Teacher.

Zeineb Ayachi
 Layout 1/2
 Section I
 Introduction
 The study of language acquisition
 Methods of data collection
 Major findings on children's acquisition of the various
parts of their language
 phonology,
 vocabulary,
 morphology,
 syntax, and
 semantics-
 Layout 2/2
 Section II
 The nature of nurture:
 Is experience necessary?
 When does linguistic experience begin?
 What is the nature of input?
 Conclusions
 Section I
Introduction
 Most children acquire language quickly and effortlessly—
giving the impression that the entire process is simple and
straightforward.

 However, the true extent of children's achievement

becomes evident when we compare their success with the
difficulties encountered by adults who try to learn a second
language

 The main question is how children the world over are able
to master the complexities of human language in the space
of a few short years
 Section I
The study of language acquisition
 Acquisition process: children acquire grammar
 Evidence:
 produce an infinite number of sentences through an
acquisition of the grammar of the native language, not
memorization of a fixed inventory of words
 doed”, "runned”, and “goed” can be informative: children
don't hear adults produce words like these, such errors
tell us that they have formulated a general rule that
forms the past tense by adding ~ed to the verb stem-
 Section I
Methods of data collection
Naturalistic observation, Experimentation 1/2
1. Naturalistic data collection
 provides a great deal of information about how the language acquisition
process unfolds
 tends to be longitudinal
 permits researchers to observe development as an ongoing process in
individual children.
 but it also has its shortcomings:
 particular structures and phenomena may occur rarely in children’s everyday
speech, making it difficult to gather enough information from natural speech
samples to test hypotheses or draw firm conclusions
 speech samples from individual children capture only a small portion of their
utterances at any given point in development
 Section I
Methods of data collection
Naturalistic observation, Experimentation 2/2
2. Experimental studies:
 usually employ tasks that test children's comprehension, production,
or imitation skills.
 Children's responses can provide valuable clues about the type of
grammatical rules being used to interpret sentences at particular stages
of development
 Negative side: there are many structures (such as passives) that are
hard to elicit even from adults, since they are used only in special
contexts,
 because children's ability to comprehend language is often more
advanced than their ability to produce sentences of their own;
production tasks can provide an overly conservative view of linguistic
development unless they are accompanied by other types of tests
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the
various parts of their language
Phonological development 1/5
 Children seem to be born with a perceptual system
that is especially designed for listening to speech.
 Newborns respond differently to human voices than to
other sounds.
 From around one month of age; children exhibit the
ability to distinguish among certain speech sounds.
 A change in the children's sucking rate (measured by a
specially designed pacifier) indicated that they
perceived the difference between the two syllables; and
were therefore able to distinguish between [p] and [b].
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various
parts of their language Phonological development
Babbling 2/5
 The ability to produce speech sounds begins to emerge
around six months of age,
 Babbling provides children with the opportunity
to experiment with and begin to gain control over
their vocal apparatus—an important prerequisite for
later speech;
 Children who are unable to babble for medical reasons
(because of the need for a breathing tube in their
throat, for example) can subsequently acquire normal
pronunciation, but their speech development is
significantly delayed
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various
parts of their language
Phonological development
The developmental order 3/5
 Babbling increases in frequency until the age of about
twelve months, at which time children start to produce
their first understandable words-
 Babbling may overlap with the production of real
words for several weeks before dying out.
 Vowels are generally acquired before consonants (by
age three)-.
 Stops (blade([t], [d]) or body ([k], [ɡ]), lips
([p], [b]), tend to be acquired before other consonants
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of
their language
Phonological development
The developmental order 4/5
 labials are often acquired first, followed (with some
variation) by alveolars (tow), velars (king: [k] and [ŋ]),
and alveopalatals (sh )- Interdentals (such as [6]and
[o]) are acquired last-
 New phonemic contrasts manifest themselves first in
word-initial position-Thus, the /p/-/b/ contrast, for
instance, will be manifested in pairs such as pat-bat
before mop-mob,
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of
their language
Phonological development
The developmental order 5/5
 In general, the relative order in which sounds are
acquired reflects their distribution in languages of the
world
 The sounds that are acquired early are generally found
most widely in the world's languages while the sounds
that are acquired late tend to be less common across
languages
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various
parts of their language
Phonological development
Early phonetic processes 1/4
 Children's ability to perceive the phonemic contrasts
of their language develops well in advance of their
ability to produce them-
 Even children who are unable to produce the
difference between words like mouse and mouth, cart
and card or jug and duck may nonetheless be able to
point to pictures of the correct objects in a
comprehension task
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of
their language
Phonological development
Early phonetic processes 2/4
 Syllable simplification
 A frequent process in children speech involves the
systematic deletion of certain sounds in order to
simplify syllable structure;
 EX:
 [s] + stop (strategy: delete [s])
 stop -> [tap]
 small —> [ma]
 desk ~> [dek]
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of
their language
Phonological development
Early phonetic processes 3/4
 Another common deletion process in early language
acquisition involves the elimination of final
consonants; as in the following examples.
 Dog
 [do]
 Bus
 [bA]
 Boot
 [bu]
 SectionI
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of
their language
Phonological development
Early phonetic processes 4/4
 Both the reduction of consonant clusters and the
deletion of final consonants have the effect of
simplifying syllable structure—bringing it closer to the
CV template that is universally favored by children and
that is generally the most widely found pattern in
human language
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of
their language
Vocabulary development 1/5
 By age eighteen months or so, the average child has a
vocabulary of fifty words or more
 Words referring to
 people: daddy, mommy, baby
 food/drink: juice, milk, cookie, water, toast, apple, cake
 animals: dog, cat, duck, horse
 clothes: shoes, hat
 toys: bail, blocks
 vehicles: car, boat, truck
 other: bottle, key, book
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of
their language
Vocabulary development 2/5
 Noun-like words make up the single largest class in the child's early
vocabulary, with verb- Adjective-like words being the next most
frequent category types
 Among the most frequent individual words are expressions for
displeasure or rejection (such as no) and various types of social
interaction (such as please and bye)
 Over the next months this vocabulary grows rapidly, sometimes by as
much as ten or twelve words a day
 By age six, most children have mastered about thirteen thousand
words.
 Children seem to differ somewhat in the types of words that they focus
on, especially in the early stages of language acquisition depending on
the context they live in.
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of their language
Vocabulary development
Strategies for acquiring word meaning 3/5
 Three strategies for learning the meanings of new words.
 The Whole Object Assumption: a new word refers to a
whole object.
 The Type Assumption: a new word refers to a type of thing,
not just to a particular thing.
 The Basic Level Assumption: a new word refers to types of
objects that are alike in basic ways.
 The strategies provide children with a good way to get
started, postponing the acquisition of certain types of
words in favor of more basic vocabulary items.
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of their language
Vocabulary development
Contextual clues 4/5
 Another major factor in vocabulary development is the
child's ability to make use of contextual clues to draw
inferences about the category and meaning of new words.
 In an experiment, three- and four-year-old children were
asked to act out the meaning of sentences such as Make it
so there is tiv to drink in this {glass (of water), The only
clues about the interpretation of the nonsense word tiv
came from the meaning of the rest of the sentence and from
the child's understanding of the types of changes that can
be made to a glass of water. Not only did more than half the
children respond by either adding or removing water, but
some even remembered what tiv meant two weeks later.
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of their language
Vocabulary development
Meaning errors 5/5
 Two most typical semantic errors involve overextension
and underextension.
 Overextension: attempts to compensate for vocabulary
limitations; The word dog, for example, is frequently
overextended to include horses, cows, and other four-
legged animals
 Underextension: use of lexical items in an overly restrictive
fashion to focus on prototypical or core members of a
category: the word dog might be used for collies, spaniels,
and beagles, but not for Chihuahuas.
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of their language
Morphological development

