First language development

Prof. Abdulrahman Alabdan

 ‫بسم هللا الرحمن الرحيم‬
‫‪( ‬الرحمن ‪.‬علم القرآن‪ .‬خلق اإلنسان ‪.‬علمه البيان ) {‪ 1:4‬الرحمن}‬
‫صبِيّا ً){‪29‬مريم}‬ ‫ان فِي ا ْل َم ْه ِد َ‬ ‫ف نُ َكلِّ ُم َمن َك َ‬‫شا َرتْ إِلَ ْي ِه قَالُو(ا َك ْي َ‬‫‪ ( ‬فَأ َ َ‬
‫‪ ( ‬وورث سليمان داود‪ ،‬وقال يا أيها الناس علمنا منطق الطير‬
‫وأوتينا من كل شيء‪ ،‬إن هذا له(و الفضل المبين)‪{ ‬سورة النمل‪}16:‬‬
‫ش َع ِظي ٌم ‪.‬‬ ‫ش ْيءٍ َولَ َها َع ْر ٌ‬ ‫‪ ( ‬إِنِّي َو( َجدتُّ ا ْم َرأَةً تَ ْملِ ُكهُ ْم َوأُوتِيَتْ ِمنْ ُك ِّل َ‬
‫ش ْيطَ ُ‬
‫ان‬ ‫ون هَّللا ِ َو َزيَّ َن لَ ُه( ْم ال َّ‬
‫س ِمنْ ُد ِ‬ ‫ش ْم ِ‬ ‫ون لِل َّ‬
‫س ُج ُد َ‬ ‫َو َج ْدتُ َها َوقَ ْو َم َها يَ ْ‬
‫س ُج ُدوا هَّلِل ِ الَّ ِذي‬ ‫ون ‪ .‬أَالَّ يَ ْ‬‫سبِي ِل فَ ُه ْم ال يَ ْهتَ ُد َ‬ ‫ص َّدهُ ْم َعنْ ال َّ‬ ‫أَ ْع َمالَ ُه ْم فَ َ‬
‫ون َو َما تُ ْعلِنُ َ‬
‫ون ‪.‬‬ ‫ض َويَ ْعلَ ُم َما تُ ْخفُ َ‬ ‫ت َواألَ ْر ِ‬ ‫س َم َوا ِ‬‫يُ ْخ ِر ُج ا ْل َخ ْبءَ فِي ال َّ‬
‫يم) {لنمل‪} 23-22:‬‬ ‫ش ا ْل َع ِظ ِ‬
‫هَّللا ُ ال إِلَهَ إِالَّ ُه َو( َر ُّب ا ْل َع ْر ِ‬
‫سلَ ْي َم ُ‬
‫ان‬ ‫سا ِكنَ ُك ْم اَل يَ ْح ِط َمنَّ ُك ْم ُ‬‫‪ ..( ‬قَالَتْ نَ ْملَةٌ يَا أَ ُّي َها النَّ ْم ُل اد ُْخلُوا َم َ‬
‫ون ‪{ )...‬لنمل‪}17:‬‬ ‫ش ُع ُر َ‬‫َو ُجنُو ُدهُ َوهُ ْم اَل يَ ْ‬
 The issue of language acquisition dates back to at least the
7th century B.C., when the Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus
had two infants brought up in complete isolation in an
attempt to determine the type of language they would learn
on their own. The Pharaoh had hoped that the children's
utterances would provide some clues about the origin of
language.

 The story is that the children were brought up by an old

shepherd couple, who were instructed not to speak to them
. After some years, the children were heard to utter bekos,
and the Pharaoh concluded that the original language of
human kind was Phrygian, since the Phrygian word for
'bread' is bekos.

 it is not surprising that children raised in an environment of

sheep cries would produce the syllable be.
PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
 From birth, children are exposed to a variety
of noises in their environment.
 Before they can begin to acquire language,

they must first separate non- speech noises

from speech sounds.
 The rudiments of this ability seem to be

present at birth, since even newborns respond

differently to human voices than to other
sounds.
 Within 2 months of birth, infants can even

recognize their mother's voice.

