First Language

Acquisition
Introduction to English
Linguistics 2020
Neurolinguistics
• Specialization of the left hemisphere of
the brain for language.
• This lateral dominance or lateralization
begins in early childhood.
• The critical period: a period when the
human brain is most ready to receive
input and learn a particular language or
languages.
“Genie”
• https://isle.hanover.edu/isle2/Ch1
2Speech/Ch12Genie.html

(4.37 - 10.30)

• The impact of neglect, linguistic as

well as emotional, on a child is
immense.
Acquisition: child-directed speech
• Motherese/ caregiver speech/ child-directed speech: a style of
speech which includes:
• Simplified words, a lot of repetition of simple sounds, especially for
people and things in the baby’s environment, higher pitch, exaggerated
intonation, extra loudness, and a slower tempo with longer pauses.

• Notice that the care-giver often treats the

baby’s babbling as turns in the conversation.

• https://motherese.weebly.com/motherese-around-the-world.ht
ml
Cooing and initial sounds
• The first production of noises from your child is
unintentional: crying, burping, sucking are all pre-linguistic
productions which develop the ability to produce sounds in
an intentional manner.
• Cooing is composed of early speech-like sounds produced in
the first few months of life.
• The baby produces vowel-like sounds, particularly high
vowels similar to [i] and [u].
• At around 5 months babies can hear the difference between
the vowels [i] and [a] and the syllables like [ba] and [ga].
 Babbling
• Between 6 – 8 months an infant can produce a number of
different vowels and consonants, as well as combinations
such as ba-ba-ba and ga-ga-ga. This is the start of the
babbling stage.
• Around 9 to 10 months, the baby is now also able to use
recognisable intonation patters, as well as a variation in
the babbling produced such as in ba-ba-da-da.
• This ‘prelanguage’ use of sound provides the child with
some experience of the social role of speech as the care-
givers react to the babbling as if it is conversational turn-
taking.
• Gestures accompany this stage, with babies able to point
and offer with an outstretched hand.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KZkTPFmDUI
One-Word Stage
• At 12-18 months children begin to produce single-unit utterances.
• The one-word stage is characterized by the production of single terms used
to identify objects such as milk, cat, bye-bye, spoon, often pronounced [pun].
• Holophrastic speech: a single form functioning as a phrase or sentence.
• E.g. [ʌsæ] might be used to ask what’s that?
• Up! to ask to be lifted up
• Identifiers or connections and possessives using the person’s name. E.g. A
sister’s bed may be identified by her name, or the dog’s bowl, identified by
the pet’s name.
 Two-Word Stage
• Two-Word Stage: begins between 18 – 20 months, as the child’s vocabulary moves beyond
50 words.
• By the age of two, the child produces combinations such as baby chair, mummy eat, cat bad.
• These two-word phrases must be interpreted in context: baby chair can be taken as a
statement: ‘baby is in the chair’; a request: ‘put baby in the chair’; an expression of
possession: ‘that’s baby’s chair’; even a complaint: ‘that’s baby’s chair, not mummy’s chair!’.
• big boat, doggy bark, hit ball, mama dress, more milk, shoe off
• The functional consequences are that care-givers – adults and older children – behave as if
communication is taking place.
• By the age of two, the child might be producing 200-300 individual words and
understanding five times as many.
Telegraphic Speech
• Telegraphic speech: strings of words in phrases or sentences such as
this shoe all wet, cat drink milk, daddy go bye-bye.
• There is also the beginning use of inflections (e.g. ing), and some
simple prepositions (e.g. on, in).
• By two and a half, the child initiates conversations and has a rapidly
expanding vocabulary.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcepkHkoLjU
Learning through imitation
• Language, in first language acquisition is acquired not taught.
• Imitation is not the main way children learn language.
• Adult: The dogs are hungry
• Child: dog hungry
• Adult: The owl who eats candy runs fast
• Child: owl eat a candy and he run fast
 Learning through correction
• Children, in fact, resist the pressure correction puts them under:
• CHILD: The teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
• MOTHER: Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits?
• CHILD: Yes
• MOTHER: What did you say she did?
• CHILD: She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
• MOTHER: Did you say she held them tightly?
• CHILD: No, she holded them loosely.

• Instead of teaching, imitation, or correction, children acquire language a great deal

