Stages of L 1st Acquisition
By/ Brwa R. Sharif
13/ April/ 2013
The basic
requirements for language acquisition:
1 - Exposure
It is the
first basic requirement for language acquisition. If we take a child born of
Moroccan parents and put him in another social environment, such as Italy, he
will speak the language spoken there (i.e. Italian) not Moroccan Arabic. This
is called cultural transmission, not genetic transmission. If the child were
not exposed to a human language, “the language faculty” (that is the ability to
acquire language) with which he is born, cannot be activated.
2 - Physical
Fitness
There is no
language output if language faculty was not activated. This leads us to say
that language acquisition requires both the auditory and the acoustic input.
3 - The
Critical Age
The critical
age, called Puberty, occurs in the area where language is. Language acquisition
has to be activated before this age. If the language faculty is not activated
on time that is before this age language acquisition will certainly fail.
Stages of L 1st
Acquisition:
1 - Pre-
Linguistic Period:
a. Cooing
Children learn to recognize the
distinctive sounds, the phonemes of the language they hear from birth long
before they are able to pronounce them. Infants can distinguish between /p/ and
/b/ at three or four months (in an experiment with /ba/ played vs. /pa/, a two
month infant showed awareness of the change). But children do not learn how to
use these sounds until much later-- around the second year or later--as shown
by the experiment with /pok/ and /bok/.
Between six and eight weeks the
first cooing sounds are produced, generally when the baby is in a settled
state. These sounds develop alongside crying, gradually becoming more frequent
and more varied, as the child responds to the mother’s smiles and speech. They
are quieter, lower pitched, and more musical than crying, usually consisting of
a short, vowel-like sound preceded by a consonant-like sound made towards the
back of the mouth many have nasal quality.
b. Vocal
play:
During cooing stage there is a
great deal of lip movement and tongue thrusting, which it is thought may be a
form of imitation. This leads between twenty and thirty weeks, to vocal play.
The sounds of vocal play are much steadier and longer than those of cooing.
Most segments last over one second, and consist of consonant + vowel-like
sequences that are frequently repeated. They are usually at a high pitch level,
and involve wide glides from high to low. (Crystal)
c. Babbling
stage:
Children around the sixth to the ninth month
begin to differentiate between the sounds and select the sounds that exist in
their environment. This stage is essential to proper language acquisition
because it familiarizes children with the sounds of their voices, allowing them
to gain control over their vocalizations, and it is characterized by
indiscriminate utterance of speech sounds. This stage is essential to proper
language acquisition because it familiarizes children with the sounds of their
voices, allowing them to gain control over their vocalizations.
The fact that all children
(including the congenitally deaf) go through a babbling stage, regardless of
language and culture, and make very similar kinds of sounds at this time
suggests that humans are biologically predisposed to go through this phase. (Akmajian,
Demers, Farmer, & Harnish, 1997)
Babbling is a smaller set of
sounds is used with greater frequency and stability, to produce the [bababa]
and other sequences known as reduplicated babbling. (Crystal, 2007)
Reduplicative babbling in child language
acquisition
During
the period 6 to 11 months after birth, all typically developing infants go
through a stage of reduplicated or canonical babbling (Stark 198, Oller, 1980
as cited in Wikipedia). Canonical babbling is characterized by repetition of
identical or nearly identical consonant-vowel combinations, such as 'nanana' or
'didididi'. It appears as a progression of language development as infants
experiment with their vocal apparatus and home in on the sounds used in their
native language. Canonical/reduplicated babbling also appears at a time when
general rhythmic behavior, such as rhythmic hand movements and rhythmic
kicking, appear. Canonical babbling is distinguished from earlier syllabic and
vocal play, which has less structure.
During babbling stage, the brain
seems to be controlling the development of babbling and early speech in a
similar way, so that a set of well-practiced sounds is available for use at
time when children become intellectually capable of using sound for the
communication of meaning. (Crystal, 2007)
The linguistic period:
a. One word (holophrastic) stage.
