language acquisition

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language acquisition

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition | 2008 | The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright 2008 Columbia University Press. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

language acquisition the process of learning a native or a second language. The acquisition of native languages is studied primarily by developmental psychologists and psycholinguists. Although how children learn to speak is not perfectly understood, most explanations involve both the observation that children copy what they hear and the inference that human beings have a natural aptitude for understanding grammar. While children usually learn the sounds and vocabulary of their native language through imitation, grammar is seldom taught to them explicitly; that they nonetheless rapidly acquire the ability to speak grammatically supports the theory advanced by Noam Chomsky and other proponents of transformational grammar. According to this view, children are able to learn the "superficial" grammar of a particular language because all intelligible languages are founded on a "deep structure" of grammatical rules that are universal and that correspond to an innate capacity of the human brain. Stages in the acquisition of a native language can be measured by the increasing complexity and originality of a child's utterances. Children at first may overgeneralize grammatical rules and say, for example, goed (meaning went ), a form they are unlikely to have heard, suggesting that they have intuited or deduced complex grammatical rules (here, how to conjugate regular verbs) and failed only to learn exceptions that cannot be predicted from a knowledge of the grammar alone. The acquisition of second or foreign languages is studied primarily by applied linguists. People learning a second language pass through some of the same stages, including overgeneralization, as do children learning their native language. However, people rarely become as fluent in a second language as in their native tongue. Some linguists see the earliest years of childhood as a critical period, after which the brain loses much of its facility for assimilating new languages. Most traditional methods for learning a second language involve some systematic approach to the analysis and comprehension of grammar as well as to the memorization of vocabulary. The cognitive approach, increasingly favored by experts in language acquisition, emphasizes extemporaneous conversation, immersion, and other techniques intended to simulate the environment in which most people acquire their native language as children.

Bibliography: See J. C. Richards, Error Analysis: Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition (1974); R. Andersen, ed., New Dimensions in Second Language Acquisition Research (1981); D. W. Carroll, Psychology of Language (1986); A. Radford, Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax (1990).

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"language acquisition." The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2008. Retrieved July 09, 2009 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-languag-ac.html

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CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language | 1998 | | © Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language 1998, originally published by Oxford University Press 1998. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION A term in LINGUISTICS for the process in which a child, in the course of normal development, learns a first LANGUAGE (or often, two or more languages). There are several methods for studying the subject. One strategy is to record samples of child speech and to analyse the emerging patterns of language which these samples display. Another is to set up experimental situations in which children are asked to carry out various tasks involving speech production or comprehension. Analysis is also carried out of the input language used by adults when they talk to children (motherese or caretaker speech) and of the nature of the interaction between them. The investigation may involve single children studied over extended periods of time (longitudinal studies) or groups of varying sizes, compositions, and ages studied at a particular point in time (cross-sectional studies).

Child development

It is commonplace to talk of ‘milestones’ in relation to child development in general, but this metaphor does not work as precisely for the development of speech. Sounds, grammar, vocabulary, and social linguistic skills are emerging simultaneously but at different rates, and significant progress can be made on several fronts in a matter of days. There are also many individual differences in the order of acquisition of specific features of language which need to be taken into account. However, most children appear to follow a similar path as they acquire sounds and grammatical structures, and broad similarities have been observed in relation to types of vocabulary and conversational skills. The aim of child language research is to explain the basis of this common order of emergence, allowing for the complex kinds of individual variation which are readily apparent.

Theoretical approaches

Several approaches have been applied to child language data. Certain features of the data seem to be the result of the children imitating what they hear in adult speech (for example, some of the early attempts at sound patterns, and the acquisition of new words), but very little of grammatical structure is learned by simple imitation. This was early noticed by researchers, who pointed out that child coinages such as mouses for mice or goned for gone could not have been produced through a process of imitation (for adults do not say such things), but must represent the child's own application of abstract rules already acquired. Furthermore, direct correction and coaching have very little effect, showing the important role of the child's own efforts. Various ways of explaining this internal ability were proposed, most notably CHOMSKY'S argument that children must be credited with an innate language acquisition device: a set of outline principles about the way language is structured and a procedure for discovering the remainder. Investigators such as Piaget argued for the importance of relating the emergence of children's language to their underlying intellectual or cognitive development. Others stressed the importance of analysing the nature of the input presented to them by adult speakers. It is now apparent that each of these factors has a role to play in guiding the course of acquisition, but the nature of their interdependence is far from clear.

Stages of development

At a descriptive level, considerable progress has been made, especially for ENGLISH, in establishing the order of emergence of sounds, grammatical structures, and (to a lesser extent) vocabulary, and determining the psycholinguistic principles involved. The focus has been on the earliest years, including the prelinguistic period of the first year. Between birth and 12 months, several stages can be detected in a child's emerging sound-producing and perceptual abilities, beginning with a range of basic biological noises reflecting such states as hunger, pain, discomfort, and contentment (0–8 weeks), and proceeding to a stage of cooing and laughing (8–20 weeks), vocal play (20–30 weeks), babbling (25–50 weeks), and the first melodically shaped utterances (9–18 months). At around a year, first words appear, though these are not easily identified with the words of the adult lexicon, but tend to have idiosyncratic meanings and to be used as primitive sentences (holophrases). Dada, for example, said with appropriate intonation and gesture, might mean ‘There's daddy’ or ‘Where's daddy?’ or ‘Pick me up, daddy’. Moreover, the word dada might refer at this stage not only to the male parent, but also to the female parent, or to other adults, or to certain animals, or even to objects. From 12 months, an expressive vocabulary is acquired which by 18 months is usually around 50 words in size. By that time, children understand far more words than they produce: estimates suggest three or four times as many. In the next six months, expressive vocabulary approaches 200 words, and in the third year rapidly moves into the thousands. Detailed studies of the growth in vocabulary size in older children are as yet unavailable, though several studies have been made of the processes which seem to affect children's lexical progress, such as over-extension of meaning, as when dog is used for all animals, and under-extension, as when dog is used for one kind of dog only.

