Language Acquisition

Key Concepts…

• Learning or Acquisition?

• Acquisition: implicit, subconscious, informal situations, uses grammatical 'feel' depends on attitude stable order of acquisition

• Learning: explicit, conscious, formal situations, uses grammatical rules, depends on aptitude, simple to complex order of learning

• Imitation or Innate (modularity)

• Language & Thought (thinking not just in words but in images)

• Positive Evidence & Negative Evidence (Hanzo, a film by K. Sunal, linguistics input) & (which strings of words are not grammatical)

Ch: I taked a cookie.

Pa: Oh, you mean you took a cookie.

Ch: Yes, that’s right, I taked it (Akmajian, 2001:479)

• Motherese (modification of speech by parents)

• Prosody (speech wave, such as lengthening, intonation, and pausing, melody and timing)

• Context (Children do not hear sentences in isolation, but in a context.) My Nephew and I Drawing 1 2

• Language Acquisiton Device (LAD) (Noam Chomsky)

• Fossilization (Adults smt. stop learning at a level and can never go beyond it)

Stages of Language Acquisition…

• Babbling (Languagelike sounds,Ex.ba, 5-12 m.)

• The One-Word Stage (Simple Nouns and Verbs, Holophrastic: Overextention and underextention of meaning, Ex. doggie, 12-20)

• Multiword Stages (Eg. Mommy sock, see doggie, there book, gimme ball, no go outside, 20-)

Acquisition of Negetion in English

• no; allgone,

• no eat; no mommy go;

• he not big; Mommy no play;

• I can’t do that; I don’t know him;

• I am not a baby; I won’t read the book; He does’nt like it

Acquisition of Questions in English

• intonation

• That mine?- Where doggie?

• See baby?- Where Daddy go?

• Dolly go boom?- What dolly do?; Why?

• Did you see him? – How she can do it?

Children develop their native language in a sequence of identifiable stages. Specific constructions of a language develop in an interelated way: negative sentences and questions in English are intimately connected with the development of the Auxiliary verb system.

Roger Brown and the Order of Acquisition

• Present Progressive

• Prepositions (in, on)

• Plural

• Articles

• Possessive Inflection

• Past Irregular

• Uncontractible Copula

• Past Regular

• Third Person Regular

• Third Person Irregular

• Uncontractible Progressive Auxiliary

• Contractible Copula

• Contractible Progressive Auxiliary

• Future Conditional

• Passive

• Past Auxiliary

Order of Acquisition of Sounds And certain places of articulation come before others

• Nasals [ n, m, ng ] Labials (made with the lips)

• Glides [ w, y ] Velars (back of tongue and soft palate)

• Stops [ p, b, t, d, k, g ] Alveolars (tongue tip and ridge behind top front teeth)

• Liquids [ l, r ] Palatals (tongue and roof of mouth)

• Fricatives [ s, z, sh, zh ]

• Affricates [ ch, dg ]

Krashen's Theory of Second Language Acquisition

• The Acquisition-Learning hypothesis ('adults have two distinctive ways of developing competences in second languages .. acquisition, that is by using language for real communication ... learning .. "knowing about" language‘) (Krashen & Terrel, 1983)

• The Monitor hypothesis ('conscious learning ... can only be used as a Monitor or an editor‘)

• The Natural Order hypothesis ('we acquire the rules of language in a predictable order‘)

• The Input hypothesis, (i+1) ('humans acquire language in only one way - by understanding messages or by receiving "comprehensible input’)

• The Affective Filter hypothesis ('a mental block, caused by affective factors ... that prevents input from reaching the language acquisition device‘)

Selinker and The Theory of Interlanguage

Systematic knowledge of an L2 which is independent of both these learner’s L1 and the target language. The term has come to be used with different but related meanings: (1) to refer to the series of interlocking systems which characterize acquisition, (2) to refer to the system that is observed at a single stage of development (‘an interlanguage’), and (3) to refer to particular L1/L2 combinations(for example, L1 French/L2 English v. L1 Japanese/L2 English). Other terms that refer to the same basic idea are ‘approximative system’ (Nemser 1971) and ‘transitional competence’ (Corder 1967)

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