First language Acquisition Chapter 14 Ms. Abrar Mujaddidi

Introduction  Acquiring a first language is an amazing process to witness for several reasons: 1. Every language is complex. 2. Before the age of 5, the child knows most of the complicated system of grammar.  Use the syntactic, phonological, morphological and semantic rules of the language.  Join sentences.  Ask questions.  Use appropriate pronouns.  Negate sentences.  Form relative clauses.

Basic requirements 1.A child requires interaction with other language-users in order to bring the general language capacity s/he has into operation. Genie Cultural transmission 2.The child must be physically capable. Being able to speak Being able to hear Is hearing enough?  Interaction (The crucial requirement)  All these requirements are related.

The acquisition schedule  All normal children develop language at roughly the same time, along the same schedule.  The biological schedule is related to the maturation of the infant’s brain to cope with the linguistic input.  Young children acquire the language by identifying the regularities in what is heard and applying those regularities in what they say.

Caregiver speech  A type of simplified speech adopted by someone who spends time interacting with a child is called caregiver speech.  Caregiver speech is characterized by: Frequent use of questions Simplified lexicon Phonological reduction Higher pitch- extra loudness Stressed intonation Simple sentences A lot of repetition

cont.,  Caregiver speech is also called ‘motherese’.  caregiver speech Assigns interactive roles to young children  E.g. MOTHER: Look! CHILD: (touches picture) MOTHER: what are those? CHILD: (vocalizes a babble string and smiles) MOTHER: yes, there are rabbits CHILD: Vocalizes and smiles MOTHER: (laughs) yes, rabbit

Cooing and babbling  Cooing: 1. Few weeks: cooing and gurgling, playing with sounds. Their abilities are constrained by physiological limitations 2. They seem to be discovering phonemes at this point. 3. Producing sequences of vowel-like sounds- high vowels [i] and [u] months- sounds similar to velar consonants [k] & [g] 5. 5 months: distinguish between [a] and [i] and the syllables [ba] and [ga], so their perception skills are good.

cont.,  Babbling: 1. Different vowels and consonants ba-ba-ba and ga-ga-ga months- intonation patterns and combination of ba-ba-ba-da-da 3. Nasal sounds also appear ma-ma-ma use of vocalization to express emotions 5. Late stage- complex syllable combination (ma- da-ga-ba) 6. Even deaf children babble 7. The most common cross-linguistic sounds and patterns babbled the most, but later on they babble less common sounds

The one-word stage  months.  recognizable single-unit utterances.  single terms are uttered for everyday objects “milk”, “cookie”, “cat”, “cup”, and “spoon” [pun].  Holophrastic (wasa = what's that)  Produce utterances such as “Sarah bed” but not yet capable of producing a more complex phrase

The two-word stage  Vocabulary moves beyond 50 words  By 2 years old, children produce utterances ‘baby chair’, ‘mommy eat’  Interpretation depends on context  Adults behave as if communication is taking place.  The child not only produces speech, but receives feedback confirming that the utterance worked as a contribution to the interaction.  By this age, whether the child is producing 200 or 300 words, he or she will be capable of understanding 5 times as many

Telegraphic speech  2-2½ years: 1. The child produces „multiple-word ‟ speech. 2. The child has already developed sentence-building capacity & can get the word order correct („cat drink milk ‟, „daddy go bye-bye’) 3. A number of grammatical inflections begin to appear. 4. Simple prepositions (in, on) are also used 5. Vocabulary is expanding rapidly.  3 years: 1. Vocabulary has grown more. 2. Better pronunciation

The acquisition process  The child does not acquire the language by imitating adults- but by trying out constructions and testing them.  CHILD: my teacher holded the baby rabbit and we patted them MOTHER: did you say your teacher held the baby rabbit? CHILD: yes. she holded the baby rabbit and we patted them MOTHER: Did you say she held them tightly? CHILD: no, she holded them loosely

Developing Morphology  By 2-and-a-half years old- use of some inflectional morphemes to indicate the grammatical function of nouns and verbs.  The first inflection to appear is –ing after it comes the –s for plural.  Overgeneralization: the child applies –s to words like ‘foots’ ‘mans’ and later ‘feets’ ‘mens’

cont.,  The use of possessive ‘s’ appears ‘mommy’s bag’  Forms of verb to be appear ‘is’ and ‘are’  The –ed for past tense appears and it is also overgeneralized as in ‘goed’ or holded’  Finally –s marker for 3 rd person singular preset tense appears with full verbs first then with auxiliaries (does-has)

Developing syntax  A child was asked to say the owl who eats candy runs fast and she said the owl eat candy and he run fast.  The development of two syntactic structures- three stages Forming questions Forming negatives

Forming questions  1 st stage: Insert where and who to the beginning of an expression with rising intonation E.g. sit chair? Where horse go?  2 nd stage: More complex expression E.g. why you smiling? You want eat?  3 rd stage: Inversion of subject and verb E.g. will you help me? What did I do?

Forming negatives  Stage 1: Putting not and no at the beginning e.g. not teddy bear, no sit here  Stage 2: Don’t and can’t appear but still use no and not before VERBS e.g. he no bite you, I don’t want it  Stage 3: didn’t and won’t appear e.g. I didn’t caught it, she won’t go

Developing Semantics  During the two-word stage children use their limited vocabulary to refer to a large number of unrelated objects.  Overextension: overextend the meaning of a word on the basis of similarities of shape, sound, and size. e.g. use ball to refer to an apple, and egg, a grape and a ball.  This is followed by a gradual process of narrowing down.

Developing Semantics  Antonymous relations are acquired late  The distinction between more/less, before/after seem to be later acquisition.

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