Pronunciation and grammar

Most research time has been devoted to the emergence of PRONUNCIATION and GRAMMAR. Children do not learn all their sounds in an identical order, but seem to share certain general tendencies. Most English CONSONANTS are acquired between the ages of 2 and 4 years. Moreover, within this sequence, certain important trends have been established. For example, consonants are more likely to be first used correctly at the beginnings of words, with final consonants emerging later. Several processes of simplifying pronunciation have been identified in early speech, such as the avoidance of consonant clusters (sky pronounced without the s), the dropping of an unstressed syllable (banana pronounced as nana), or the replacement of fricative sounds such as [f] and [s] by plosive sounds such as [p] and [t]: for example, shoe as /tuː/ and fish as /pɪ/. During the second year, some children make great use of a process of REDUPLICATION, with the different syllables of a word being pronounced in the same way, as when (in one child) sister became [sisi] and mouth became [muːmuː]. Patterns of INTONATION also develop in the early years (such as the difference between stating and questioning, using the melody of the voice only), but some of the more subtle intonation patterns are still being learned as late as the teenage years, such as the difference between I THOUGHT it would rain (and it has) and I thought it would RAIN (but it hasn't).

Grammatical patterns in the early years are fairly well established for English. A stage of single-word SENTENCES appears from just before 12 months of age until 18 months, such as bye, gone, teddy, and mama. At around 18 months, children begin to put two words together, to make simple ‘telegrammatic’ sentences such as dada bye, want car, and mine lorry. Sentences increase in complexity during the third year, with more advanced features of CLAUSE structure being introduced. Clauses add extra elements, stabilizing word order, and developing a clearer subject-verb-object structure; and the hierarchical structure of a sentence develops, with phrasal complexity emerging within clauses, and ridding the sentences of their telegrammatic appearance. My daddy do kick that ball is a typical sentence for a 2-year-old. Each of the elements (subject, verb, object) appears as more than one word (a phrase), so that the sentence now has two layers of structure. By age 3, there is still greater complexity, in the form of linked sequences of clauses, using such words as and, but, cos (for ‘because’), and then.

Narratives, sometimes of great length, now make their appearance. As sentence control develops, so more attention is paid to the more subtle aspects of grammar, such as the learning of the irregular forms of nouns, verbs, pronouns, and other parts of speech. At 3, most children are making errors in the use of certain pronouns (such as me not like that mouse); by 4, most such errors have been eliminated. During the early school years there are still several aspects of English grammar to be acquired, such as the rarer irregular forms, more complex patterns of sentence connection (such as the use of although), and the use of multiple subordinate clauses. There is evidence of grammatical development right through the primary school years until, as the teenage years approach, all that is left is the learning of more subtle aspects of grammatical style and the building up of vocabulary.

Other skills

The task of language acquistion requires more than the learning of the structural skills of sounds, grammar, and vocabulary. Children must also learn to use these structures appropriately in everyday situations. They need to develop conversational skills, the rules of politeness (such as when to say please and thank you), the correct use of FORMS OF ADDRESS, and how to make requests in a direct or indirect manner (‘I was wondering if you could …’). Older children need to be able to handle such ‘manipulating’ features of language as well, you know, and actually, to learn to decode and use more subtle interactional features (such as sarcasm), and to cope with such stylistic differences as formal and informal speech. School brings an encounter with learning to read and write, though for many children considerable awareness of written language has come from reading materials at home. Finally, children have to develop a set of metalinguistic skills (the ability to reflect on and talk about language), through the use of a range of popular, semi-technical, and technical notions, such as sound, word, page, sentence, capital letter. The task of language acquisition is complex. The fact that it is largely complete by puberty makes it one of the most remarkable (if not the most remarkable) of all learning achievements. See ANALOGY, HALLIDAY, LANGUAGE LEARNING, PSYCHOLINGUISTICS.

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TOM McARTHUR. "CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. 9 Jul. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

TOM McARTHUR. "CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. (July 9, 2009). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O29-CHILDLANGUAGEACQUISITION.html

TOM McARTHUR. "CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Retrieved July 09, 2009 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O29-CHILDLANGUAGEACQUISITION.html

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LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE

Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language | 1998 | | © Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language 1998, originally published by Oxford University Press 1998. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE, short form LAD. In LINGUISTICS, a genetic mechanism for the acquisition of language proposed by Noam CHOMSKY (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965). LAD was ‘wired’ with language universals and equipped with a mechanism which allowed children to make increasingly complex guesses about what they hear around them, aided by an in-built evaluation measure that enabled them to select the best GRAMMAR consistent with the evidence. It has, however, proved difficult to specify and test this theory, and Chomsky has abandoned it in favour of parametric theory (Knowledge of Language, 1986), which suggests that children are preprogrammed with some universals but only partially ‘wired’ with others. They have advance knowledge of certain basic language options, but have to discover by experience which occur in the language they are exposed to. In Chomskyan terminology, they know the parameters along which language can vary, but have to fix their values, perhaps by setting a ‘switch’ in one of two possible positions. According to this theory, languages are similar at deep, even though on the surface they appear different.

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TOM McARTHUR. "LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. 9 Jul. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

TOM McARTHUR. "LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. (July 9, 2009). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O29-LANGUAGEACQUISITIONDEVICE.html

TOM McARTHUR. "LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Retrieved July 09, 2009 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O29-LANGUAGEACQUISITIONDEVICE.html

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