Acquiring Language(s): Life with

First Language, Second Languages,

and More
The First Steps of Language Acquisition in Childhood
Theories of Language Acquisition
Language and The Brain
Bilingual and Multilingual Brains
The Social Aspects of Multilingualism
Code-Switching, Code-Mixing, and Diglossia
Summary And Conclusions
For most adults learning a foreign
language is a major task, and only
relatively few attain fluency in second
language, how is it small children learn
language, or even two or more, as
effortlessly as they do?
Is first language acquisition different from
second language acquisition? Is learning a
third language easier than learning a
second? Do polyglots-people people who
can speak several languages fluently-
possess a special kind of innate intelligence
the rest of us lack? Are the brains of
bilingual and multilingual people somehow
different from monolingual brains?
Polyglot - a person who knows and is able to use several
languages.
The First Steps of Language Acquisition in
Childhood

For the most part, children are not taught to

speak their native language. They learn it by
exposure to people who talk to them. They do
not go to language labs, and they are given no
pattern drills to memorize.

Language Laboratory- provide practice in an entertaining

and interactive way to acquire the 4 main language skills:
listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
Actually, many of the examples they are
presented are poor approximations of
correct speech, as anyone who has ever
hears a grandmother talk “baby talk” to a
child knows. Yet by about age two or
three, most children are usually
communicating well enough for parents
and most others to understand them
Approximation- is anything that is intentionally similar but
not exactly equal to something else
 The first step of infant is to find some
way to learn the phonological system. To
reproduce the speech sounds of any
particular language when they begin to
talk, infants must learn to discriminate
among sounds that may quite similar
Phonological System-can Examples:
be defined as the set of sound Thin-sin
distinctions Bill-pill
One of the techniques to test infants
acuity of sound perception is high
amplitude sucking. When infants begin to
hear sounds, they suck energetically, but
gradually lose interest if the sounds stay
the same. When sound changes, however
vigorous sucking is resume.
Acuity- the ability to hear, see, or think accurately and
clearly.
Vigorous- characterized by or involving physical strength,
effort, or energy
The acuity of voice perception in
newborn babies has also been attested. IT
has been establish that three-day old
infants are able to distinguish their
mothers’ voices from other female voices.
And it has been shown that newborn
infants prefer to listen to their mother
tongue than another language.
Attested- provide or serve as clear evidence of.
Only reflexive noises such as burping,
crying and coughing are produced during
first eight of ten weeks.
Vocal play, consisting of the production
of a fairly wide range of sounds
resembling consonants vowels, becomes
noticeable by about the age of six months
The second half on an infant’s first year is
characterized by babbling
Babbling - the action or fact of talking rapidly and
continuously in a foolish, excited, or incomprehensible way
Intonational contours begin to appear
around the end of the first year, at about the
same time as the word stage (for example:
mama, cup, and doggie). This stage is
succeeded around the age of two multiword
stage. At first the child combines two words
(for example, see doggie, baby book, nice
kitty, and daddy gone), but soon expands
such phrases to short sentences.
By the age of five or so, all normal
children the world are able to ask
questions, make negative statement,
produce complex sentences, talk about
things removed in time and space, and in
general carry on intelligent conversation
on topics they are able to comprehend.
Theories of Language
Acquisition
Behaviorist Psychology Theory
Behaviorism is a schools psychology
popular in the mid-twentieth century; it
made a major impact on learning theory.
Probably its best-known proponent was
B.F Skinner who argued for his view of
language acquisition in his book Verbal
Behavior (1957).
According to his theory, the human
environment (parents, older peers, and
others) provide language stimuli to which
child responds, largely by repetition of
what she is hearing. If the response is
acceptable or commendable, the learner is
rewarded (by praise or some other way.)

