"First Language Acquisition". By H. Douglas Brown

Dietrich Tiedemann recorded his observation of the physiological and linguistic development of his young son.  A years later researchers begin to analyze child language  systematically and to try to discover the nature of the psycholinguistic process that enable every human being to gain fluent control of an exceedingly complex system of communication.

Children acquire languages fluently and efficiently without special instruction but not without significant effort and attention to language.

THEORIES OF FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

As small babies, children babble and coo and cry and vocally or nonvocally send an extraordinary number of messages. When they end their first year make specific attempts to imitate words and speech sounds they hear around them. At the age of three, children can comprehend an incredible quantity of linguistic input.

Behavioristic approaches

Language is a part of total human behavior. This approach focused on the immediately perceptible aspects of linguistic behavior.  It claimed that the language behavior is the production of correct responses to stimuli. If a particular response is reinforced, it then becomes habitual or conditioned. One learns to comprehend an utterance by responding appropriately to it and by being reinforces for what response.

Skinner claimed that verbal behavior is controlled by its consequences. When consequences are rewarding, behavior is maintained, when consequences are punishing, the behavior is weakened and eventually extinguished.

The Nativist Approach

 Nativist argues that we are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systemic perception of language around us.

Eric Lenneberg proposed that language is a species-specific” behavior and those certain modes of perception, categorizing abilities and other language-related mechanism are biologically determined.

Chomsky claimed the existence of innate properties of language and this innate knowledge is embodied in a “little black box”.

Researchers in the nativist tradition have continued this child language acquisition research that focuses on what come to be known as universal grammar. According to them, all human beings are genetically equipped with abilities that enable them to acquire a language.

The child’s language at any stage is systematic in that the child is constantly forming hypotheses on the basis of the input received and the testing those hypotheses in speech.

Functional approaches

More recently we have seen a shift in patterns of research. The shift has not been so much away from the generative /cognitive side of language. Two emphases have emerged 1.- Language was one manifestation of the cognitive and affective ability to deal with the word. 2.- Generative rules that were proposed under the nativistic framework were abstract, formal, explicit and quite logical.

Cognition and Language development: Lois Bloom pointed out that the relationships in which words occur in telegraphic utterances are only superficially similar. Bloom concluded that children learn underlying structures, and not superficial word order.

Bloom’s research paved the way for a new wave of child language study, this time centering on the relationship of cognitive development to firs language acquisition. What children learn about language is determined by what they already know about the word.

Social Interaction and Language Development: social constructivist emphasis of the functional perspective. Holzman proposed that “a reciprocal behavioral system operates between the language-developing infant-child and the competent (adult) language user in a socializing-teaching-nurturing role”

ISSUES IN FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE

Competences refers to one’s underlying knowledge of a system of language (its rules of grammar, its vocabulary, all the pieces of a language and how those pieces fit together) It is the no observable ability to do something. Performance is the overtly observable and concrete manifestation or realization of competences; it is the actual production or the comprehension of linguistic events.

COMPREHENSION AND PRODUCTION

Comprehension and production can be aspects of both performance and competence. Research evidence point to the general superiority of comprehension over production: children seem to understand more than they actually produce.

NATURE OR NURTURE

 Nativist contends that a child is born with an innate knowledge, the innateness hypothesis presented a number of problems itself. Environmental factor cannot by any means be ignored. Derek Bickerton proposed that human beings are “bio-programmed” to proceed from stage to stage.

UNIVERSALS

Language is universally acquired in the same manners and moreover that the deep structure of language at its deepest level may be common to all languages. Maratsos enumerated some of the universal linguistic categories under investigation by a number of different researchers.

Word order

Morphological marking tone

Agreement

Reduced reference

Verbs and verb classes

Predication

Negation

Question formation

SYSTEMATICITY AND VARIABILITY

Children exhibit a remarkable ability to infer the phonological, structural, lexical and semantic system of language; it has been found that young children who have not yet mastered the past-tense morpheme tend first to learn past tenses as separate items without knowledge of the difference between regular and irregular verbs.

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT

Vygotsky claimed that social interaction, through language, is a prerequisite to cognitive development. Thought and language were seen as two distinct cognitive operation that grow together

IMITATION

Children are good imitator; in fact imitation is one of the important strategies a child uses in the acquisition of language. The earliest stages of child language acquisition may manifest a good deal of surface imitation since the baby may not possess the necessary semantic categories to assign “meaning” to utterances. Researches has also shown that children, when explicitly asked to repeat a sentence in a test situation, will often repeat the correct underlying deep structure with a change in the surface rendition.

PRACTICE

Closely related to the notion of imitation is practice, children practice language constantly. A Behavioristic model of first language acquisition would claim that practice is the key to the formation of habits by operant conditioning. Practice is usually thought of as referring to speaking only. But one can also think in terms of comprehension practice.

INPUT

The role of input in the child’s acquisition of language is undeniably crucial. The speech that young children hear is primarily the speech heard in home. Linguists one claimed that most adult s` speech is basically semi grammatical, that children are exposed to a chaotic sample of language.

DISCOURSE

 While conversation is a universal human activity performed routinely in the course of daily living, the means by which children learn to take part in a conversation appear to be very complex. The child learns not only how to initiate a conversation but how to respond to another’s initiating utterance.