Transcript document

First Language
Acquisition
Sources:
Brown
Lightbown & Spada
NAM/nam
Theories of L1 Acquisition
 Behaviorism
 “Say what I say”
 Innatism
 “It’s all in your mind”
 Interactionism
 “A little help from my friends”
Behaviorism
 Skinner (1957).
 People’s behaviors are directly observable, rather than the mental
systems underlying these behaviors. Children are born with a mind
that is like a blank state.
 Language → verbal behavior
 Children learn language through: I _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
R_________
 Tabula rasa
 Stimulus  Response
 Conditioning
 Reinforcement
Observation:
Is this enough to explain how human beings learn a language?
Innatism
 Criticism on Behaviorism for LA
 Poverty of the stimulus → we end up knowing far more about language
than is exemplified in the language we hear around us.
 Problems with Input → Slips of the tongue, false starts, ungrammatical
and incomplete sentences, the data children are exposed to is
impoverished
 LA is a creative process. Children are not given explicit information
about the rules:
No instruction or correction.
 Children are equipped with an innate template or blueprint for language
→ Universal Grammar (UG).
 Children go through similar universal LA stages regardless of cultural and
social circumstances.
Children construct rules which are structure dependent →
children do create phrase structures, and the rules they
acquire are sensitive to this structure.
 Example: What accounts for the difference between
“and” and “with” in:
 Jill ate bagels and cream
 Jack went up the hill with Jill.
and their corresponding possible wh. Questions:
 What did Jill eat bagels with _________________?
 Who did Jack go up the hill with______________?
Bagels and cream → coordinate NP (2 NP conjoined with
and)
Bagels with cream → NP composed of an NP followed by a
PP (NP + PP)
Children never violate a coordinate structure constraint like:
*Who did Jack and ________ go up the hill?
*What did Jill eat bagels and ___________?
The innateness hypothesis:
An answer to the logical problem of language acquisition:
What accounts for the easy, rapidity and uniformity of
language acquisition in the face of impoverished data?
 Children acquire a complex grammar quickly and easily
without any particular help beyond exposure to the
language, they do not start from scratch.
 The child constructs his grammar according to an innate
blueprint (UG)
 All children proceed through similar development stages.
Characteristics
 Universal Grammar (+UG))
 Principles intact (UG)
 Parameters (For specific language) yet unset
 Acquisition based on data input
 Learning procedure (LAD)
 Hypothesis testing
 Parameter setting
Markedness differential
Hypothesis
Linguistic rules can be either part of the :
 “Core Grammar” (UG)
.- Follow general principles of language
.- Considered to be less complex
.- Unmarked
 “Periphery”
.- Specific to each language
.- Considered to be more complex
.- Marked
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Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
Universal Grammar (UG)
Systematic; rule-governed acquisition
Creative construction
“Pivot” grammar
Critical Period Hypothesis
 “Victor” and “Genie”
Interactionists
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PIAGET (1969):
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Language is not based on a separate ‘module of the mind’.
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it can be explained in terms of learning in general:
“language acquisition is similar to the acquisition of other skills or knowledge”
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Language is a number of symbol systems which are developed in
childhood. Language serves children to represent the knowledge acquired
through physical interaction with the environment.
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Social interaction and environment.
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Cognitive development and use of the language.
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Functions of language through interaction
 Child-directed speech: Jim’s case
VYGOTSKY (1978):
 Importance of conversations which children have with adults and
with other children
 These conversations constitute the origins of both language and
thought.
 Thought is essentially internalized speech, and speech emerges in
social interaction.
 More recently, constructivists have focused their research on the
social meaning of language.
 “Function are the meaningful, interactive purposes, within a social
(pragmatic) context, that we accomplish with forms.” (Brown 2000:
28).
 They criticized the innatists’ generative rules as being abstract,
formal, explicit and only concerned with the forms of language,
ignoring the functions of meaning within social interaction
(pragmatics).
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BLOOM (1971):
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Criticized innatists’ pivot grammars: the
relationship between a pivot word and an open
word was not always of the same nature.
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In the utterance: “Mommy sock”, she found, at
least, three relations:
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agent-action (Mommy is putting the sock on)
agent-object (Mommy sees the sock)
possessor-possessed (Mommy’s sock).
Bloom’s conclusion: Children learn underlying
structures, and not superficial word order.
Issues in L1 Acquisition:
 Universals
 Principles
 Parameters
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Language and thought
Imitation
Practice
Input/discourse
 Pivot grammar n
Now-discarded theory of grammatical
development in L1A. Children were said to
develop two major grammatical classes of
words:
1.- pivot class: small group of words attached to
other words, e.g. on, allgone, more
2.- “open class” (e.g. shoe, milk) to which pivot
words were attached.
The child’s early grammar was thought to be a
set of rules which determined how the two
classes of words could be combined to produce
utterances such as allgonemilk, shoe on.
Longman Dictionary of Linguistics, Applied Linguistics and ELT.