1 Paradigmas Linguisticos Semester II Child language learning

2 Biological preparedness for language Human infants are specially tuned to hear human language from birth. New born infants can hear sound distinctions that are not distinctive, or phonemic, in their native language. This ability to perceive differences disappears after about 6 months, when the native phonological system becomes established.

3 Universal Grammar This biological preparedness for language learning has been described by Chomsky as a Universal Grammar (UG) that is part of our genetic makeup as human beings. UG specifies the general form of human language and guides the child in the acquisition of the target language.

4 The Acquisition Schedule It depends on maturity of children’s brain and lateralization process. Acquisition happens regardless of the kind of interaction the child is exposed to when learning. (Sufficiently constant input)

Caretaker Language Adults play an essential role in the child’s acquisition of language even though the child hasn’t developed the ability to speak. Some features of this speech style are: exagerated intonation, simple sentence structure, a lot of repetition and questions, baby-talk words such as “choo-choo”.

6 From first sounds to babbling. In the first six months the infant interacts with her caretakers in a variety of ways. Vocalizations are primarily soft coos and gurgles and do not resemble genuine language. After the first 6 months true babbling begins. At this point the infant starts to make sounds that exhibit language- like features. At first, this consists of single syllables of stop consonants (p, b, t, d, etc) and a vowel like "ah". These babbles will be a string of similar syllables, ba, ba, ba.

7 From babbling to ‘words’ Eventually this will become more varied baga, bada and will start to sound like phonemic segments, in a process called segmental babbling. The vocalizations will also have sentence intonation, with the infant appearing to engage in a "conversation" that has no semantic content.

8 First words: one-word stage. Infants as young as 9 months can recognise individual words from a string of speech, but the first word is not produced until between months. The first word often sounds like babble, although it is consistently used to refer to one thing. This stage is also referred to as holophrastic because each word conveys as much meaning as an entire phrase. "Milk" can refer to the milk, to spilling it, drinking it, etc.

9 Early word use: Under- and over-extension During the early one-word stage the child will both underextend and overextend the meaning of words. underextension is when the child learns the word birdie in reference to the family budgie, and does not use it to refer to other birds. overextension of word meanings, where the child extends a word like doggie to refer to all four-legged animals. Overextension is more common and appears to be limited to production.

10 The two-word stage When the child has learned about 50 words, two significant things happen. A vocabulary spurt takes place in which the rate of vocabulary learning increases dramatically. The infant also enters the two-word stage, in which s/he starts producing two-word utterances from which the grammar of the language is developed.

11 The two-word stage and the emergence of grammar As the child moves beyond the one-word stage of development, lexical learning speeds up and the child begins to combine words to form small sentences. The structure of the child's target language is already reflected in the two-word stage. Here are examples of utterances of an English-speaking child at this stage. a carbaby cookie a ricehere Mommy doggie allgonepull car

12 Lexical development Various principles govern child vocabulary learning Fast-mapping is where a child hears a word once or twice, learns its grammatical class, but has only a vague idea of what it means. Whole object principle allows the child to sort out what is being referred to quickly, without having to consider whether the speaker is referring to the whole object or one of the parts. Only one name principle says that there is only one name for each object. Extendability principle. The child has the expectancy that individual words will refer to categories of similar things. During the one-word stage this principle can lead to overextension of word meaning, but is helpful later in the development of knowledge of categories.

13 Acquisition of grammatical features Bound morphemes are acquired in a similar order by children learning English. Earliest to appear is the -ing marker on verbs signalling the present progressive form. Sentences like Mommy sleeping are very common, with the auxiliary is (Mommy is sleeping) appearing much later.

14 Mean order of acquisition of morphemes 1. Present progressive (-ing) 2/3. Preposition in/on 4. Plural (-s) 5. Past irregular 6. Possessive (-’s) 7. Uncontracted copula (is, am, were) 8. Articles (a, the) 9. Past regular (-ed) 10. Third person regular (-s) 11 Third person irregular

15 The L1 is not learned by imitation children make non-random errors acquisition happens in a regular manner across diverse languages and settings the basic grammar is learned quickly acquisition comes about without formal instruction or correction, acquisition happen regardless of kind of interaction the child is exposed to when learning.

16 U-shaped development Often observed in English is the overgeneralization of the regular past tense verb. The most frequent verbs have irregular past tenses and children tend to acquire these first (e.g., went and ate). They then acquire some high frequency regular verbs like hugged and kissed. At that point they seem to discover that past tense formation is rule-governed, and begin to overgeneralize the past tense marker to irregular verbs (e.g. producing utterances like eated and goed). This overregularizing is also evident in the production of plurals (foots and feets) and illustrates the tendency of all children to make irregular processes in their language more regular. Regular forms are easier to learn and the child seems to impose regularity where it doesn't exist.

Second Language Acquisition 17 Question formation Stage 1. Rising intonation He work today? Stage 2. Intonation with sentence complexity Yes/no questions: You like this? Wh questions: Why you catch it? Stage 3. Beginning of inversion Can I go? Is that mine? But Why you don’t have one? Stage 4. Inversion Do you like ice cream? do in yes/no but not wh-questions Stage 5. Inversion with wh-question Why can he go out? Why he can’t go out? No inversion with negative Stage 6. Overgeneralization of inversion I don’t know why can’t he go out.

Second Language Acquisition 18 “..there is a unity of process that characterises all language acquisition, whether of a first or second language, at all ages.” McLaughlin, 1978 cited in Gass & Selinker p 102 ????

19 Class discussion activity We have discussed features of child language learning. These include: Six month babbling period Fast-mapping Segmental babbling Whole object principle One-word stage Only one name principle Two word stage Extendability principle Over and under extension U-shaped development How applicable do you think these processes are to adult SLA?