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FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Whether it be Mama, Papa, or even kitty, we all recognize the first
word as a major milestone in the childs development.
We emphasize the childs first word, because of the enormous
importance that we place on language as a way of communicating with
other people After all the only species that uses language is the human
species.

Fortunately, the ability to acquire language is present in almost every
human child. Language development occurs in all children with normal
brain function, regardless of race, culture, or general intelligence.
Given the pervasiveness and inevitability of first language acquisition, we
often tend to take the process of language learning for granted. But
language is the most complex skill that a human being can master.
However as complex as it may be, children before the age of five
already know most of the intricate system that is the grammar of a
language.

There have been various proposals concerning the psychological
mechanisms involved in acquiring a language. Early theories of language
acquisition were heavily influenced by behaviorism, a school of
psychology prevalent in the 1950s. As the name implies, behaviorism
focused on peoples behaviors rather than on the mental systems
underlying these behaviors. Language was viewed as a kind of verbal
behavior, and it was proposed that children learn language through
imitation, reinforcement, analogy, and similar processes. B. F. Skinner,
one of the founders of behaviorist psychology, proposed a model of
language acquisition in his book Verbal Behavior (1957). Under this
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view, the child is born with general learning abilities but not with any
language-specific knowledge; linguistic behavior is molded (i.e.,
externally reinforced) by adult speakers (a child learning a language is
corrected when wrong and rewarded when right); and imitation plays
an important role (children are viewed as imitating others speech).

Two years later, in a devastating reply to Skinner entitled Review of
Verbal Behavior (1959), Noam Chomsky showed that language is a
complex cognitive system that could not be acquired by behaviorist
principles.
Chomsky claims that the linguistic data available to the child are less
than what is necessary to account for the richness and complexity of the
grammar they attain. This argument is known as the as the poverty of the
stimulus argument

Furthermore, that language development in children occurs
spontaneously and does not require conscious instruction or
reinforcement on the part of adults. Indeed, as many a parent has
discovered, the attempt to instruct children in language can produce
frustrating results:
(3)
Child: I taked a cookie.
Parent: Oh, you mean you took a cookie.
Child: Yes, thats right, I taked it.

Imitation, as well, seems to play little or no role in the childs mastery of
language. Indeed, children show enormous creativity in their use of
language. They utter words, phrases, and sentences they have never
heard before. Anyone who has studied child language, or has observed
children, can recount examples such as the following:
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(4)
a. Parent: Did you like the doctor?
b. Child: No, he took a needle and shotted my arm.
In (4b) the child (a 6-year-old girl) has spontaneously created a new verb
to shot from shot , a noun meaning hypodermic injection, (in this
context, one that makes perfect sense, and one that she could not have
learned by imitating adult speakers.

This is all not to say that imitation and instruction play no role whatsoever
in learning ones native language but the point, again, is that imitation
and overt teaching play at best a very minor role in the childs mastery of
grammar.

Chomsky argues that children are equipped with an innate blueprint for
language, a linguistically specific system of principles and parameters
which he refers to as Universal Grammar (UG) or as the Language
Acquisition Device (LAD). This UG aids the child in the task of
constructing a grammar for her language. This is referred to as the
innateness hypothesis and it receives its strongest support from the
poverty of the stimulus argument.

The innateness hypothesis provides an answer to the logical problem of
language acquisition, ie: What accounts for the ease, rapidity, and
uniformity of language acquisition in the face of impoverished data? The
answer is that children acquire a complex grammar quickly and easily
without any particular help beyond exposure to the language because
they do not start from scratch. UG provides them with a significant head
start. It helps them to extract the rules of their language and to avoid
many grammatical errors.
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Although the full nature of the principles of UG is not totally understood
there is little doubt that human languages conform to abstract universal
principles and that the human brain is specially equipped for acquisition
of human language grammars.

Because the child constructs his grammar according to an innate
blueprint, all children pass through a series of recognizable stages as
they master their native language. Although the age at which children will
pass through a given stage can vary significantly from child to child, the
particular sequence of stages seems to be the same for all children
acquiring a given language.

Babbling stage:
During the first year of life, children develop the sounds of their
language. They begin by producing and perceiving many sounds that do
not exist in their language input. In this stage, which begins at around 5
to 6 months, the child utters sounds and sound sequences (syllables
such as ba, ma, ga) that are as yet meaningless but nevertheless
recognizable as being more language like the earlier infant cries
Gradually, their productions and perceptions are fine-tuned to the
environment. Childrens late babbling has all the phonological
characteristics of the input language. 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.

The One-Word Stage
The babbling phase gradually gives way to the earliest recognizable
stage of language, often called the one-word stage. Some time after the
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age of one, the child begins to repeatedly use the same string of sounds
to mean the same thing. At this stage children realize that sounds are
related to meanings. They have produced their first true words. The age
of the child when this occurs varies and has nothing to do with the childs
intelligence. (It is reported that Einstein did not start to speak until he was
three or four years old.) These words are usually the names of familiar
people, animals, and objects in the childs environment (mama, dada,
kitty, doggie, ball, bottle, cup) and words indicating certain actions and
demands (More!, No!).

Childrens use of words sometimes shows an overextension or
underextension of reference. For example, a certain child might use the
word doggie to refer not just to dogs but to all common animals in the
environment (an example of overextension). In contrast, a child might
use the word doggie to refer not to all dogs (i.e., all animals that could
properly be referred to by the word doggie) but only to certain specific
dogs (an example of underextension)
This stage is the holophrastic stage or whole phrase stage because
these one-word utterances seem to convey a more complex message.
For example, when a child says down he may be making a request to
be put down, or he may be commenting on a toy that has fallen down
from the shelf.

The acquisition of first words is an amazing feat. How do infants discover
where one word begins and another leaves off? Speech is a continuous
stream broken only by breath pauses. Studies show that infants seem to
know what kind of cues to look for in the input that will help them to
isolate words. In the case of English-speaking children, younger infants
(seven-and-a-half months old) rely on frequency while older infants (nine
months old) attend to stress, allophonic and phonotactic information.
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allophone A predictable phonetic realization of a phoneme, e.g., [p] and
[p] are allophones of the phoneme /p/ in English.
phonotactics/phonotactic constraints Rules stating permissible
strings of phonemes; within a syllable, e.g., a word-initial nasal
consonant may be followed only by a vowel (in English).

Multiword Stages
At some point during the second year of life, the childs utterances
gradually become longer, and the one-word stage gives way to multiword
stages.
It is during this stage that children learning English begin to use word
order to indicate certain relationsfor example, Possessor followed by
Possessed, or Subject followed by Predicate (again see table 11.1). And
the childs language begins to reflect the distinction between sentence
types, such as negative sentences, imperatives, and questions.
As the length of the childs utterances increases beyond the two-word
stage, the major grammatical constructions of the native language begin
to develop in more detail. Two constructions of English that have been
studied from the point of view of their development are negative
sentences and questions.