through word play.
Developing Morphology
• Overgeneralization: the child starts to learn rules but then overgeneralizes in their
application.
• For example, learning that - s forms plurals, the child might talk about foots and
mans.
• Irregular plurals follow but they may be overgeneralized giving us the forms feets
and mens.
• The irregular forms of ‘to be’: is and are arrive around the same time as the
possessive ‘s.
• Finally we get the regular past tense forms with the overgeneralization we saw in
the dialogue about the rabbits – holded. Again, this may be followed with some
overgeneralization when the irregular forms are learnt: such as helded and wented.
Acquisition of Morphemes
Developing Syntax
• E.g. forming questions and the use of negatives.
• In both of these, there seems to be three identifiable stages: stage 1:
between 18 – 26 months; stage 2: between 22 – 30 months; stage 3: 24
– 40 months
• Forming questions:
• Stage 1: i) Add a wh-form (e.g. Where kitty?) ii) rising intonation (e.g. sit chair?)
• Stage 2: i) More complex expressions but still using rising intonation ii) More wh-
forms appear (e.g. Why you smiling?)
• Stage 3: i) Inversion starts (the change in position of the auxiliary verb e.g. I can
have ~ Can I have?) but doesn’t spread evenly. ii) Wh- forms may still be without
inversion (e.g. Why kitty can’t do it). iii) Continued morphological problems.
Syntax: Forming negatives
• Stage 1: putting no or not at the beginning: (e.g. no do that, as a command, and
no doing it as a denial – ‘I am not doing it’. It can also be used as an expression
of desire not to do something: I no do that).
• No and not can attach to both verbs and nouns.
• In Stage 2, the forms don’t and can’t appear.
• In Stage 3, the incorporation of other auxiliary forms such as didn’t and won’t.
• Isn’t comes quite late: this isn’t potato slowly replaces both this no potato, and
this not potato.
Developing Semantics
• Using dog to mean any four-legged animal.
• This process is called overextension.
• Most often this overextension is based on size and shape. So dog is any four-
legged animal; ball is any round object, etc.
• In terms of hyponymy, the child will almost always use the ‘middle’ term:
animal, dog, terrier; plant, tree, oak.
• A lot later in language development, when the child is at school, more difficult
distinctions are grasped: buy/sell; borrow/lend; more/less.
Developing societal roles
• Reinforcement, both positive and
negative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n
Wu44AqF0iI
• The truth is that “[children] will play
with anything...until age three...[when]
parents push children into more
gender-specific items” (Berg, p.35, Or positive?
2009). https://www.youtube.co
• Modelling: pernicious? m/watch?v=kJP1zPOfq_0
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw
W0X9f0mME
• Cui bono? [Who benefits?]
End of term paper questions (Due: Dec. 7th, 6pm)
• Write an essay of about 1,500 words (or a max of 2,000 including references) on ONE of the following topics:

• 1.
Is Brown and Levinson (1987)’s politeness theory universally applicable to all
cultures? Discuss, with examples, how their ideas of positive and negative politeness
may not work in some cultures.

• Suggested references:
• • Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
• • Eelen, G. (2014). A critique of politeness theory (Vol. 1). Routledge.
• • Mao, L. R. (1994). Beyond politeness theory: ‘Face’ revisited and renewed. Journal of pragmatics, 21(5), 451-486.
• • Matsumoto, Y. (1989). Politeness and conversational universals–observations from Japanese. Multilingua-Journal
of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 8(2-3), 207-222.
• • Trosborg, A. (Ed.) (2010). Pragmatics across Languages and Cultures. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
• (Keywords: politeness, face, pragmatics, culture, intercultural pragmatics)
• 2.Humour is often expressed through deliberately violating (flouting) Paul Grice’s
maxims of conversation. Find a short dialogue (of about a minute or two in duration)
that contains humour from a TV series of your own choice. Using Grice’s co-operative
principle and maxims of conversation, discuss the ways in which the speakers in the
scene exploit, or flout some or all of the Gricean maxims to convey humour. (If you
don’t want to use a TV series, you may analyze examples from a movie, a talk show, or
even dialogues in a novel. Include the source text at the end of your essay as an
appendix).
• Suggested references:
• • Grice, H. P. (1970). Logic and conversation (pp. 41-58).
• • Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.
• • Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1981). On Grice’s theory of conversation. Conversation and discourse, 155-78.
• • Yus, F. (2003). Humor and the search for relevance. Journal of pragmatics,35(9), 1295-1331.
• • Attardo, S. (1993). Violation of conversational maxims and cooperation: The case of jokes. Journal of pragmatics, 19(6), 537-558.
• (Keywords: Grice, co-operative principle, maxims of conversation, humour, implicature, jokes)
• 3. Collect around 30 posts on the Facebook fans page or Twitter account of a celebrity
(e.g. a politician, a pop singer, or a movie star, etc.). Classify these posts into their
speech act types (note that a post may convey multiple speech acts). Then, describe and
discuss a few examples for each type. In your small sample, which type of speech act is
the most frequently occurring? What could be the reason(s) for a certain type of act to
dominate these posts? (List the source posts at the end of your essay as an appendix.).

• Suggested references:
• • Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words. Oxford university press.
• • Herring, S., Stein, D., & Virtanen, T. (Eds.). (2013). Pragmatics of computer-mediated
communication. Walter de Gruyter.
• • Nastri, J., Pena, J., & Hancock, J. T. (2006). The construction of away messages: A speech act
analysis. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 11(4), 1025-1045.
• • Page, R. (2012). The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of
hashtags. Discourse & Communication, 6(2), 181-201.
• • Searle, J. R. (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in society, 5(01), 1-23.
• (Keywords: speech acts, illocutionary acts, computer-mediated communication)
• 4. Collect a small database of 20-30 advertising slogans in which English is
mixed with another language. These slogans may come from any medium of
your own choice. Discuss the motivations behind code-mixing in these
advertisements. (Include a list of the code-mixed texts that you have collected
at the end of your essay as an appendix.)

