Psychology
Children's Language Acquisition
Children's language acquisition refers to the process through which children learn and develop language skills. This includes the ability to understand and produce speech, as well as comprehend and use grammar and vocabulary. It is a complex and multifaceted process that involves both biological and environmental factors, and it is a key area of study in developmental psychology.
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12 Key excerpts on "Children's Language Acquisition"
eBook - PDF- Heather Winskel, Prakash Padakannaya(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Part I Language acquisition (i) Spoken language 1 Studying language acquisition cross-linguistically Sabine Stoll and Elena Lieven Introduction One of the fundamental questions in the enterprise of cognitive science is what enables children to learn any of the approximately 7000 languages spoken today and how they cope with the extreme variation exhibited in the structures of these languages? On the one hand, there must be human-specific universals that allow a child to learn any language. On the other, we know from research on linguistic relativity that language influences the way we characterize and categorize the world. Thus the way children learn language sheds light on the question of how language and cognition interact. Prelinguistic children show a similar development of the abilities relevant to producing and understanding language (Callaghan et al., 2011). Some of these abilities are joint attention, pattern recognition, imitation and role reversal. They also show an approximately similar timetable for major land- marks such as babbling and first words. However, as soon as children start producing language, many aspects of development across languages and also, within languages, diversify radically due to the different demands on the learner exhibited by the structures of the language a child is learning and the cultural and social environments a child grows up in. All acquisition theories assume that language learning involves the inter- play of biological and environmental factors but the nature of this interaction is hotly debated. To answer these theoretical issues, empirical acquisition research on a wide range of languages is mandatory. One of the main challenges is to explain how children are able to cope with such a wide variation both of structures and of cultural traditions and beliefs. There have been two somewhat different approaches to the question of variation.
eBook - PDFLanguage Files
Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics, 13th Edition
- Department of Linguistics(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Ohio State University Press(Publisher)
C H A P T E R 8 Language Acquisition © 2015 by Julia Porter Papke 328 F I L E 8.0 What Is Language Acquisition? Many people believe that language is what sets humans apart from other animals. Lan- guages are highly complex and sophisticated systems. So how do we humans manage to learn such complicated systems? This chapter addresses that question. A predominant theory assumes that part of our ability to acquire language is innate and that children learn language by “inventing” the rules specific to their language. When acquiring one or more native language(s), all children go through the same stages of language development: they start by babbling, then learn their first words, go through a so-called one-word stage (during which they can utter only one word at a time), enter the two-word stage, and finally learn the more complex structures of their language(s). Language acquisition is not limited to children; many people learn a second language later in life. However, second-language acquisition can differ from first-language acquisition in many respects. Contents 8.1 Theories of Language Acquisition Discusses the innateness hypothesis and introduces a number of theories of language acquisition. 8.2 First-Language Acquisition: The Acquisition of Speech Sounds and Phonology Describes how infants perceive and produce sounds, and discusses the acquisition of phonology, including babbling and first words. 8.3 First-Language Acquisition: The Acquisition of Morphology, Syntax, and Word Meaning Discusses the one-word stage, the two-word stage, and later stages of language acquisition, and introduces phenomena involved in the acquisition of word meaning. 8.4 How Adults Talk to Young Children Introduces various features of child-directed speech. 8.5 Bilingual Language Acquisition Presents different kinds of bilingual language acquisition, discusses code-switching, compares bilingual and monolingual language acquisition, and introduces issues in second-language acquisition.
eBook - PDF- Peter Jordens, Josine A. Lalleman(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Fletcher & M. Garman (eds.) Language acquisition: studies in first language development, Cambridge: Univ. Press, 455-474 LEOPOLD, W.F. 1939-1949 Speech development of a bilingual child, Evanston: Northw. Univ. Press LOVAAS, O.I. 1977 The autistic child: language development through behaviour modification, New York: Irvington Publ. MACNAMARA, J. 1977 From sign to language, in J. Macnamara (ed.) Language Learning and thought, New York: Acad. Press MARATSOS, M. 1983 Some current issues in the study of the acquisition of grammar, in J.H. Flavell & E.M. Markman (eds.) Handbook of child psychology Vol 3: Cognitive development (general ed. P.H. Müssen), New York: Wiley. MARATSOS, Μ. & M.A. CHALKLEY 1980 The internal language of children's syntax: the ontogenesis and representation of syntactic categories, in K.E. Nelson (ed.) Children's Language (Vol 2), New York: Gardner Press MAZURKEWICH, I. & L. WHITE 1984 The acquisition of the dative alternation: unlearning overgeneralizations, in Cognition 16, 261-283 MCNEILL, 1966 The creation of language by children, in J. Lyons & R.J. Wales (eds.) Psycholinguistic Papers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press 27 MILLER, G.A. & Ν. CHOMSKY 1963 Finitary models of language users, in R. Bush, E. Galanter & R. Luce (eds.), Handbook of mathematical psychology, vol. II. New York: Wiley MUYSKEN, P.C. 1985 Taalontwikkeling en grammatika, in Tijdschrift voor Taal- en Tekstwetenschap 5,3, 219-230 NELSON, K. 1973 Structure and strategy in learning to talk, in Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 38 NEWPORT, E.L. 1976 Motherese: the speech of mothers to young children, in J.J. Castellan, D.B. Pisoni & G.R. Potts (eds.) Cognitive Theory (Vol 3), Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum PETERS, A.N. 1986 Early syntax, in P. Fletcher & M. Garman (eds.) Language acquisition; studies in first language development, Cambridge: Univ.
