1st Language

Acquisition

By: Fernando Benavides &

Lorena Maldonado

UNIVERSIDAD CENTRAL DEL ECUADOR

FACULTAD DE FILOSOFÍA LETRAS Y CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACIÓN

MAESTRÍA EN LINGÜÍSTICA Y DIDÁCTICA DE LA

ENSEÑANZA DE IDIOMAS EXTRANJEROS

Infants are born into a social world, a

world of touch, sound, and affect, a world

of communication. They develop and grow

up as social beings, immersed in a network

of relationships from the start. It is in this

social setting that they are first exposed to

language, to language in use (Eve V. Clark

2009).

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

LANGUAGE THEORIES

Behaviorism

(Skinner)

Universal Grammar

(Chomsky)

Socio-Cognitivism

(Piaget)

LANGUAGE THEORIES

Behaviorism

(Skinner)

LANGUAGE THEORIES

Universal Grammar

(Chomsky)

LANGUAGE THEORIES

Socio-Cognitivism

(Piaget)

First Language Acquisition

STAGES:

STAGE Typical

age

Examples

Pre-talking stage

At birth, the infant vocal tract is in some ways

more like that of an ape than that of an adult

human. In particular, the tip of the velum reaches

or overlaps with the tip of the epiglottis. As the

infant grows, the tract gradually reshapes itself in

the adult pattern.

Are children born with a blank slate? No. Nursing

studies show that babies respond to the human

voice and especially to speech sounds.

0 - 6

months

View:

Baby Natalie

interacting with her

grandma (who speaks

Chinese) (YouTube)

Babbling stageDuring the period from 4-7 months, infants

typically engage in vocal play, manipulating pitch

(to produce "squeals" and "growls"), loudness

(producing "yells"), and also manipulating tract

closures to produce friction noises, nasal

murmurs, "raspberries" and "snorts".

At about seven months, babbling appears: infants

start to make extended sounds that are chopped

up rhythmically by oral articulations into syllable-

like sequences, opening and closing their jaws,

lips and tongue. Repeated consonant+vowel

sequences are often produced, such as [bababa]

or [nanana].

6-8 months View:

Babbling baby on

tummy (YouTube)

First Language Acquisition

STAGES:

Holophrastic stage One multipurpose word often usually used to

convey the child's needs and world views.

At about ten months, infants start to utter

recognizable words. Some word-like

vocalizations that do not correlate well with

words in the local language may consistently be

used by particular infants to express particular

emotional states.

Young children often use words in ways that are

too narrow, called under extensions ("bottle"

used only for plastic bottles; "teddy" used only

for a particular bear) or too broad, called

overextensions ("dog" used for lambs, cats,

and cows as well as dogs; "kick" used for

pushing and for wing-flapping as well as for

kicking.) These under extensions and

overextensions develop and change over time in

an individual child's usage.

9-18

months

Examples:

"Cookie" (means "May

I have a cookie?"

"Up!" (means "Carry

me please")

"Doggie" (means "I

see the dog.")

"Duck" (while the child

hits a toy duck in the

bath

"Papa" when the child

hears the doorbell.

First Language Acquisition

STAGES:

Two-word stage There is often a spurt of vocabulary acquisition

during the second year. Early words are acquired

at a rate of 1-3 per week (as measured by

production diaries); in many cases the rate may

suddenly increase to 8-10 new words per week,

after 40 or so words have been learned.

However, some children show a more steady rate

of acquisition during these early stages. The rate

of vocabulary acquisition definitely does

accelerate in the third year and beyond: a

plausible estimate would be an average of 10

words a day during pre-school and elementary

school years.

18-24

months

"mini-sentences" with

simple semantic relations

Examples:

"Mommy work" (when

asked "Where's

mommy?", means

"Mommy's at work

now"

"Go bye-bye" (child

watching dog walk out

the back door, means

"The dog is going

outside."

View:

"Oh Yeah, Baby."

(YouTube)

First Language Acquisition

STAGES:

Telegraphic stage

The child is still mostly understood by his/her

parents and caregivers.

"Telegraphic" sentence structures are lexical

rather than functional or grammatical

morphemes.

In the early multi-word 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.

24-30

months

View:

Child talking on the

phone to Barney

(YouTube)

Repeating Toddler.

Notice how the child

has mastered many

individual sounds but

runs into trouble when

many sounds are

combined into

syllables. (YouTube)

Baby talking Spanglish

(YouTube) such as

"Policeman in agua"

First Language Acquisition

STAGES:

STAGE : SPEECH FORMS

• Incorporating some inflectional morphemes

• -ing form in expressions such as cat sitting and mommyreading book.

• The marking of regular plurals with the –s form, as in boysand cats.

• Overgeneralization the child overgeneralizes the apparentrule of adding -s to form plurals and will talk about foots andmans.

AGE

• Two and a half years old

DEVELOPING MORPHOLOGY

STAGE : IMITATION

• Syntactic structures used by young children

• They repeat what she / he heard.

• The formation of question and the use of negatives

AGE

• First stage 18 and 26 months

• Second stage 22 and 36 months

• Third stage 24 and 40 months

DEVELOPING SYNTAX

STAGE : Forming Questions

• the child’s first stage has two procedures.

• In the second stage, more complex expressions can be formed.

• In the third stage, the required movement of the auxiliary in englishquestion for example I can have / Can I have.

• Some children beggining schools in their fifth or sixth school year

STAGE : Forming Negatives

• the child’s first stage to involve a simple strategy of putting No or Not at thebegining.

• In the second stage, the additional negative forms don’t and can’t appear

• In the third stage, the incorporation of other auxiliary forms such as didn’t andwon’t .

EXAMPLES

• No mitten

• Not a teddy bear

• I don’t want it

• I didn’t caught it

STAGE : OVEREXTENSION

• The child overextends the meaning of a word on the basis ofsimilarities of shape, sound and size.

AGE

• 12 and 24 months

EXAMPLES

• The word ball is extended to all kinds of round objects.

DEVELOPING SEMANTICS

Lexicon Begin with simple lexical items for

people/food/toys/animals/body functions

Lexical Achievement:• 1-2 years old 200-300 words (avg)

• 3 years old 900 words

• 4 years old 1500 words

• 5 years old 2100 words

• 6-7 years old 2500 words

• High school grad 40,000 – 60,000 words!

“5,000 per year, 13 words a day” --Miller & Gildea

Reviewing Linguistic Stages

6-12 weeks: Cooing (googoo, gurgling, coocoo)

6 months: Babbling (baba, mama, dada)

8-9 months: Intonation patterns

1-1.5 years: Holphrastic stage (one word)

2 years: Two-word stage

2.5 years: Telegraphic stage

3,4 – 11 years: Fluent speech w/errors

12 years+: Fluent speech