Commendable- deserving praise

Innatist Theory- Among the most
influential approaches to language
development is innatism. Where
behaviorism argues all that all of language
is acquired through different types of
learning, innatist theory argues that there
are at least some aspects of language
which must already present in the child at
birth
This point of view received great support
when Noam Chomsky (1959) in lengthy
review of Skinners book convincingly
undermined all of it assumptions and
claims. In Chomsky view, children are
born with a capacity for language
development.
Sociocultural Theory- grew from the work
of seminal psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who
believed that parents, caregivers, peers, and
the culture at large were responsible for
developing higher-order functions.
According to Vygotsky, learning has its
basis in interacting with other people. Once
this has occurred, the information is then
integrated on the individual level.
Sociocultural theory focuses not only how
adults and peers influence individual
learning, but also on how cultural beliefs
and attitudes affect how learning takes
place.
Language and the Brain
Even though our understanding of how
human brain operates is steadily
increasing, our knowledge of its function
is still far from complete.
Among the reasons are that the brain is
tremendously complex and that
experimentation with the brain is still
somewhat limited.
Tremendously- to a very
great extent
Some of what is known about its
functions has been learned from the
location and extent of brain injuries,
however, a great deal of information has
recently been gained from new-
experimental techniques (for example,
neuroimaging and the stimulation of the
cerebral cortex or nerve centers below it
by electric current).
 Neuroimaging- Neuroimaging is the discipline that deals with the in
vivo depiction of anatomy and function of the central nervous system
(CNS) in health and disease.

The cerebral cortex (plural cortices), also known as the

cerebral mantle, is the outer layer of neural tissue
of the cerebrum of the brain in humans and other mammals
Neurolinguistics
The branch of linguistics concerned with
the role the brain plays in language and
speech processing-explores questions on
which parts of the brain control language
and speech, how the brain encodes and
decodes speech and whether the controls
such aspects of language as sounds,
grammar, and meaning the
neuroanotmically distinct or joints
Neurotomically- is the study of the relationship
between structure and function in the nervous system
Cerebrum
Injuries to specific areas of the language-
dominant hemisphere from such causes as
gunshot wound, tumor, stroke or infection
result in different aphasias or other
impairments of linguistic capabilities
Aphasia-  impairment of language, affecting
the production or comprehension of speech
and the ability to read or write
Broca and Wernicke area
Brocka’s area-  is a region in the frontal lobe of
the dominant hemisphere, usually the left, of the
brain with functions linked to speech
production.
Wernicke's area- is the region of the brain that
is important for language development. It is
located in the temporal lobe on the left side of
the brain and is responsible for the
comprehension of speech
Broca’s Aphasia- Expressive aphasia, also
known as Broca's aphasia, is a type
of aphasia characterized by partial loss of the
ability to produce language (spoken, manual, or
written), although comprehension generally
remains intact. A person with
expressive aphasia will exhibit effortful speech.

Wernicke’s Aphasia-referred to as
'fluent aphasia' or 'receptive aphasia'. Reading
and writing are often severely impaired.
 MC

AG

B
W

AC

THE HUMAN BRAIN AC=performing basic and higher functions

AC= Auditory Cortex in hearing, such as possible relations to
language switching
AG= Angular Gyrus
AG= it is involved in a number of processes
B= Broca’s area related to language,
MC= Motor Cortex
MC= involved in the planning, control, and
W= Wernicke's area execution of voluntary movements
 Individuals affected by anomic aphasia
have difficulty naming objects presented
to them. Impairment of this type is
associated with lesions in the dominant
angular gyrus, one of the characteristic
ridges of gray matter at the surfaces of the
hemisphere.
Anomic Aphasia- where individuals
have word retrieval failures and cannot Lesions- ny damage or abnormal
express the words they want to say change in the tissue of an organism,
(particularly nouns and verbs). Anomia usually caused by disease or trauma
is a deficit of expressive language.
Lesions in different parts of the language-
dominant hemisphere result in different
language and speech impairments. But
much is yet to be learned about the human
brain, both in general and concerning its
role in communicative behavior.
Bilingual and Multilingual
Brains
In the past, it was often assumed that
competence acquired in the first language
(L1) was qualitatively different from that
in a second language (L2) or any
subsequent language. This privileging the
“native language” led to many popular
misconceptions, such as believing that
children of bilingual parents would never
fully disadvantaged.
Such claims are due to the belief that
monolingualism is the norm, and they are
held by many in the United States and
other countries where a single language is
politically or socially dominant. That this
view must be wrong can easily be seen
from the fact that many people in the
world are speaking more than one
language.
“Bilingual or “multilingual” can mean a
variety of things. Some people may learn
two languages natively as children, and be
equally proficient and comfortable in
both. Others may have only full
competence in one language, and just get
by in the other. Some people may be
passive or receptive bilinguals, having the
ability to understand a second language
but not being able to speak it. There is
also the issue of order..
Are we dealing with simultaneously
bilingualism, where a child learns two
languages at the same time or sequential
bilingualism, where a person becomes
bilingual by learning one language and
then another? And probably everybody
understands at least a little of some other
language, whether it is the leftovers from
high school Spanish class, the words and
phrases from neighbors, or words picked
on a job working with foreign –born
employee.
Bilingualism then should be viewed as a
continuum from relatively monolingual
speaker to the highly proficient speaker of
two languages. Speaking in very broad
terms, the childhood bilingual acquisition
process may be considered as three
developmental stages

