Language acquisition &language processing

John Israel G. Tagudin
Reporter
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
& LANGUAGE PROCESSING

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION & PROCESSING

“The capacity to learn language is deeply
ingrained in us as a species, just as the capacity
to walk, to grasp objects, to recognize faces.
We don’t find any serious difference in children
growing up in congested urban slums, in
isolated mountain villages, or in privileged
suburban villas”
Dan Slobin, The Human Language Series 2 (1994)

• Every language is complex.
• Before the age of 5, the child knows most of
the intricate system of grammar:
 Use the syntactic, phonological, morphological and
semantic rules of the language
 Join sentences
 Ask questions
 Use appropriate pronouns
 Negate sentences
 Form relative clauses

Learning to speak and understand a
language is different than learning to read
and write.
“ We are designed to walk.. That we are
taught to walk is impossible. And pretty
much the same is true of language.
Nobody is taught language. In fact you
can’t prevent a child from learning it”
- Chomsky 1994

Issues in first language acquisition
• How do children acquire such a complex system so quickly a
and effortlessly?
• Does a child decide to consciously pursue certain skills?
(e.g., walking)
• Do babies make a conscious decision to start learning a
language?
• We correct children’s errors sometimes. Does it help?
‘Nobody don’t like me’
• Noisy data

Theories of language acquisition:
• Nature vs. Nurture
The ancient theories of child language acquisition explore the dilemma of nature
versus nurture; that is, whether language is inherent and God-given or learned from
environment.
• Behaviorism (1950s)
Children learn language through imitation, reinforcement, analogy and similar
processes.
As the name implies, behaviorism focused on people’s behaviors, which are
directly observable, rather than mental systems underlying these behaviors.

Theories of language acquisition:
• Innateness hypothesis
Children are equipped with an innate template for language
(Language Acquisition Device and Universal Grammar).
Evidence: we end up knowing more about language than
what we hear around us.
The same stages in all cultures and languages

Basic requirements:
Environment and interaction to bring this capacity into operation-
– cultural transmission
The child must be physically capable (being able to hear)
Interaction.
All these requirements are related.

The acquisition schedule:
• In spite of different backgrounds, different locations, and different
upbringings, most children follow the very same milestones in
acquiring language.
• The biological schedule is related to the maturation of the infant’s
brain to cope with the linguistic input.
• Young children acquire the language by identifying the
regularities in what is heard and applying those regularities in
what they say.

Caretaker Speech
(motherese/child-directed speech/baby talk)
• A type of simplified speech adopted by someone who spends
time with the child characterized by:
• Frequent use of questions
• Simplified lexicon
• Phonological reduction
• Higher pitch- extra loudness
• Stressed intonation
• Simple sentences
• A lot of repetition
Example: Oh, goody! Now Daddy will push choo choo!

Caretaker Speech (motherese)
MOTHER: Look!
CHILD: (touches picture)
MOTHER: what are those?
CHILD: (vocalizes a babble string and smiles)
MOTHER: yes, there are rabbits
CHILD: Vocalizes and smiles
MOTHER: (laughs) yes, rabbit

Stage Typical age Description
Cooing 3-5 months Vowel-like sounds
Babbling 6-10 months Repetitive patterns
One word stage 12-18 months Single open-class words or word stems
Two word stage 18-24 months "mini-sentences" with simple semantic relations
Telegraphic stage 24-30 months sentence structures of lexical words no functional or
grammatical morphemes
Later multiword stage 30+ months Grammatical or functional structures emerge
3-5 years Competence begins to match performance.
Grammaticality, complete syntactic structures. Complex
sentences.
4 years 10-15 new words per day
7 years 20 new words per day, academic vocabulary. Registers and
styles appear.
12 years Overgeneralizations may continue
Adolescence Strive for “correct” or “cool” forms for social identity and ego
enhancement.
Adult 40-60,000 words in active vocabulary

First language acquisition stages
Cooing
• Few weeks: cooing and gurgling, playing with sounds. Their
abilities are constrained by physiological limitations.
• They seem to be discovering phonemes at this point.
• Producing sequences of vowel-like sounds- high vowels [i] and
[u].
• 4 months- sounds similar to velar consonants [k] & [g].
• 5 months: distinguish between [a] and [i] and the syllables [ba]
and [ga], so their perception skills are good.

