCEPTS

L1

L2
INTERESTING EFFECTS IN BILINGUALS

• Interference
• Code switching
• Cognitive advantages