 Heart Rate

Typical set up:

 Mother or Father asked to read story, talk to, or
other language task for 3-4 weeks in 3rd trimester
 Mother comes to lab and is hooked up to fetal
heart rate monitor
 Same and different stories are played to baby and
measure heart rate
Heart Rate
. . . Basic findings
 Recognition of mother’s voice
 Recognition of prose passage before birth
 Recognition of native language after birth
 Recognition of difference between
male/female voices
High Amplitude Sucking

l
 From about one month, children exhibit the
ability to distinguish among certain speech
sounds.
 In one experiment, infants were presented with

a series of identical syllables consisting of the

string [ba]. These were followed by an
occurrence of the syllable [pa].
 A change in the children's sucking rate (the

normal reaction to a new stimulus) indicated

that they perceived the difference between the
two syllables and, therefore, were able to
distinguish between [p] and [b].
 Despite this early sensitivity to distinctions among
speech sounds, the ability to distinguish between
meaningful words is not yet present.

 The emergence of this ability has been examined in

a task in which children are presented with two toy
animals named bok and pok and are asked to
respond to sentences such as Show me pok.

 To respond correctly, children must not only hear

the difference between [p] and [b] but also
recognize that this difference is linguistically
significant-that it is used to distinguish between
words in their language. Children under 18 months
have little success in this type of task.
Babbling
 Even before children master the phonemic
contrasts of their language, they begin to
develop the articulatory movements needed to
produce these distinctions in speech.
 The emergence of articulatory skills begins
around 3 or 4 months of age, when children
start to produce cooing and babbling sounds.
 The table in the next slide illustrates that there
are similarities in the babbling produced by
children from different linguistic communities
 The data in the table come from a study of children acquiring Hindi,
Japanese, English, Arabic, Mayan, and Luo.) Such cross-linguistic
similarities suggest that early babbling is independent of the particular
language to which children are exposed.
 In fact, even deaf children babble, although their articulatory activity is
some- what less varied than that of hearing children. Moreover, it is
known that children who for medical reasons are unable to babble can
later develop normal pronunciation.
 All of this suggests that babbling precedes but is not actually
part of the language acquisition process.
The Developmental Order
 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.

 By the time children have acquired fifty words or so, they

begin to adopt fairly regular patterns of pronunciation.

 Language acquisition researchers have tried to determine

the order in which speech sounds are mastered in
production and perception. Although this work has been
difficult , some general trends seem to exist:
1) As a group, vowels are acquired before
consonants (by age three).
2) Stops tend to be acquired before other consonants.
3) In terms of place of articulation, labials are acquired
first, followed, with some variation, by velars,
alveolars, and alveopalatals. Interdentals (such as [θ]
and [ð]) are acquired last.
4) 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.
5) All other things being equal, a sound that occurs in
many different words will be acquired before a sound
(like [ð] in English) that occurs in relatively few words.
 By age two, the average English-speaking child can
produce the following inventory of consonant phonemes

 By age four , this inventory becomes lager and

includes the following sound
 Early Phonetic Processes
 The phonetic processes responsible for the speech patterns of young
language learners are not arbitrary.

 For the most part, these processes simplify phonological structure by

creating sound patterns that can be articulated with a minimum of
difficulty. Such patterns are typified by syllables consisting of a consonant
and a vowel.
I.Substitution One of the most widespread phonetic processes in child
language involves substitution-the systematic replacement of one sound
by another. Common substitution processes include

1. Stopping: the replacement of a fricative by a corresponding stop;

2. Fronting: the moving forward of a sound's place of articulation;
3. Gliding: the replacement of a liquid by a glide;
4. Denasalization: the replacement of a nasal stop by a nonnasal
counterpart. These processes are illustrated with the help of English
examples in the next slide.
II. Syllable Simplification : A second type of process in children's
speech involves the systematic deletion of certain sounds resulting in
simpler syllable structure. In the data below typical of the speech of
two- and three-year-old children, consonant clusters have been
reduced by deleting one or more segments.

 In all of these patterns, the weaker segment in the cluster is deleted.

Thus, stops are retained over all other consonants, and fricatives are
retained over liquids
 Another common deletion process in two-year-old 
children involves the elimination of final consonants.
Initial consonants, in contrast, are typically retained if
.they precede a vowel
 
 

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 pattern that is universally favored by children and
.that is the most widely found pattern in language
III.
Assimilation : is the modification of one or more features of a
phoneme under
the influence of neighboring sounds.

 In the following examples, initial consonants have been voiced

in anticipation of the following vowel
tell [dɛl] ; push [bʊs] ; soup [zuwp] ; pig [bɪg]

 Inthe next set of examples, a word-final consonant is devoiced

in apparent anticipation of the silence following the end of an
utterance.
have  [hæf] ; big  [bɪg] ; egg   [ɛk] , bed   [bɛt] .

