Ling 101 Introduction to Linguistics

Ling 101 Introduction to Linguistics

Chapter 8: Language Acquisition

I. Some General Ideas

* Human language is unique and species specific.

* Children are not born with a mind that is like a blank slate, but we are prewired to learn language.

* Children do not start with a fully formed grammar or with knowledge of social and communicative intercourse.

* Linguistic competence develops by stages. Observations of children in different language areas of the world reveal that the stages are similar possibly universal.

* Some of the stages last for a short time; others remain longer.

II. Basic Issues:

The two major questions that are basic to the study of first language acquisition are

1) What do children do when they acquire their first language?

: Stages of language development

This is simply a data question: what are the facts about children?s linguistic behavior? This can be answered by careful observation and testing of children at different stages of acquisition. The data is obtained by watching children in a natural setting (while at play, etc) and recording their linguistic behavior. Linguists may use various experiments to test children?s linguistic skills in very controlled and specific ways.

2) What can that information tell about how human language works?

: different theories of language acquisition will attempt to explain how human language works.

- Innateness Hypothesis

- Imitation Theory

- Reinforcement Theory

- Critical Age Hypothesis

III. What a child does and does not do when acquiring a language

* Children do not learn a language by storing all the words and sentences.

* Children learn to understand and produce novel sentences.

* Children must learn the "rules" to use their language creatively.

* No one teaches them these rules.

* Children also learn communicative competence.

IV. Learning Styles

C. E. (Concrete Experience)

R. O. (Reflective Observer)

A. C. (Abstract Conceptualizer)

A. E. (Active Experience)

* Filed Dependent

e.g., study directions before working on something (whole --> Part)

Field Independent: part --> whole

V. Three Ego States (Eric Berne, M.D.)

* Adult (e.g., don?t like to make mistakes in public)

* Parental (inhibitive/prohibitive)

* Child (careless about making mistakes in public)

VI. What infants (1-10 months) CAN and CANNOT do

* Infants

o ignore the nonlinguistic aspects of the speech signal, i.e. the difference in physical sound

o ignore the difference in pitch

o ignore own/other voice

o ignore the difference in speed of speech production ignore the intensity and the voice quality (they ignore a different physical sound when produced by male, female, or child).

* Infants

* respond to phonetic contrast found in some human language even when these differences are not phonemic in the language spoken in the baby?s home, e.g. [p] vs. [b] / [r] vs. [l] ( Japanese infants) aspirated stops vs. unaspirated stops

* can discriminate between sounds that are phonemic in other languages and nonexistent in the language of their parents. e.g. Hindi: retroflex [t] and alveolar [t] attend to the differences in manner and place of articulation

* categorize speech sounds in terms of features (perceptually/productively)

Perception comes before production!

e.g., even when children hear the errors when their parent say ?poon? for ?spoon?, or ?tuck? for ?truck, they still produce the words as ?poon? or ?tuck?. ( Or ?duck? for ?tuck?/ ?duck? for ?guck? pp. 333-334)

* do not merge the speech sound when they hear them (do not hear 'hello' as 'hello' but as h-e-l-o)

* produce only what relevant to their native language

VII. Stages of language development

1. The first sounds (from birth)

* Responses to stimuli

* "Prewired" mind

- Babies ignore the nonlinguistic aspects of the speech signal. They seem to be born with the ability to perceive just those sounds what are phonemic in some languages.

* Universal listener

- They can discriminate between sounds that are phonemic in other languages as well as their native language. Infants are universal listeners, while adults have difficulty in discriminating nonnative contrasts. For example, Japanese infants can distinguish between [r] and [l] while their parents cannot.

- They can learn any language to which they are exposed.

* Experiments: sucking rate, looking time, and head turn paradigm

- The sucking rate will decrease when the same stimuli are presented over and over again, and the sucking rate will increase when stimuli(visual or auditory) are varied.

- Infants turn their head toward a loud speaker when the stimuli are varied. They also look at the speaker or stimuli longer when the stimuli are varied than they do when the stimuli are not varied.

2. Babbling (6 mths - 1;0)

* Development