 The development of affixes/Inflection

 Stage 1: case-by-case learning (Irregular plural/past)

 Stage 2: overuse of general rule (Video: Children overgeneralization)
 Stage 3: mastery of exceptions to the general rule
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of their language
Syntactic development
The one word stage 1/5

 children begin to produce one-word utterances

between the ages of twelve and eighteen months
 one-word utterances can be used to express the type of
meaning that is associated with an entire sentence in
adult speech: Such utterances are called holophrases
(literally 'whole sentences').
 Candy, for example,would say candy rather than want.
since the former word is more informative in this
situation.
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of their language
Syntactic development
The two word stage 2/5
 Baby chair:
 meaning: 'The baby is sitting on the chair
 Semantic relation: agent-location
 A notable feature of children's two-word utterances is that they
almost always exhibit the appropriate word order. This suggests a
very early sensitivity to this feature of sentence structure, but
there is reason to believe that children do not initially have a
general word-order rule. Rather, they may have a separate rule
for each verb.
 subject-verb-object order: Elmo tammed the apple
 subject-object-verb order: Elmo the apple gopped
 verb-subject-object order: Dacked the apple Elmo
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of their language
Syntactic development
The telegraphic stage 3/5

 The telegraphic stage is characterized by the

emergence of phrase structure: ex: Daddy like book

 A merge operation can form phrases consisting of a

head and a complement {like book, ride bus, show
Mommy)
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of their language
Syntactic development 4/5
 The development of phrase structure
Stage Approx- age Developments
Holophrastic 1-1.5 yrs. single word utterances; no structure
Two-word l.5-2yrs. early word combinations; presence of
syntactic categories
Telegraphic 2-2.5 yrs. emergence of phrase structure; especially
head-complement and subject-VP patterns
 Section I
Major findings on children's acquisition of the various parts of their language
Syntactic development
Later development 5/5

 Subject-Verb Inversion
 In the very early stages of language acquisition, children
signal yes-no questions by means of rising intonation alone
 Auxiliary verbs are a relatively late development
 Ex: Sit chair?
 Wh questions emerge gradually between the ages of two
and four-
 The first wh words to be acquired are typically what and
where followed by who, how, and why; when, which, and
whose are relatively late acquisitions (Video: How do babies build sentences)
 Section II
The nature of nurture
Is experience necessary? 1/3

