This week, our reading focuses on first and second language acquisition and theories of learning. Based on the reading, create a reflective piece of writing on the topics, subjects and elem

First and Second Language Acquisition Information First Language

Milestones in Language Development

Phonology First year: vocal play; canonical babbling Second year: representational phonology (can distinguish the difference between phonemes) Third year: phonetic inventory completion Fourth year: phonological awareness grows

Lexicon First year: recognition of own name; first word Second year: word spurt; 50 word productive vocabulary Third year: 500 word productive vocabulary Fourth year: knowledge of derivational morphology; increases vocabulary

Grammar Second year: first word combinations Second and third years: increasing length of word combinations; adding grammatical morphemes; negative and question forms Fourth year: complex (i.e., multi-clause) utterances

Communication First year: intentional communication begins Second year: range of distinguishable communicative purposes grows Third year: conversational initiative and responsiveness grow Fourth year: narrative skills develop

Emergence of Responses and Vocalizations in the First Year of Life Age Group Responses Vocalizations Newborns Startles Crying

Is calmed by voice Vegetative sounds Prefers mother’s voice

1-3 months Laughs Cooing sounds Smiles at speaker Crying

Vowel sounds 3-7 months Responds to emotional intonation Speech-like sounds

(e.g., friendly, angry) Syllables Reduplicated babbling ba, ga, bababa

8-12 months Responds to name Varigated babbling Responds to no gadabaga Recognizes games and routines like Sentence intonation Peek-a-boo or bye-bye Protowords Recognizes some words

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First Words Many children go through a transitional phase between babbling and their first real words. The first “real” words appear at the end of the first year for the normal child. These real words are preceded by protowords or idiomorphs which are personally meaningful that are not real words like mutz when given milk. The single-word stage has been called the holophrastic (“entire expression”) phase because children use single words to express a complete thought. Milk could mean I want milk, I spilled the milk, Mom has no milk, That’s milk. The holophrase derives its meaning in part from the context in which it occurs.

Two-word utterances are referred to as telegraphic speech because they resembled the sparse syntax used in telegrams that people sent to save money before e-mail and fax technology. The first two-word phrases represent different kinds of intentions. Roger Brown, A First Language, The Early Stages, described the semantic relationships which reflect the semantic roles of the words in the sentence:

Agent + action Mommy come. Action + object Drive car. Agent + object Mommy sock. Action + location Sit chair. Entity + location Cup table. Possessor + possession My doggie. Entity + attribute Crayon big. Demonstrative + entity Dat money.

Children’s Complex Sentences, In Order of Development

Type Examples Object complementation Watch me draw circles.

I see you sit down. Wh-embedded clauses Can I do it when we get home?

I show you how to do it. Coordinating conjunctions He was stuck, and I got him out.

When I was a little girl I could go “geek-geek” like that, but now I can go “this is a chair”.

Subordinating conjunctions Here’s a set. It must be mine if it’s a little one. I want this doll because she’s big.

Order of Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes

1. Present progressive Adam is eating. 2. Preposition in Eve sit in chair. 3. Preposition on Sweater is on chair. 4. Plurals books 5. Irregular past tenses went, come, ate 6. Possessives Adam’s chair. 7. Uncontracted copula Cowboy is big. 8. Articles the doggie, a cookie 9. Regular past tenses Eve walked home. 10. Third person present regular He plays.

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11. Third person present irregular He has some toys. 12. Uncontracted auxiliary He was going to work. 13. