School of Humanities HET 524 Child Language Acquisition (CLA)

Prepared by: Mohamad Arshad Sasikala Rosy Avon Irutayam Ooi Yee Min Nadia Roselilyana

Topics
1) STAGES OF ACQUISITION Phonology Semantics Morphology Syntax 3) OTHER THEORIES Critical Period Hypothesis Interaction Hypothesis

2) SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT IN CLA Behaviourist Innatist/ mentalist Cognitivist Social Interactionist Connectionist

4) Q & A STAGES OF ACQ. THEORIES FERAL CHILD

Language acquisition
1. The process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, to produce and use

words to communicate.
2. Language acquisition studies infants' acquisition of their native language (CLA). 3. L2 acquisition which deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages (SLA).

1) Phonological Development 0-6 months has the ability to distinguish certain speech sounds but not meaningful words
Speech sounds Meaningful words

Experiment: Infants presented with a series of identical syllable [ba] followed by the syllable [pa]

Experiment: Children are presented with two toy animals and are asked to respond to sentences e.g bok and pok Results: Results: A change in the childrens sucking Have very little success rate differentiating the command

Babbling
Begins at about 6 months of age Develop the articulatory movement Infants start to selectively use the phonemes. It starts using words with repetitive sounds like bababa ,dadada, mama. Few weeks: cooing and gurgling, playing with sounds. Their abilities are constrained by physiological limitations. 4 months: distinguish between [p] and [b], 4-6 months: children babble, putting together vowels and consonants. (Unconscious process. They experiment with their articulation 7-10 months: starts repeated babbling. 10-12 months: children produce a variety of speech sounds.

The Developmental Order

Vowels are generally acquired before consonants Stops tend to be acquired before other consonants Place of articulation: 1. Labials ([p], [b], [m])

2. Alveolar ([t], [d], [n], [s])

3. Velars ([k], [g]) 4. Alveopalatals ([], [] []) 5. Dentals ([], [])

Early Phonetic Processes

Syllable simplification: Deletion of certain sounds in order to simplify syllable structure E.g. reduction of consonants clusters stop [tap] try [taj] from [fm] Substitution: Replacement of one sound by an alternative that is easier to articulate E.g. substitution in early speech sing [tI] - change s-t ship [sIp] change - s Assimilation: Modification of one or more feature of a segment under the influence of neighbouring sounds tell [dl]

2) Syntactical Development a) 1 year old: Single word

Refers to what they can see, hear or feel

Interaction of the brain innate program and the infants exp. with
hearing sound (Juszyck & Hohne, 1997) (Pinker, 1994): Half of infants single word refers to object (milk, cookie, doll) Other half refer to actions, routines or motions (eat, hot, etc)

The single word signify the infant longer thought

Eg: Milk Im hungry/ I want to eat

b) 2 years old: two-word combi.

Childs vocab. range grows (approximately 50 words) Hints about what the child is communicating (eg: daddy shirt,

me play).
Combining words & changing orders signify the learning of grammar rules (syntax). Responsive parents (contact & awareness) can enhance child vocab range (Tamis-Lemonda, 2001).

3 3.5 years: begins to use past tense, although not always in the right form. me fell down, or me go home shows your child is beginning to understand the concepts of how and when. (Bowen, 1973) possessive forms: such as "girls" and "boys" when referring to objects that belong to someone else. 4 years: Articles (a, and, the) to sentences. regular past-tense combinations such as she jumped and questions such as are you going? in the right order. Mark the beginning of using the S-V-O order.

3) Morphological Development By age 24 months: Consistent word order is in place (e.g I want milk) Expressive language contains few grammatical markers and speech is telegraphic By age 30 months: -ing and plural /s/ begin emerging Use of negatives between subject and verb (e.g. Mommy no go) appears Rising intonation is used to indicate a question. There are three types of structures: word + intonation, What + noun phrase + (doing) (e.g.What doggie (doing)?) and where + noun phrase + (going) (e.g.Where ball?)

By age 36 months: Overgeneralization of past-tense verb forms is in place (e.g. runned) Present tense auxiliaries have emerged (e.g. Daddy is eating; Bunny

does hop)
By age 42 months: Auxiliary verbs are being ordered correctly in questions and negatives (e.g. What is he doing? versus What he is doing?) Grammatical markers have emerged including: possessive s,

articles a, the, and irregular past tense (e.g. Mommys shoe,

I see a kitten.)

By age 48 months: A variety of early complex sentence types emerge including compound sentences (e.g. My shirt is blue and green), full

prepositional clauses in sentences (e.g. I put away the toys in

the toy box), and simple infinitives (I want to draw). By age 48-60 months: Later developing morphemes are acquired, including Be verbs, regular past, and third person /s/ (e.g. He is my friend, Mommy

pulled the wagon, Danny hits the ball.

A child with morphology deficits

Demonstrate inconsistent or incorrect word order when speaking. Use a limited number of grammatical markers (e.g. ing, a, the, possessive s, be verbs). Have difficulty understanding and using past, present and future verb tenses. Show limited understanding of plural forms.

4) Semantic Development

Childs ability to make use of contextual clues to draw

inferences about the category and meaning of new words (OGrady et al. 1996: 455)

By 18 months, the average child has a vocabulary of fifty words or more (OGrady et al. 1996: 454)

A. The Acquisition of Word Meaning

1. Overextension The meaning of the childs word is more general or inclusive than adults (OGrady et al. 1996). Example, the word ball.

2. Underextension Underextension errors often reflect childrens propensity to focus on prototypical or core members of a category (OGrady et al.

1996 : 456).
Example, the word kitty B. Spatial and Dimensional Terms Spatial words (mostly prepositions) differ from each other in terms of their semantic complexity although they are similar in

terms of syntax (OGrady et al. 1996).

Dimensional terms are also acquired in a relatively fixed order, depending on their generality (OGrady et al. 1996:457).

C. The Interpretation of Sentence Structure 1. Thematic Roles Children are able to associate thematic roles with particular

structural positions during early stages of acquisition (OGrady

et al. 1996). They could interpret simple active sentences correctly than passive sentences (OGrady et al. 1996) Example:

Active Sentence
Passive Sentence

: The truck bumped the car.

: The car was bumped by the truck.

2. Pronominals and Reflexives Children are able to interpret reflexives correctly before pronominals (OGrady et al. 1996: 460)

Example:
i. ii. Sam said that Gary slapped himself on the wrist. Sam said that Gary slapped him on the wrist.

1) Behaviourist
a) Classical conditioning (Pavlov, 1903): Experiment on dogs. The idea is to examine their salivary response. He rang a bell just before serving the food. At first the dogs did not salivate until the food is served. However, when the bell was rung at repeated feedings, the sound of bell alone caused the dogs to salivate.

Eg: A study on an infant with the word bottle while being fed

b) Instrumental or Operant Conditioning (Skinner):

Expand Watsons basic stimulus-response model. Skinners model was based on the premise that effective language behaviour consists of producing responses

(behaviours) to the correct stimuli (situation). When a response is followed by a reinforcement (reward) then it is conditioned to occur again. Reinforcement and punishment are the core ideas of operant conditioning: Eg: Water

Operant conditioning

c) Social Learning Learning takes place when the child observes and imitate others.

Basic principle involves that children need not be rewarded

in order to acquire a behaviour/ language.

2) Innatist/Mentalist Theory
Rely heavily on theories of mind and on special abstract mental mechanism such as Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

(Chomsky, 1982).
It is possible for children to: a. Attend to the language that adults around them speak. b. Make hypotheses about how it works. c. Derive an appropriate grammar.

 Chomsky (1975) defines that all possible human language are

considered innate and constitute the concept known as Universal Grammar (UG). It specifies basic linguistic possibilities where we can hypothesize certain initial states and paths toward language

competence (Gleason & Ratner 1998).

3) Cognitivist
Jean Piaget (1980) Main Argument: Children cannot be "given" information which

they immediately understand and use.

They "construct" their own knowledge through experience (schema/ mental model).
Before children can use linguistic structures, they need first to have developed the conceptual ability to make relative judgments.

Focuses on exploring the links between the stages of cognitive

development and language skills.

Assimilation A child may change or alter what (s)he perceives in the outside world in order to fit the internal world (overgeneralisation).

Accommodation
Occurs when a child must alter the ideas in his head in order to "fit the realities of outside world (a change in schema). Eg: A child learns his father is called Daddy, so he calls other males ( e.g. the mailman) Daddy (assimilation) He is quickly told that the other man is not Daddy. Again, the schema for Daddy is modified (accommodation)

4) Social Interactionist
Language development emphasizing the role of social interaction between the developing child and linguistically

knowledgeable adults (Vygotsky & Halliday).

Emphasizes the role of feedback & reinforcement in language acquisition. Child's linguistic growth stems from modeling of and interaction with parents and other adults (positive instructive correction) Similar to behaviourist but also involves Interdependence of cognitive & language developments. Adults are considered as experts.

Zone of proximal development (ZPD) Proposed by Vygotsky Proximal ideal level of language Created through interaction of a child with more knowledgeable others. The feedback must be comprehensible enough. Motherese, foreigner talk, teacher talk (linguistic simplification) gesturing, paraphrasing, slower speech rate, ungrammatical Allow children to: Learn new terms & grammatical structures Forming concepts beyond their own language capabilities Faster progress

5) Connectionist/Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) Compares the brain to a computer system Stresses neural networks the ability to make

connections/associations between various related concepts A child develops such connections over through exposure to the

forms of the language associated with external events.

Assumes that sufficient exposure will lead to the establishment of neural networks. McClelland successfully modeled in a computer how a child might acquire simple past tenses. The processor(child or machine) simply tallies the input frequencies of phonological characteristics.

Connectionist Model Theory Example: Showed, mowed, and towed imply that the statistical likelihood of

the past tense of the word glow to be glowed.

Just like a computer simulation, actual children make overgeneralization errors, eg: irregular past (maked/ made & goed/ went). The wider array of irregular verb forms that children are exposed

to, the less errors they make.

Critical Period Hypothesis

(Lennerberg, 1967) The ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age. The there is an ideal time window to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment After that, further language acquisition becomes much more difficult

and effortful.
First few years of life is the crucial time in which an individual can acquire a L1 if presented with adequate stimuli.

If language input doesn't occur until after this time, the individual will
never achieve a full command of language especially grammatical systems.

Interaction Hypothesis
(Long, 1996)
Modified interaction is the necessary mechanism for language acquisition/ learning (CLA/SLA) Example: Motherese, foreigner or teacher talk Parents/ native speakers consistently modify their speech to sustain

conversation.
Importance of corrective feedback during interaction. Negotiating for meaning (eg: I dont understand, mom.. What does

it mean?
Children/ learners need an opportunity to interact with other speakers not necessarily linguistic simplification .

1. What is the difference between Behaviorists and Innatist Theory ? 2. How might you determine what 2-4 , and 8 year old children

think the word boat means?

3. Feral Child (Genie)

Answers
Question 2: 2 4 year old children would think the word boat is used for any object which has the similar shape as the boat (OGrady et al. 1996).

8 year old children would know the difference of the word

boat, yacht and ship (OGrady et al. 1996).

Discussion
Genie (Pseudonym):
A child who suffered from severe abuse & and social isolation (in a

small dark underground room

she was discovered at the age of 13. Only able to bark and howl like a dog

Many researchers (psychologists & linguists) conducted a series of

observations and tests to study many aspects of human development including language acquisition skills and language development. Tested and no mental retardation.

 She began acquiring vocabulary within 2 months of entering the hospital Her first words included wider variety of concepts than that

typically found early in language

He syntactic development was slow She strings together content words with little grammatical structure Examples:

I like hear music ice cream truck (Curtiss, 1981)

Think about Mama love Genie (Curtiss, 1981)

Cont.
After several investigations, many questions regarding Genies
childhood and progress were unresolved. Undermine Chomsky Innateness Idea and Social Interactionist Suffered from past trauma selective mutism

 Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. London: George Allen
& Unwin. Dulay, H., & Burt, M. (1974). Natural sequences in child second language

acquisition. Language Learning, 24, 3753.

Lakshmanan, U. (1994). Universal grammar in child second language acquisition: Null subjects and morphological uniformity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Carlisle, J. F. (2003). Morphology matters in learning to read:A commentary. Reading Psychology, 24, 291332. Gleason and Ratner (1998) Psycholinguistics. OGrady et al. (1996) Contemporary Linguistics Analysis : An Introduction. Pearson Canada Inc., Toronto, Ontario http://www.livestrong.com/article/508501-syntactic-development-in-children/