Continuum- something
that keeps on going
First, the child build up a set of both
languages, but usually keep them
separate, and not as translations of each
other. Second, as sentences begin to
appear, words from both languages can be
used. This mixing rapidly declines,
however. Dropping almost completely by
the end of the third year.
After this, vocabulary in both languages
grows, but a single grammatical pattern is
used. Usually by the fourth year, however,
The syntax of each language becomes
distinct as the child becomes more
cognizant that the two languages are not
the same. It is then they become aware of
the sociolinguistic power of each
language, the way each other is to be
used, and for what purpose.
Syntax- the Cognizant- having
arrangement of words knowledge or being aware
of
The Social Aspects of Multilingualism
A particular people is as rule linked with a
particular language, and this language
more than anything else serve as the
people’s badge of ethnic identity and
uniqueness.
 And it used to be assumed that peoples
who speak different languages have
different cultures and therefore the
boundaries between different societies
coincide with lines separating mutually
unintelligible languages. It was also
widely accepted that any given languages
is the medium of communication for
members of the corresponding society and
that the relationship among language,
culture and communication tends to
persist
Persist - continuein time
to exist Coincide- occur at or during
the same time
 According to Hymes, the world of human
societies is divisible not so much
according to languages their members
speak but rather according to
communicative units “composed of
repertoires of codes and code-use,”.

Repertoires- a stock of skills

or types of behavior that a
person habitually uses
Another language increasingly used by
those with formal education was English.
At the same time, there was a concerted
effort on the part of the hinterland peoples
to use the local vernacular as the main, if
not the only, medium of communication
in order to achieve political recognition as
distinct ethnic units.
If members of different ethnic groups live
side by side and interact frequently,
atlease some of them learn to speak a
language or languages other than their
own mother tongue and thereby they
become multilingual. The most common
instance of multilingualism is
bilingualism , characterize by the ability
to speak two languages
The transition form their native languages
to English through the intermediate stage
bilingualism was mostly accomplished
during the past century and only the oldest
tribal members still possess a serviceable
knowledge of their original speech. Where
the concentration of immigrants maintains
itself a high-level, bilingualism tends to
persist any longer
In the most places in the world, there are
not only the dialects but several languages
present in a community , the speakers
possessing varying degrees of facility. In
these multilingual situation the codes that is
languages verities or languages often
become blended. This is so common that
linguist have special terms for this blending:
Code-switching and code-mixing.
Code-Switching, Code-Mixing, and
Diglossia
Mixing and switching probably occur to
some extent in the conversation of the
bilingual. Code-mixing and code-
switching can serve a variety of functions,
such as building or reinforcing solidarity
among the speakers who share these
language.
The use of two distinct varieties of a
language for two different sets of function
is called diaglossia.
Summary and Conclusion
Learning to speak a foreign language is a
formidable task, and most adults fail to
achieve fluency even after many years of
trying. Children, however learn to achieve
learn native language with no apparent
effort and without instruction before they
reach school .
 Acquisition of language should not be
studied without considering the
sociocultural context in which take place.
Knowing how to use their native language
effectively helps individuals cope with
their culture, and learning to use is
appropriately is an important part of
enculturation.
Enculturation is the gradual process by which people learn the culture of
their own group by living in it, observing it, and being taught things by
members of the group.
Eventhough many people speak only one
language, they are actively or least
passively, acqauinted with several dialects
and speech.styles of that language. Their
speech patterns differ from those of
others, even if only slightly