First Language Acquisition

Teguh Ardianto

How children acquire their first language?

Is it through listening to adults around and imitating?

Do they learn the grammar bit by bit? Or does the grammar fall into place naturally?

Is the rate of their language development influenced by the way adults speak with them?

Is the sequence among children in acquiring language the same or not?

Introduction

Acquisition is the initial cognitive and social process

of language learning. (p.12) First language acquisition normally takes place

between birth and the age of four. (p.12) Second language acquisition is the learning of a

language by an individual who already has some degree of control over another language. (p.12)

First language refers to the first language people learn in the life. (p.29)

Second language refers to any language learned later in life and usually learned after the age of five. (p.29)

Introduction

Rice (1986) identifies three crucial issues in

language acquisition: The nature of language What the child brings to language acquisition What the environment contributes to language

development

Three crucial issues in LA

The Nature of LanguageTeguh Ardianto

Whether language is seen as a set of

grammatical rules? focus on how this rules processed internally

Whether language is seen as a tool to socialize and to communicate? focus on how children learn to use language for expressing pragmatic intentions

The nature of language

The Role of the Child in LA

Teguh Ardianto

Piagetian view of cognitive

and language development

Vygotskyan view of cognitive and language development

The role of the child in LA

Cognitive development and language

acquisition closely interrelated processes Toddlers develop an abstract knowledge about

the world experience and observing the object

This linked to sensorimotor from B 18 months

the language manifested in accordance with the cognition capacity

In short: experience with object processed in the child cognition children try to manifest the world by using language

Piagetian view

Experience

with objects

Cognitive developme

nt (thought)

LanguageCognitive

Determinism

Relationships is not always one

way children use language to express concepts at the same time when the concepts are being learned

Criticism to Piagetian View

Different Piagetian and Vygotskyan view:

Vygotsky stressed the importance of connection between cultural and social environments and language learning.

Cognition is seen as closely related to language but not in deterministic manner as Piaget argued.

Through language used by themselves and the people around them, children learn to interpret new experiences which further develops their ability to think.

Vygotskyan view

Interaction

with the world and

with others

LanguageCognitive

Development

(thought)

Relationship between Cognitive Development and

Language

The Role of the Environment in LA

Teguh Ardianto

Social environment the circumstances in

which children are brought up and learn things about world.

Linguistic environment the circumstances in which children interact with other people using language, as well as receiving input, and getting explicit and implicit feedback on their language use.

The role of environment in LA

Joint referencing adult and child attend to

the specific objects, evens or actions in an act of communication which often includes naming or describing.

Joint action a shared action sequence by adult and child.

Adult interaction behaviors

Register adults use different register (speech

variants, topics) when they are talking to children

Conversation strategies adults encourage children to speak repetitions, modelings, promptings, reformulations, and contingent utterances.

Contingent speech commenting on or a response to a topic established by the child.

Adult conversational strategies

Theoretical Models in LA

Teguh Ardianto

The three influential theoretical models

for explaining language acquisition and how language, the child and the environment connected each other, those models are: The behaviorist model The innatist model The interactionist model

Theoretical models

This theory was popularized by Ivan Pavlov

(and his dog, of course ), John Watson, and Edward Thorndike.

Learning was seen as behavior change through habit formation, conditioned the presence of stimuli and strengthened through practice and selective reinforcement

Language learning was seen as being similar to any other kind of learning.

The behaviorist model

Language acquisition was a form of operant

conditioning directly resulting from adult modeling and reinforcement, imitation, practice and habit formation on the part of the child.

Environment adult modeling and child imitation to change child’s behavior to habit drilling

The behaviorist model

The absent of overt correction on form.

Adult input is often ‘degenerate’ -- full of false starts, hesitations, slip of the tongue and redundancies insufficient for adequate modeling but children are still able to learn the correct structures Syntactic rules.

Children could not learn all they have to say by only imitating adults.

Inability to explain of complex syntactic learning.

Criticisms of the behaviorist model

This theory was proposed by Chomsky which

emphasized the role of mental or psycholinguistic processes.

Language is not behavior learned through imitation and conditioning, it is rule based and generative in nature, processed and produced through complicated cognitive processes and mechanisms.

The innatist model

The assumption of the innatist model toward

language learning: Human beings possess an innate mental

capacity Language Acquisition Device (LAD) Universal Grammar

Language development follows a biological and chronological program

Because children are equipped with LAD, a large amount of input is not necessary input is necessary only when it triggers the process.

The innatist model

It does little in explaining the developmental of

language acquisition too much focus on innate ability for language learning.

It focuses only on internal knowledge of an ideal speaker/listener rather than messy product of real speech.

It neglects the important of environment on language acquisition

“real” children are more focused on meaning rather than structure/syntactical rules in comprehending children talk, analyzing syntactic rules is not sufficient, adults need to analyze the semantic process through rich interpretation.

Criticisms of the innatist model

The primary focus of the interactionist approach

is how language and cognitive developments take place within key contexts of interaction.

In interactionist model, adult-children interaction provides opportunities for children to use and experiment with language.

Language acquisition in this model considers both the child’s cognitive capacities as well as social capacities for learning.

The interactionist model

It doesn’t adequately explain the cognitive

processes that children engage in when noticing and using language during interaction.

Needs to draw on development in other related fields to help explain the cognitive processes that take place during language processing and development.

Criticisms of the interactionist model

• Concerned with learning in general• Important linguistic input from the environment• Modeling• Imitation• Practice• Reinforcements• Habit formation

• Concerned with specific aspect of language learning• ‘degenerate’ input from the environment• Biological program (critical period hypotheses)• Special language learning ability• Universal grammar• Linguistic rule extraction• Hypothesis testing• Natural order of acquisition

• Concerned with social and psychological aspects of language learning• Meaningful linguistic input from the environment• The importance of communicative contexts• Child’s pragmatic intentions• Adult conversational/interactional strategies• Child directed speech (Motherese)• Adult’s rich interpretation and feedback• Conversational adjustments• Child’s capacity for learning• Interdependence of cognitive and language development

Key features of

Behaviorist, Innatist, and Interactionis

t model

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Language Child Environment

It is a subset of all learned behaviors

A ‘clean slate’ It is a source of language models and provides selective reinforcements

All languages have characteristics in grammatical structure that are universal (UG)

Born with syntactic knowledge for analyzing linguistic input

The input from the environment is ‘degenerate’ but necessary for ‘triggering’ innate knowledge

Language has social and communicative purposes

Uses contextual clues from interaction to process language

The environment provides meaningful contexts for language input and language use

Inna

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Comparison of Acquisition Issues addressed by Theoretical Models