At some point in the late part of
the first year of life or the early part of the second year, the child begins
using recognizable words of the native language. These words are usually the
names of familiar people, animals, and objects in the child’s environment
(mama, dada, kitty, doggie, ball, bottle, cup) and words indicating certain
actions and demands (More, No). In this stage a certain child might use the word
(doggie) to refer not just to dogs but to all common animals in the environment
(overextension). In contrast, a child might use the word (doggie) to refer not
to all dogs but only to certain specific dogs (underextension). (Akmajian, Demers, Farmer, & Harnish, 1997)
A particular sound often used in a
child’s environment (such as in the name of a sibling or a pet) can cause that
sound to be used much earlier than it otherwise might. Some children have favorite
sounds, which they introduce into many words, whether the sound is in the adult
version or not. Others avoid sounds for example, persistently dropping certain
consonants at the ends of words. Several studies showed the way children change
the sounds of the language when they attempt to use them:
They tend to replace fricative
consonants by stops: see → [ti:]
They tend to replace velar
consonants by alveolar ones: gone → [don]
They avoid consonant clusters: sky
→ [kaI]
They tend to omit consonants at
the ends of words: hat → [ha]
They often drop unstressed
syllables: banana → [nana] (Crystal, 2007)
Overextension Vs underextension:
During one word stage another
phenomenon usually occurs which is overextension or underextension. A certain
child might use the word doggie to refer not just to dogs but to all common
animals in the environment (overextension). In contrast, a child might use the
word doggie to refer not to all dogs (all animals that could properly be
referred to by the word doggie) but only to certain specific dogs
(underextension). (Akmajian, Demers, Farmer, & Harnish, 1997)
Deaf babies whose parents use sign
language begin making their first word/gestures around eight months. This stage
is characterized by the production of actual speech signs. Often the words are
simplified: "du" for duck, "ba" for bottle. When the child
has acquired about 50 words he develops regular pronunciation patterns.
b.
The Two-Word Utterances:
This stage is around 18-24 months; babies begin to use
"mini-sentences" with simple semantic relations. They produce two- word utterances which can show different
combination of word order. In this stage, the words lack morphological and
syntactic markers but we can notice that there is a word order. And it
is the beginning of real communication, and may resemble early proto-languages,
such as give
milk as a request for a drink and daddy home to observe that the
father has returned.
During
second year, as simple sentences develop, a wider range of attitudes is
expressed, and prosody begins to signal differences in emphasis. At this point,
it becomes possible to distinguish such general sentences as Daddy gone
from the contrastive Daddy gone (not someone else).
Generally in this stage, children who are asked to repeat sentences
may simply leave out the determiners, modals and verbal auxiliaries, verbal
inflections, etc., and often pronouns as well. The same pattern can be seen in
their own spontaneous utterances.
c. Telegraphic
Stage:
Telegraphic stage or early multiword stage (better multi-morpheme), "Telegraphic"
sentence structures of lexical rather than functional or grammatical
morphemes appear. It nearly
starts from the second year of babies’ birth. And they quickly progress
to real grammar in short sentences, correctly placing words in proper order as
in mommy
call doggie - though this is not entirely correct, it shows an
understanding of English sentence structure, the word forms are beginning to vary, inflectional
morphemes begin to appear, and the use of simple prepositions become apparent. The child pronunciation is closer to the adult one.
Later development:
All children, no matter how rapid or
how pedestrian their rate of acquisition, proceed systematically through the
same learning stages for any particular linguistic structure.
How do children acquire WH
questions?
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. An early
example of this is found in the work of Brown’s colleagues, Edward Klima and
Ursula Bellugi, who proved that children learning English produce two different
types of WH questions before they eventually come up with the correct adult
version. They identified three distinct stages:
a. Use of WH word but no auxiliary
verb employed.
What Daddy doing?
Why you laughing?
Where Mommy go?
b. Use of WH word and auxiliary verb
after subject.
Where she will go?
Why doggy can’t see?
Why you don’t know?
c. Use of WH word and auxiliary verb
before subject.
Where will she go?
Why can’t doggy see?
Why don’t you know?
How do children acquire yes/no question?
According to Brown’s early fieldwork
there are 3 different stages of using yes/no questions:
a. Use of NO at the start of the
sentence.
No the sun shining.
No Mary do it.
b. Use of NO inside the sentence but
no auxiliary or BE verb.
There no rabbits.
I no taste it.
c. Use of NOT with appropriate abbreviation
of auxiliary or BE.
Penny didn’t laugh.
It’s not raining. (Scovel, 2009)
References:
Akmajian, A., Demers, R. A., Farmer, A. K.,
& Harnish, R. M. (1997). Linguistics: An introduction to language and communication
(4th ed.). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Asilla, B. (2008, October). Language
Acquisition Process. Retrieved March 10, 2013, from
www.translationdirectory.com:
http://www.translationdirectory.com/articles/article1233.htm
Crystal, D. (2007). How language works.
London: Penguin group.
First Language Acquisition. (n.d.). Retrieved March 10, 2013, from
pandora.cii.wwu.edu:
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test4materials/ChildLangAcquisition.htm
Language acquisition. (n.d.). Retrieved March 10, 2013, from
www.thinkquest.org: http://library.thinkquest.org/C004367/la3.shtml
Liberman, M. (n.d.). Stages of language
acquisition in children. Retrieved March 10, 2013, from ling.upenn.edu:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/ling001/acquisition.html
Reduplication. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#Reduplicative_babbling_in_child_language_acquisition
Scovel, T. (2009). Psycholinguistics.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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