- Anita K. Barry(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
If you are interested in the acquisition of this structure, a good place to begin is Crain and Lillo-Martin, 389-98. 4. As a teacher, you might be interested in exploring language development in the later years of childhood. Here you might begin with the seminal study by Chomsky (1969). Tager-Flusberg (186-97) also offers some interesting insights into later language de- velopment. 5. In this chapter, we touched on some of the theoretical issues concerning the acquisition of language, such as the question of how much language-learning ability is innate Child Language Acquisition 191 and what the role of imitation is in the process. These questions are part of a much broader and long-standing intellectual debate concerning the nature of language. An- other related piece of the debate is the question of whether language learning is different from other kinds of learning. Some psychologists make the case that it is not, while most linguists take the position that it is. If you wish to explore this debate, a good place to start is Bohannon and Bonvillian (279-84). You might also wish to explore the recent claim by some scientists that they have discovered a gene specif- ically related to language. (See "Scientists Report Finding a Gene Enabling Speech," New York Times, October 4, 2001.) More will be said about these issues in Chapter 11. 6. This chapter has not explored the acquisition of the pragmatics of language use, an area that might be of great interest to a teacher who interacts socially with children for many hours each day. How do children learn the conventions of politeness? How do they learn the intent behind an utterance? How do they learn to gauge what their listener already knows and shape their language appropriately? How do they learn to give appropriate feedback in a conversation? At what point do they recognize gender differences in the use of language? These issues are explored in Warren and Mc- Closkey (1997).
eBook - PDFProcess linguistics
Exploring the processual aspects of language and language use, and the methods of their description
- Thomas T. Ballmer, Wolfgang Wildgen, Thomas T. Ballmer, Wolfgang Wildgen(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Do these capacities develop in a way that is impor-tant for language acquisition? Is the child capable of formulating hypotheses about language in general and more specifically about syntax? Are these hypotheses similar to the child's general learn-ing principles? Does this kind of hypothesis develop along the same lines as his intellectual development? What do these hypoth-eses refer to? etc. In this light it is interesting to remember that LA-theory claims a limited hypothesis space and LL-theory an extensive hypothesis space. This means that in the LL-theory the child is postulated to be more active and creative than in LA-theory; c) to determine more exactly the child's innate and language specific capacity to learn language. Actually this latter point is nothing more than a methodological gap: all peculiarities that cannot be explained for the moment from a) and b) belongs to it for the time being. That language acquisition occurs almost unnoticed is only partly true. Every adult is aware that he cannot talk to a child - whether he is one, two or seven years old - in the same manner as to an adult. Furthermore, it is often found that adults don't neglect systematically the child's language difficulties, but do correct and expand their immature productions. 213 Finally, the analysis of mother to child language makes clear that this kind of communication is bound by very specific rules. A valid explanation of why people think that children learn their language almost unnoticed is perhaps that language is not learned so much by overt practice in a learning situation, but rather in a communicative situation. What we are doing with a child is communicating, transferring information establishing relation-ships. For the child, however, there is the additional task of detecting linguistic regularities in the speech directed to him.
No longer available |Learn moreUnderstanding Language
A Basic Course in Linguistics
- Elizabeth Grace Winkler, Elizabeth Winkler(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
Chapter Overview 1. Early theories of first language acquisition 50 2. Stages of first language acquisition 59 3. Second language acquisition 63 4. Second language teaching and learning 66 In the first two chapters, we’ve learned that acquiring a language is a remark-able achievement requiring an understanding of many linguistic systems each with its own set of complex rules. Nevertheless, practically all children acquire their native language with little obvious effort. The vast majority of us take this phenomenon for granted. It is not until we try to learn a second language that we confront for the first time a multitude of rules and processes that we must understand to communicate effectively in a second language. In fact, most native speakers are completely unaware, at a conscious level, of the majority of the rules of their own native language. Despite this, every day we produce and comprehend thousands of sentences, which we have never heard or produced before. What is it that children acquire during the acquisition period before age 5? Children are exposed to the dialect that their parents speak, thus they learn the basic formal patterns of that dialect. This would be rules like, in English, that adjectives come before nouns and that the normal sentence pattern is subject, verb and finally object. These types of fundamental rules cover nor-mal spoken language. This is not the same as school grammar or prescriptive grammar as discussed in Chapter 1. That would include rules that prohibit 3 Language Acquisition Understanding Language 50 ending sentences in prepositions or using double negatives. The vast major-ity of children do not learn these types of rules until they go to school, and despite the best efforts of our teachers, many of us continue to break these school rules throughout our lives, especially in speaking. 1. Early theories of first language acquisition In the mid- 1950s, behavioural psychologist B.