 Assimilationis also observed in children's tendency to maintain

the same place of articulation for all of the vowels or consonants
in a word. This can lead to the pronunciation of doggy as [gagij]
(with two velar stops) or as [dodij] (with two alveolar stops).
 Production versus Perception
 Allof the examples presented in the previous
section involve production. An important
question that arises at this point is whether
children can perceive phonemic contrasts that
they cannot yet make.
 According to one study, a child who would not

produce a distinction in his own speech between

mouse and mouth, cart and card, or jug and duck
was, nonetheless, able to point to pictures of the
correct objects in a comprehension task. This
suggests that this child's ability to perceive the
phonemic contrasts in question exceeded his
ability to produce them.
Production versus Perception
 Another indication that children's perceptual abilities
are more advanced than their articulatory skills comes
from their reaction to adult speech that fails to respect
the normal phonemic contrasts. The following report
describes one such incident:
 One of us, for instance, spoke to a child who called his

inflated plastic
fish a ʃis, In imitation of the child's pronunciation, the
observer said:
"This is your ʃis ?" "No," said the child, "my ʃis," He
continued to reject the adult's imitation until he was
told, "That is your fish.“ "Yes," he said, "my ʃis,"
 What does this suggest?
 MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

Sequence of Morphological Development

As is the case with the sound pattern of language, the details of
morphological structure emerge over a period of several years.
 Initially, the words of English-speaking children seem to lack any

internal morphological structure. Affixes are entirely absent and

most words consist of a single root morpheme. Gradually,
inflectional and derivational morphemes appear, marking an
increased capacity for word formation.
In a language such as English, which has many examples of

irregular inflection (men as the plural of man, ran as the past of

run), children often begin by simply memorizing forms on a case-
by-case basis without regard for general patterns or rules.
 .
Thus, they may initially produce the correct plural form for man and the
correct past tense for come.
As they subsequently observe the generality of -s as a plural marker and -ed

as a past tense marker around the age of two years and six months , they
may incorrectly add these suffixes to the irregular forms-producing words
such as *mans and *runned. (Errors resulting from overgeneralizations.)

Fora period of several months, the over generalized forms

and their correct counterparts may co-occur in children's
speech. Even occasional mixed forms such as felled, a blend
of fell and falled, may be used before children come to
distinguish between inflected forms that follow a general rule
and those that must be treated as exceptions.
◦The development of affixes
◦Stage 1: case-by-case learning .
Stage 2: overuse of general rule.
◦Stage 3: learning of exceptions to the general rule .
Stage 4: production of adult forms .
The development of bound morphemes and non-
lexical categories (such as determiners and
auxiliaries) in English takes place in an orderly
sequence with relatively little variation from child to
child. In a pioneering study of this phenomenon, the
more or less invariant developmental sequence in was
found in three children between the ages of twenty
and thirty-six months.
 Typical developmental sequence for English-speaking
children
1)- ing
2)plural-s
3)possessive -'s
4)the, a
5)past tense - ed
6)third person singular -s
7)auxiliary be
What determines the order of acquisition of minor
lexical categories and bound morphemes?
1)Occurrence of the morpheme in utterance-final position. Children
show a greater tendency to notice and remember elements that
occur at the end of the utterance than those found in any other
position. All other things being equal, this favors the learning of
suffixes over prefixes.
2) Syllabicity. Children seem to take greater notice of morphemes
such as –ing and on, which constitute syllables, than the plural or
possessive suffix -s, which is a single consonant.
3) A straightforward relation between form and meaning. Whereas
the word the functions only as a determiner, the portmanteau
verbal ending -s simultaneously represents three linguistic
categories: third person, singular, and present (nonpast) tense.
This type of morpheme is difficult for children to acquire.
4) Lack of exceptions .Whereas all singular nouns form the
possessive with -' s, not all verbs use -ed to mark the past tense
(saw, read, drove). Such exceptions hinder the language
acquisition process.
What determines the order of acquisition of minor lexical
?categories and bound morphemes

5) Lack of allomorphic variation. Whereas the affix - ing

has the same form for all verbs, the past tense ending -
ed has three major allomorphs-ltI for verbs such as
chase, Idl for forms such as crave, and I:)dl for verbs
such as recite. This type of allomorphic variation, which
also occurs with the plural, possessive, and third person
singular affixes in English, slows morphological
development.
6) Clearly discernible semantic function Whereas
morphemes such as in, on, and the plural -s appear to
express easily identifiable meanings, some morphemes
(such as the third person singular -s) appear to make no
contribution to the meaning of the sentence. Acquisition
of this latter type of morpheme is relatively slow.
 Morphophonemic Rules