Babbling
• Different vowels and consonants ba-ba-ba and ga-gaga
• 9-10 months- intonation patterns and combination of
ba-ba-ba-da-da
• Nasal sounds also appear ma-ma-ma
• 10-11- use of vocalization to express emotions
• Late stage- complex syllable combination (ma-da-gaba)
• Even deaf children babble
• The most common cross-linguistic sounds and patterns babbled
the most, but later on they babble less common sounds

The word stage (holophrastic)
• Single terms are uttered for everyday objects e.g. ‘milk’, ‘cookie’,
‘cat’
• Produce utterance such as ‘Sara bed’ but not yet capable of
producing a phrase.
• Differ from adult language
[da] dog
[sa] sock
[aj] light
[daw] down
• Convey a more complex message

Two word stage
• Vocabulary moves beyond 50 words
• By 2 years old, children produce utterances ‘baby chair’,
‘mommy eat’
• Interpretation depends on context
• Adults behave as if communication is taking place.

Telegraphic stage
• By 2 years & a half, they produce multiple-word speech.
• Developing sentence building capacity.
E.g. ‘this shoe all wet’, ‘cat drink milk’, ‘daddy go bye-bye’
• Vocabulary continues to grow
• Better pronunciation

The acquisition process
The child does not acquire the language by imitating
adults- trying out constructions and testing them.
CHILD: my teacher holded the baby rabbit and we patted them
MOTHER: did you say your teacher held the baby rabbit?
CHILD: yes. she holded the baby rabbit and we patted them
MOTHER: Did you say she held them tightly?
CHILD: no, she holded them loosely

Developing Morphology
• By 2-and-a-half years old- use of some inflectional morphemes to
indicate the grammatical function of nouns and verbs.
• The first inflection to appear is –ing after it comes the –s for plural.
• Overgeneralization: the child applies –s to words like ‘foots’ ‘mans’
and later ‘feets’ ‘mens’

Developing Morphology
• By 2-and-a-half years old- use of some inflectional morphemes to
indicate the grammatical function of nouns and verbs.
• The first inflection to appear is –ing after it comes the –s for plural.
Overgeneralization: the child applies –s to words like ‘foots’ ‘mans’
and later ‘feets’ ‘mens’
• The use of possessive ‘s’ appears ‘mommy’s bag’
• Forms of verb to be appear ‘is’ and ‘are’
• The –ed for past tense appears and it is also overgeneralized as in
‘goed’ or holded’
• Finally –s marker for 3rd person singular preset tense appears with full
verbs first then with auxiliaries (does-has)

Developing syntax
• A child was asked to say the owl who eats candy runs fast and she
said the owl eat candy and he run fast.
• The development of two syntactic structures- three stages
• Forming questions
• Forming negatives

Forming questions
1st stage: Insert where and who to the beginning of an
expression with rising intonation
E.g. sit chair? Where horse go?
2nd stage: More complex expression
E.g. why you smiling? You want eat?
3rd stage: Inversion of subject and verb
E.g. will you help me? What did I do?

Forming negative
Stage 1: Putting not and no at the beginning
e.g. not teddy bear, no sit here
Stage 2: Don’t and can’t appear but still use no and not before VERBS
e.g. he no bite you, I don’t want it
Stage 3: didn’t and won’t appear
e.g. I didn’t caught it, she won’t go

Developing Semantics
During the two-word stage children use their limited vocabulary to refer
to a large number of unrelated objects.
Overextension: overextend the meaning of a word on the basis of
similarities of shape, sound, and size.
e.g. use ball to refer to an apple, and egg, a grape and a ball.
This is followed by a gradual process of narrowing
down.
Antonymous relations are acquired late
The distinction between more/less, before/after seem to be later
acquisition.

Language acquisition &language processing

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