eBook - PDF- Edgar C. Polomé(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Experimental studies using artificial language have been quite sug-gestive in showing that certain properties seem to be essential to the learning of an artificial language. By hypothesis, these properties are essential to natural languages as well. Moeser and Bregman (1982) show that semantic correlates to syntax facilitate learning. Morgan and Newport (1981) show that constituent groupings with semantic significance strongly facilitate learning. 4.2. Language acquisition Language-acquisition theory deals with questions of how humans acquire natural language. Its domain includes the mechanisms under-lying first language acquisition, and the nature of language structure. Noam Chomsky has argued forcefully that humans acquire natural language because of their innate linguistic endowment (1965, 1975). Language learning cannot be explained as learning in the general sense, he claims, making the argument of poverty of the stimulus. The linguistic input to young children underdetermines the grammars that they are learning. Rather, humans have a specific language faculty with specific content, and grammar is a matter of growth and triggering rather than of learning in the traditional sense. Evidence for this view of grammar growth is the rapidity of first-language acquisition, the relative absence of errors, and the fact that children are not instructed in their native language. Furthermore, and very tellingly, children acquire constraints for which they receive no direct evidence: this argues strongly for an innate language faculty. Detailed accounts of language learning from this strong nativist position are developed in Felix (1984) and Pinker (1984). Others take the position that general cognitive abilities are used in the construction of grammars by children. Some psychologists empha-size the importance of functional considerations and the social ground-ing of language development (Bates —MacWhinney 1982).
eBook - PDF- Susan Foster-Cohen(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
As Chomsky (1959, p. 55, citing Lashley), suggested, the ‘syntactic organization of an utterance is not something directly universal grammar approaches 93 represented in any simple way in the physical structure of an utterance itself’. The question is: How do we come to know these intricate pieces of knowledge? And how does it happen that even young children, between 4 and 5 years, are sensitive to these logical properties? (See Gualmini and Crain, 2002, 2005; Han et al., 2007). Before answering this question, we turn our attention to some key features of the process of language acquisition. how children acquire language Children acquire language without specific instructions, without focused correction (see below), without being explicitly told whether a sequence of words is grammatical or not, and without being expli- citly told what a sequence means or cannot mean. Moreover, this hap- pens across widely varying circumstances. For example, Petitto (1996) showed that the same milestones characterize the acquisition of both spoken and sign languages, with oral and manual babbling emerging at 6–8 months (Petitto and Marentette, 1991); first words and signs at around 12 months (Meier and Newport, 1990; Lillo Martin, 1999; Petitto, 1988) and first combinations at around 24 months. Thus, the modality in which language is expressed, orally or manually, does not change the course of language acquisition. Similarly, despite a smaller range of experience, blind children acquire language more or less at the same pace as sighted children and in the same way. Landau and Gleitman (1985) showed that the vocabulary of blind children is similar to that of sighted children and that blind children know the meaning of perception verbs such as ‘see’ and ‘look’ without sensory experience.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hugh J. Silverman(Authors)
- 1979(Publication Date)
- Northwestern University Press(Publisher)
1 / The Psychological Development of Language in the 'Child [1] AN OVERVIEW DURING THE FIRST MONTHS OF LIFE, the child cries; he makes expressive movements; and then he begins to babble. One must consider this babbling as the ancestor of language: it is, above all, extraordinarily rich and includes phonemes which do not exist in the language that is spoken around the child, and which he himself, once he has become an adult, is incapable of reproducing (for example, when he wants to reacquire t'hem to learn a foreign language). This babbling is therefore a poly- morphic language, whieh is spontaneous with respect to its en- vironment. (It exists in deaf-mute children, even though it is not as well developed.) There is, however, a large amount of imita- tion. This imitation reaches its culmination between six and twelve months, but it remains rudimentary to the extent that the child does not grasp' the meaning of that which he is imitating. The same relationship' exists between babbling and language as between scribblin,g and drawing. This imitation concerns the melody of the sentence just as much as the words, because the child tries, as it were, to speak "in general." W. Stem relates that, for a month, his daughter spoke a foreign ''language,'' which had 'a conversational tone but which did not mean anything. 1 (It was as though she were playing I. [See William Stern, Psychology of Early Childhood (New York: Holt, 1931).] [II] 12 / CONSCIOUSNESS AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION at speaking.) According to Delacroix, "The child bathes in language." 2 He is attracted and enthralled by the movement of dialogue around him, and tries it himself. Language is the indissoluble extension of all physical activity, and at the same time it is quite new in relation to that physical actiVity. Speech emerges from the "total language" as constituted by gestures, mimicries, etc.