 As children's productive and perceptual abilities

improve, they start to gain command of
morphophonemic rules, including those
responsible for allomorphic variation of the sort
associated with the English plural (lsl in hats, I z I
in pens, I z l in judges) and the past tense (ldl in
played, It/in taped, / ə d / in hunted). Initially, even
allomorphic variation as straightforward as the a /
an alternation in English can cause difficulty for
language learners, and it is not unusual to hear
children aged two to three produce utterances
such as an cucumber.
A well-known technique for studying the
development of morphophonemic rules is to
present children with nonsense words and then ask
them to form plurals or past tense forms. If the
children have mastered rules for allomorphic
variation, they ought to be able to add appropriate
endings even to words they have never heard
before. In a classic experiment, children were shown
a picture of a strange creature and told "This is a
wug." A second picture was then presented and the
children were given the following type of
question. .Now, there's another wug. There are two
of them.
Now, there are two ... ?
 Word Formation Rules
Like inflectional morphemes, English derivational
affixes and compounding appear to be acquired in
a more or less fixed order. This is illustrated in a
study of the six word formation processes as
follows
Example Type
teacher ( = one who teaches) Agentive -er

bird house Noun-noun compounds

dirty Adjectival -y
eraser (= something to erase with) Instrumental –er

quickly, quietly Adverbial - ly

 DEVELDPMENT OF WORD MEANING

By age 18 months or so, the average child has a vocabulary of 50 words or more.
Over the next months this vocabulary grows rapidly, sometimes by as much as ten or 12
words a day. The typical words of a two-year-old child are :

Objects

body parts: cheek, ear, foot, hand, leg, nose, toe

 food:cookie, cereal, drink, egg, fish, jam, milk
clothes: boot, clothes, dress, hat, shirt, shoes, socks
 household: bag, bath, bell, bottle, box, brush, chair, clock, soap, spoon,
animals: bear, bird, cat, cow, dog, horse, sheep
Properties

bad, dirty, fat, good, more, nice, poor, sweet

Actions and events
 bring, burn, carry, catch, clap, come, cut, do, dry, fall, get, give, go, kick, kiss, knit,
look, meet, open, pull, push, ring, shut, sit, sleep, speak, sweep, tickle, wag, warm, wash
Other

away, down, now, up, no, yes, thank you, goodbye

 The crucial factor in determining the order of emergence of these word formation
processes seems to be productivity.
 The two processes that apply most freely in English (the formation of a noun by the
addition of the agentive affix -er to a verb and compounding) were the first to
emerge.
 On the other hand, morphemes such as -ly that can apply to only a restricted set of
adjectival roots (quiet/quietly but *red/redly, *fast/fastly) seem to be mastered at a
much later age.
 Noun- like words are predominant in the child's early vocabulary, with verb- and
adjective-like words being the next most frequent category types.
noun-like verbs adjectives
 Among the most frequent individual words are expressions for displeasure or
rejection (such as no) and various types of social interaction
( such as give and bye-bye).
 Over the next few years, continued rapid expansion of this vocabulary takes pace
so that by age six most children have mastered about five thousand different
morphemes.
 6yrs 5000 words
 These developmental trends are found in all linguistic communities and therefore
appear to be universal.
 A major factor in lexical development is the child's ability to use contextual
clues to draw inferences a out t e category and meaning of new words.
 From around 17 months of age, for instance, children can use the presence or
absence of determiners to distinguish between proper nouns (names) and
common nouns.
2 year-old children who are told that a new doll is a dax will identify a similar
doll as a dax as well. However, if they are told that the new doll is Dax, they will
restrict use of the new word to the doll they have actually been shown.
 Children are also able to use the meaning of other words in the sentence as
well as their understanding of the nonlinguistic context to form hypotheses
about new words.
 In one experiment, for example, 3 and 4-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 to the interpretation of the nonsense word tiv
come from the meaning 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, some even
remembered what tiv "meant" two weeks later!
 Errors in the Acquisition of Word Meaning
 The meanings that children associate with their early words
sometimes correspond closely to the meanings employed by adults.
In many cases, however, the match is less than perfect. The two
most typical semantic errors involve overextension and
underextension.
 Overextension In cases of overextension, the meaning of the child's
word overlaps with that of the corresponding adult form, but also
extends beyond it. The word dog, for example, is frequently
overextended to include horses, cows, and other four-legged
animals. Similarly, ball is sometimes used for any round object, such
as a balloon,, a small stone, a plastic egg-shaped toy, and so on.
 What is the basis for overextension? Is it the similarities in the
appearance (shape, size, texture )or the function of object to which
the overextended word refers?
 Childrenoften overextend a word to include a set of perceptually
similar objects that they know to have diverse functions. One child,·

for example, used the word moon for the moon, grapefruit halves, a
crescent-
shaped piece of paper, a crescent-shaped car light, and a hangnail.
Another
child used the word money for a set of objects ranging from
pennies to buttons .
 While overextensions are the most frequent type of word meaning

error among children also frequently employ underextension.