• Suggested references:
• • Li, D.C.S. (2002). Cantonese-English code-switching research in Hong Kong: A survey of
recent research. In K. Bolton, ed. Hong Kong English: Autonomy and Creativity. Hong Kong:
Hong Kong University Press, pp. 79–99.
• • Leung, C. H. (2010). An empirical study on code mixing in print advertisements in Hong
Kong. Asian journal of marketing, 4(2), 49-61.
• • Sebba, M., Mahootian, S. and Jonsson C. (eds) (2012) Language Mixing and Code-
Switching in Writing. London: Routledge.
• (Keywords: Code-mixing, code-switching, advertisements, language of advertising)
• 5.From a linguistic perspective, describe and explain the role of language in ethnic
discrimination and ground your argument with examples from one or two discourses:
social media, the mainstream media, governmental discourse, political discourse,
educational discourse, etc. (Include a list of the texts that you have collected at the
end of your essay as an appendix.)

• Suggested references:
• • Deterding, D., Wong, J., & Kirkpatrick, A. (2008). The pronunciation of Hong Kong English. English
World-Wide, 29(2), 148-175.
• • Gluszek, A., & Dovidio, J. F. (2010). The way they speak: a social psychological perspective on the
stigma of non-native accents in communication. Personality and Social Psychology Review.
• • Jenks, C. J., & Lee, J. W. (2016). Heteroglossic ideologies in world Englishes: an examination of the
Hong Kong context. International Journal of Applied Linguistics.
• • Kubota, R. (2020). Confronting Epistemological Racism, Decolonizing Scholarly Knowledge: Race and
Gender in Applied Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Volume 41, Issue 5, October 2020, Pages 712–732,
https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amz033
• • Thapa, C.B. & Adamson, B. (2018) Ethnicity, language-in-education policy and linguistic
discrimination: perspectives of Nepali students in Hong Kong, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural
Development, 39:4, 329-340, DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2017.1389947
• (Keywords: language stigma, stigmatization, ethnicity and linguistic discrimination, identity)
• 6.Find two recent/current print or billboard advertisements promoting a similar product or service,
where one appears to target a male customer and the other a female one. For instance, you might
choose advertisements for a category or products that comes in distinct ‘male’ and ‘female’ versions
(e.g. moisturizer, shampoo, razors), or one that comes in multiple varieties/brands, some of which are
marketed more to men while others are marketed more to women (e.g. soft drinks, breakfast cereals,
cars). Or you may be able to find a case where there are two gender-specific versions of the same
message (this sometimes applies to public health messages, such as government sponsored TV ads
about diet, smoking or drinking). When you have chosen your examples, consider the following
questions. (Include a list of the texts that you have collected at the end of your essay as an appendix.)

• 1.How does each text construct the target consumer?

• 2.What similarities and differences are there in the way the two texts represent the product or service
being advertised (or in the case of public information texts, the attitude/behaviour being promoted)?
• 3.If there are differences, do you think they are related to gender, or that they reproduce particular
ideologies of gender? Why or why not?
• [from p.77, Cameron & Panović (2014). Working with Written Discourse, Sage, London)
• Suggested references:
• • Cameron & Panović (2014). Working with Written Discourse, Sage, London.
• • Cook, G. (2001). The Discourse of Advertising, (2nd Ed.), Routledge, London.
• • Kress, G. & Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading Images (2nd Ed.), Routledge, Abingdon.
• • Van Dijk, Teun (2008). Discourse & Power, Palgrave Macmillan, London.
• (Keywords: advertising, ideology, critical discourse analysis, gender, discourse)
• 7. Choose a multimodal political advertisement or public information
broadcast and discuss the methods by which the text achieves (or fails to
achieve) its aim. (Include a list of the texts that you have collected at the
end of your essay as an appendix.)
• Suggested references:
• • Cameron & Panović (2014). Working with Written Discourse, Sage, London.
• • Kress, G. & Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading Images (2nd Ed.), Routledge, Abingdon.
• • Mackay, R. R. (2015). Multimodal legitimation: Selling Scottish independence.
Discourse & Society, 26(3), 323–348. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926514564737
• • Van Dijk, Teun (2008). Discourse & Power, Palgrave Macmillan, London.
• • Van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & Society, 17(3), 359–
383. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926506060250
• • Van Leeuwen, T. (2007). Legitimation in discourse and communication. Discourse &
Communication, 1(1), 91–112. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481307071986
• (Keywords: legitimation, manipulation, ideology, critical discourse analysis, political
language)
Essay guide
• https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/libraryservices/library/asc/docu
ments/public/Short-Guide-Essay-Planning.pdf

• VeriGuide submission:
https://express.veriguide.org/cuhk/documents/VeriGuide_Express_Us
er_Guide_CUHK.pdf
Grading
• SOLO assessment:
http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/policy/assessment/SOLO-description.pdf