 “the source of language is within us but

. . . the conditions for its emergence
depend crucially upon community”
(Kegl et al. 1999, 223).
 Section II
The nature of nurture
Is experience necessary 2/3

The inscrutability of rate of language acquisition

 There is considerable variability in the rate of language
development among children.
 Some of this difference in rate may be related to aspects of
input (e.g., Potts et al. 1979), but rate differences occur in
highly enriched environments as well as in more deprived
ones.
 Although orphanage children with limited language input
often suffer developmental delays, it is not clear to what
degree these involve language development;
 Catch up” mechanisms may apply regardless of such
variations.
 Section II
The nature of nurture
Is experience necessary? 3/3

Summary
 While there can be no doubt that experience is necessary
for language acquisition, the form of experience can vary
widely.
 The genesis of a new language appears to require the
existence of a community, but the ontogenesis of a
first language in children can involve different
amounts and types of communicative interaction.
 All normal children appear to contain within
themselves the ability to create a language in spite of
wide variations in experience.
 Section II
The nature of nurture
When does linguistic experience begin? 1/3
 Before birth?
 External auditory stimulation is available to the fetus, although
attenuated
 “Mother’s voice is a prominent sound in the amniotic environment”;
“experience with sounds begins prior to birth” (Fifer and Moon 1989,
175, 184)
 Newborns appear to distinguish speech from birth, and to be drawn to
language.
 They orient to sound , showing a preference for speech and voice or
song over other stimuli (e.g., instrumental music) and prefer to listen
to words over other sounds
 Section II
The nature of nurture
When does linguistic experience begin? 2/3

 A newborn younger than three days “can not

only discriminate its mother’s voice but also
will work to produce her voice in preference
to the voice of another female” (DeCasper
and Fifer 1980, 1175)
 Section II
The nature of nurture
When does linguistic experience begin? 3/3
 Is one language enough?
 An important series of research studies now confirms
that “a few days after birth, infants are able to tell apart
two different languages, even when neither of them is
present in their environment; moreover, they already
show a preference for their maternal language”
(Mehler and Christophe 1995, 947).
 Infants are not confused by exposure to more than one
language, and seem to know very early which language
is “going to be their maternal language”
 Section II
The nature of nurture
What is the nature of the input? 1/7
 Baby Talk Register
 Presented with an infant, adults will often change their
manner of speaking, adopting “Baby Talk” (BT),
sometimes called “Motherese”
 The linguist Charles Ferguson speculated in an early
survey of twenty seven languages that “in every speech
community people modify their speech in talking to
young children, and that the modifications have an
innate basis” (1977, 203).
 Section II
The nature of nurture
What is the nature of the input? 2/7
 Motherese Hypothesis
 As Baby Talk Register is not universal, this challenges the Motherese
Hypothesis, suggesting a more general role for the BTR in adult–infant
interaction, linking it to culture and to affective interaction rather than
to language teaching per se.
 Results showed that the vast majority of properties of maternal speech
did not correlate positively with developing complexity in child speech.
 The length or complexity of a mother’s utterances did not correlate
with the same features in the child’s language; nor did the amount of
repetition by the mother correlate with any form of growth measured.
 Growth of complex sentence structures in the child’s speech did not
correlate with any property of maternal speech.
 Section II
The nature of nurture
What is the nature of the input? 3/7
 These findings disconfirm a strong form of the Motherese Hypothesis,
although they do not suggest that children cannot or do not attend to
specific properties of the input.
 They suggest a “semi autonomous unfolding of language capabilities.”
 Effects of maternal input are those which match the biases of the
learner, which act “as a filter through which the linguistic environment
exerts its influence”
 These results begin to factor out which properties of the input infants
may select.
 The input is not the primary determinant of the universal aspects of
language knowledge.
 Section II
The nature of nurture
What is the nature of the input? 4/7
 Cross-cultural differences
 Even though, in general, there are no major cross-
linguistic differences in language acquisition (in that
by three years normal children appear to complete the
foundations of language acquisition), some cross-
cultural differences exist.
 In a cross-language study of infants’ late babbling and
first words in French, English, Japanese and Swedish,
Japanese children produced their first words two to
three months later than children in the other cultures
 Section II
The nature of nurture
What is the nature of the input? 5/7
 Japanese and American mothers’ speech to their
children differ: American mothers provide object
labels more often in their interchange with
children,while Japanese mothers more often use
objects to engage the child in social routines.
 The differences in child language may thus reflect
differences in parental and cultural input.
 Section II
The nature of nurture
What is the nature of the input? 5/6
 Imitation
 Children may spontaneously repeat utterances they
hear, varying widely in the degree to which they do so.
 Imitation of language appears not to be a direct passive
rote copy of the input, but requires analysis and
reconstruction of the input
 Section II
The nature of nurture
What is the nature of the input? 6/6
Conclusions
 Children are not “data driven,” in the sense that they are
not trying to solve the problem by simply “looking very
closely at the data” and “picking up” knowledge from it.
 Rather, children are considering the input and imposing
structure on it.
 They are building a theory about the language to be
acquired.
 Input must fit their theory.
 Children are selective and reconstructive in use of input
data. (Video: How children acquire language)