 Underextension: using lexical items in an overly restrictive fashion.

For example, at the age of 9 months, one child restricted her use of
the word car to a particular situation. She used it only for cars
moving on the street as she watched out of the window, not for cars
standing still, for cars in pictures, or for cars she rode in herself.
 Another type of underextension is the use of a word to name a

specific object without extending it to other members of that class.

Thus, kitty might be used to refer to the family pet, but not to any
other cats.
 SYNTACTIC DEVELOPMENT

 Like phonological and morphological development, the emergence of syntactic

rules takes place in an orderly sequence.
 Beginning with the production of one-word utterances near the end of the first,

children gradually master the rules for sentence formation in their language.
I. One Word Stage
Children begin to produce one-word utterances between the ages of 12 and 18
months. A basic property of these one-word utterances is that they can be
used to express the type of meaning that would be associated with an entire
sentence in adult speech. Thus, a child might use the word dada to assert
(among other things) 'I saw daddy's hat', more to mean 'Give me more candy',
and up to mean 'I want up'. Such utterances are called holopbrases.

A striking feature of holophrastic utterances is children's skill in communicating

complex messages with a single word. This skill seems to be based on a
strategy of choosing the most informative word that applies to the situation
being commented upon. A child who wanted a candy, for example, would say
candy rather than want since the former word is more informative in this
situation. Similarly, a child who notices a new toy would be more likely to say
toy than see, thereby referring to the most novel feature of the situation he/she
is trying to describe.
 Situation Utterance

father enters room dada

child sits down down

father closes door door

child watches an action again

child points here

While the production is restricted to single-word utterances, children

child gives mother X mama
at this stage seem to have acquired more complex form of syntactic
knowledge.
 II) The Two Word Stage : Within a few months of their
first one word utterances, children begin to produce
two-word utterances of the sort shown below
Meaning Utterance
The baby is sitting on Baby chair
the chair
I hit the doggie Hit doggie
Ken is drinking water. Ken water
Daddy’s hat Daddy hat
III) The Telegraphic Stage : After a period of several months
during which their speech is limited to one- and two-word
utterances, children begin to produce longer and more complex
grammatical structures. Some representative utterances from the
first part of this period are given in the following example.
Chair all broken. Man ride bus today.
What her name Me wanna show Mommy.
I good boy. Daddy like this book .
 Stages of Syntactic Development
Developments Approx. age Stage
single Word utterances; no structure 1-1.5 yrs Holophrastic

early word combinations; presence of syntactic 1.5-2 yrs Two-word

categories unclear

emergence of the S rule and the part of the XP rule 2-3 yrs Telegraphic
that yields heads and complements

emergence of non-lexical categories, 3 yrs up Later

including those used as specifiers (Det, Aux)
 Later Development
Inthe years following the telegraphic stage, children continue to
acquire the complex grammar that underlies adult linguistic
competence. Here is an example of this development

Example : Development of Negation

 NegationChildren seem to acquire basic patterns of negation involving
no and not in three stages during the second and third years of life.
Stage 1 (approximately eighteen to twenty-five months)

The use of no at the beginning of the sentence.

No the sun shining.
No sit there.
No dog bite you.
No money.
No Mom sharpen it.
No Fraser drink all tea.
Stage 2 (approximately twenty-six to forty-two months)

Negative elements (usually no) now occur sentence-internally, but

children still do not have productive mastery of auxiliary verbs.

 Forms like can't and don't occur occasionally, but can and do are
not found.

 This suggests that children do not yet have command of auxiliary

verbs and are treating can't and don't as simple negative
morphemes.

I no singing song.
The sun no shining.
Don't sit there.
Dog no bite you.
We can't talk.
I no want envelope.
I no taste them.
Stage 3 (after forty-two months)
The forms not and n't now appear sentence-
internally with auxiliary verbs, as in adult speech.
I'm not singing a song.
The sun isn't shining.
The dog won't bite you.
It's not cold.
I don't have a book.