1. Chapter 2 First Language Acquisition
This chapter outlines issues in first language learning as a foundation on which you can build an understanding of principles of second language learning.
Understanding the nature of first language learning is an essential component in the construction of a theory of second language acquisition. This chapter discusses some key issues in first language acquisition that are important for an understanding of second language acquisition.

2. Theories of First Language Acquisition
Q: What is meant by “Telegraphic Utterances”? Children have remarkable ability to communicate. Children “small babies” can send messages vocally and non-vocally and can also receive more messages. As they reach the end of their first year, children make specific attempts to imitate words and speech sounds they hear around them and this time, they utter their first words. By about 18 months of age, those words have multiplied considerably and are beginning to appear in two-word and three-word sentences ; this is commonly referred to as “telegraphic utterances”.

3. Examples of these “telegraphic utterances” are:
There cow
Bye-bye Daddy
The production tempo “the rate or speed” begins to increase as more and more words are spoken every day and more and more combinations of multi-word sentences are uttered.
By the age of 2, children are comprehending more sophisticated language and their production repertoire “collection” is multiplying, even to form questions and
negatives as seen below:
Why not me sleeping?
That no red, that blue

4. By the age 3, children can understand an amazing quantity of linguistic input. Their speech and understanding increase as they become the generators of nonstop conversation. Those around them can see that their language is a mixture of structures and words. This fluency and creativity continues into school age as children internalize increasingly complex structures expand their vocabulary and sharpen communicative skills. At school age, children not only learn what to say but what not to say as they learn the social functions of their language.

5. Q:How can we explain this fantastic journey from the first cry at birth to adult competence in a language?
This type of question is answered by the theories of language acquisition. These theories are the same school of thoughts referred to in our first chapter. (A) The Behaviorist theory claims that 1. children come into the world with tabula rasa 2. They have a clean state bearing no preconceived notions about the world or about language 3. Children are shaped by their environment and slowly conditioned through various types of reinforcement.

6. (B) The Constructivist Theory 1
(B) The Constructivist Theory 1. It takes the cognitive claim that children come into this world with very specific innate knowledge, predisposition “tendency”, and biological timetables 2. Children learn to function in a language chiefly through interaction and discourse.

7. The Behavioral Approach
The behavioral approach focused on:
1. the immediately perceptible aspects of linguistic behavior
the observable responses
The relationships or associations between those responses and events in the world surrounding them.
* This approach considers effective language behavior to be the production of correct responses to stimuli. Children produce linguistic responses that are reinforced.
* One learns to comprehend an utterance by responding appropriately to it and by being reinforced for that response.

8. Skinner’s “operant conditioning” then “verbal behavior”
It refers to conditioning in which the organism “human being” produces an operant “sentence or utterance” without observable stimuli. This operant is learned by reinforcement “ a positive verbal or non-verbal response from another person”. If a child says “want milk” and a parent gives the child some milk, the operant “utterance” is reinforced and the child can repeat it again and again.

9. Verbal behavior, like other behaviors is controlled by its consequences. When consequences are rewarding, behavior is maintained and is increased in strength and helps frequency. When consequences are punishing, or when there is a total lack of reinforcement, the behavior is weakened and eventually disappeared.

10. The Nativist Approach
The term “nativist” is derived from the concept that language acquisition is innately determined and that we are born with a genetic capacity that helps us to systematically understand language around us, resulting in the construction of an internalized system of language. For innateness hypothesis, language is a species-specific behavior and certain modes of perception and understanding are biologically determined. The existence of innate properties of language explains the child’s mastery of a native language in a short time in spite of the abstract nature of the rules of language.

11. The idea that a brain is a black box has come to be known as ‘language Acquisition Device’. This device consists of 4 innate linguistic properties: 1-The ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment 2-The ability to organize linguistic data into various classes that can later be refined 3-knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that other kinds are not 4-The ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing linguistic system so as to construct the simplest possible system out of the available linguistic input.

12. Important Questions
Q: what is pivot grammar? (page 30)
What are some challenges to the Nativist Approach?
Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP)
(page 31)
Connectionism (page 31-32)
Emergenitism (page 32)