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Language learning in early childhood: First language acquisiton,…
Language learning in early childhood:
First language acquisiton
The first three years: Milestone and development sequences
Auditory discrimination
Babies can hear the difference between sounds as similar as 'pa' and 'ba'
Babies can distinguish the voice of their mothers from those of other speakers
They recognize the language that was spoken around their mother before they were born
Phonemic
Infants stop making distinctions between sounds that are not phonemic in the language that is spoken around them
Babies who regularly hear more than one language in their environment continue to respond to these differences for a long period
It is not enough for babies to hear language sounds from electronic devices, in order to learn they need to interact with a human speaker
By the end of the first year, most babies understand quite a few frequently repeated words in the language spoken around them
Function words and grammatical morphemes
At 12 months they begun to produce a word or two that everyone recognizes
The word order they produce reflects the word order of the language they are hearing and the combined words have a meaningful relationship
In their first three years there are predictable patterns in the emergence and development of many features of the language they are learning
development sequences or stages
They reflect the gradual acquisiton of the linguistic elements for expressing ideas
Longitudinal study
Language development of three children
14 grammatical morphemes were acquired in a similiar sequence
Cross-sectional study
21 children
The children may master the morphemes at different ages, but the order of their acquisition is very similar
Negation
Longitudinal study
Children understand the negation's functions and express them with single words and gestures
Stage 1: Espressed by the word 'no'
Stage 2: Utterances grow longer and the sentence subject may be included. For instance, using 'don't'
Stage 3: The negative element is inserted into a more complex sentence, such as 'can't' and 'don't'
Stage 4: Children begin to attach the negative element to the correct form of auxiliary verbs such as 'do' and 'be'
Questions
'What' is generally the first wh-question word to be used
'Where' and 'who' emerge very soon
'Why' emerges around the end of the second year
'How' and 'when' emerge later
Stage 1: Questions with single words or simple two- or three-word sentences with rising intonation. Eg. "Where's Daddy?"
Stage 2: Children use the word of the declarative sentence, with rising intonation. Eg. "You like this?"
Stage 3: Children notice that the structure of questions is different and begin to produce questions such as "Can I go?"
Child's rule seems to be that questions are formed by putting something at the front of a sentence, leaving the rest of the sentence in its statement form (fronting). For instance "Is the teddy is tired?"
Stage 4: Questions are formed by subject-auxiliary inversion. The questions resemble those of stage 3, but there is more variety in the auxiliaries that appear before the subject. For isntance "Are you going to play with me?"
Children can even add 'do' in questions: "Do dogs like ice cream?"
Children seem able to use either inversion or a wh-word, but not both: "Is he crying?" not "Why is he crying?"
Stage 5: Wh- and yes/no questions are formed correctly: "Are these your boots?" or "Why did you do that?"
Negative questions may still be difficult
Stage 6: Children are able to correctly form all questions types, including negative and complex embedded questions
The pre-school years
By the age of four, most children can ask questions, give commands, report real events, and create stories about imaginary ones, using correct word order and grammatical markers most of the time.
By the age of four, children have acquired the basic structures of the language or languages spoken to them in these early years
Three- and four year-olds continue to learn vocabulary at the rate of several words a day. They begin to acquire less frequent and more complex linguistic structures such as passives and relative clauses
In the pre-school years, children also begin to develop metalinguistic awareness, the ability to treat language as an object separate from the meaning it conveys
Five-year-olds know that 'drink the chair' is wrong in a different way from 'cake the eat'
The school years
Learning to read gives a major boost to metalinguistic awareness
Seeing words represented by letters and others symbols on a page leads children to a new understanding that language has form as well as meaning
Reading reinforces the understanding that a word is separate from the thing it represents
Growth of vocabulary
Acquisition of different language registers
Children learn how written language differs from spoken language, how the language used to speak to the principal is different from the language of the playground, how the language of a science report is different from the language of a narrative
Explaining first language acquisition
The behaviourist perspective
Behaviourist hypothesized that when children imitated the language produced by those around them, their attempts to reproduce what they hear received 'positive reinforcement' (B.F. Skinner)
The quality and quantity of the language the child hears and the consistency of the reinforcement offered by others in the environment, would shape the child's language behaviour
Imitation: word-for-word repetition of all or part of someone else's utterance
Practice: repetitive manipulation of form
Patterns in language
Focus on meaning
Question formation
Order of events
The innatist perspective
The innatist perspective is related to Chomsky's hypothesis that all human languages are based on some innate universal principles
Children are biologically programmed for language and that language develops in the child in just the same way that other biological functions develop
The environment makes only a basic contribution in this case. The child's biological endowment will do the rest
The universal grammar (UG) would prevent the child from pursuing all sorts of wrong hypotheses about how language systems might work. If children are pre-equipped with UG, then what they have to learn is the ways in which the language they are acquiring makes use of these principles
Researchers who study this perspective argue that such complex grammar could never be learned purely on the basis of imitating and practicing sentences available in the input
Since children acquire the language of their environment, they must have some innate mechanism or knowledge that allows them to discover such complex syntax in spite of limitations of hte input. This would be used exclusively for language acquisition
Children who are deaf will learn the sign language in a similar way as hearing children's acquire the spoken language
Language is somehow separate from other aspects of cognitive development and may depend on a specific module of the brain
The critical period hypothesis
The hypothesis that animals, including humans, are genetically programmed to acquire certain kinds of knowledge and skill at specific times in life. Beyond those 'critical periods', it is either difficult or impossible to acquire those abilities
It is difficult to find evidence for or against the CPH, since nearly all children are exposed to language at an early age
American Sign Language makes use of grammatical markers to indicate such things of time and number. These markers are expressed through specific hand or body movements
Interactionist/developmental perspectives
Piaget
Children's cognitive development would partly determine how they acquire language
The developing cognitive understanding is built on the interaction between the child and the things that can be observed or manipulated
Language was one of a number of symbol systems that are developed in childhood. Language can be used to represent knowledge that children have acquired through physical interaction with the environment
Vygostsky
Language develops primarily from social interaction
Zone of proximal development
supportive interactive environment
Scaffolding
Conversations that children have with adults and with other children
Cross-cultural research
Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES)
Adults modify the way they speak when talking to little children
Adults often repeat the content of a child's utterance
In some societies adults do not engage in conversation or verbal play with very young children
In other societies, young children interact primarily with older siblings who serve as their caregiver
Interaction is important
Language acquisition is usage-based
Language acquisition is possible because of children general cognitive capacities and the vast number of opportunities they have to make connections between the language they hear and what they experience in their environment
Childhood bilingualism
Children who learn more than one language from earliest childhood are referred to as 'simultaneous bilinguals', whereas those who learn another language later may be called 'sequential bilinguals
Many children attain high levels of proficiency in both languages
The limitations that may be observed in the language of bilingual individuals are more likely to be related to the circumstances in which each language is learned than to any limitation in the human capacity to learn more than one language
Code switching: the use of more than one language in a conversation
Subtractive bilingualism: the loss of one language on the way to learning another
Additional bilingualism: the maintenance of the home language while second language is being learned
Lightbown, P.m M.; Spada, N. (2013) How Languages are Learned_CH 01