eBook - PDFIntroducing Linguistics
Theoretical and Applied Approaches
- Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, John W. Schwieter(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
London: Routledge. Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: The new science of language and mind. New York, NY: Penguin. Stark, R. (1986). Pre-speech segmental feature development. In P. Fletcher & M. Garman (Eds.), Language acquisition (2nd Edition, pp. 149–173). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tardif, T., Fletcher, P., Liang, W., Zhang, Z., Kaciroti, N., & Marchman, V. (2008). Baby’s first 10 words. Developmental Psychology, 44(4), 929–938. Wolff, S. (2004). The history of autism. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 13, 201–208. OVERVIEW In this chapter, you will develop an understanding of the study of second language (L2) acquisition (SLA). Our objectives are to: • compare and contrast how first languages (L1s) and L2s are acquired; • explore how sounds, words, and structure develop in an L2; • learn about internal and external factors that affect SLA; • gain knowledge about teaching pedagogies that help L2 learning; and • look at some theoretical approaches to studying SLA. 13.1 What Is Second Language Acquisition? The study of second language acquisition (SLA) investigates the process by which non- native languages are acquired. The most common form of SLA focuses on sequential language acquisition, in which an L2 is learned after an L1 has already been acquired. SLA goes well beyond studying how non-native languages are acquired; it also examines questions such as what the lan- guage learner comes to know (and not know), why some learners are more successful at learning an L2 than others, and why certain linguistic elements are more easily acquired than others. 13 Second Language Acquisition John W. Schwieter LINGUISTICS TIDBITS: HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF SLA Did you know that learning L2s has always been important across the world? • During the Middle Ages all educated peo- ple had to learn Latin as an L2.
- Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams, , Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
These two rules show that the children prefer simple CV syllables. Of the many phonological rules that children create, no child will necessarily use all rules. Early phonological rules generally reflect natural phonological processes that also occur in adult languages. For example, various adult languages have a rule of syllable-final consonant devoicing (for example, in German hʊnd/ ‘dog’ is pronounced [hʊnt]. Children do not create bizarre or whimsi- cal rules. Their rules conform to the possibilities made available by Universal Grammar. The Acquisition of Word Meaning Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me . . . Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. HELEN KELLER, The Story of My Life, 1903 How do children figure out the meaning of a word? Most people do not see this aspect of acquisition as posing a great problem. The intuitive view is that children look at an object, the mother says a word, and the child connects the sounds with the object. However, this is not as easy as it seems. As the linguist Lila Gleitman points out: A child who observes a cat sitting on a mat also observes . . . a mat sup- porting a cat, a mat under a cat, a floor supporting a mat and a cat, and so on. If the adult now says “The cat is on the mat” even while pointing to the cat on the mat, how is the child to choose among these interpretations of the situation? 1 Even if the child succeeds in associating the word cat with the animal on the mat he may mistakenly interpret “cat” as “Cat,” the name of that particular animal, instead of a type of animal. Upon hearing the word dog in the presence of a dog, say, a poodle, how does the child know that “dog” can also refer to 1 Gleitman, L.R., and E. Wanner. 1982. Language acquisition: The state of the art. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
eBook - PDF- Annamaria Pinter(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
On the other hand, she has command over a range of literacy devices and structures that can be exploited in speech to make what she says dramatic, flexible, variable, versatile, and should she so wish, fast and efficient. (Wood 1998: 211) Adolescents are continuously exposed to new social experiences. Their extensive participation in peer culture and their more independent lifestyle will offer new opportunities to develop their L1, combined with the effects of promoting more formal styles of language in classrooms. Those preparing to apply for places at college or university will experience yet new, more academic ways of using their L1 in interviews, tests, essays and reports. Language Learning Processes in Childhood 49 2.3 Second language acquisition in childhood Children are believed to be more successful second language learners than adults. Parents all over the world put their children in language schools at an early age, convinced that the earlier they start learning, the better. But what is the actual research evidence behind this widespread belief about young children? Are young children superior language learners as compared to older learners? What are children’s advantages over adults, if any? When it comes to pinpointing the exact effects of age on the processes of second language acquisition, research to date has produced rather com- plex results. Although age is inevitably important, it is clear now that other factors may also play equally important parts in the process of learning a new language. For example, factors such as supportive contexts, oppor- tunities to practise, motivation and the quality of formal instruction all make a difference, and age simply cannot be separated and examined in isolation.
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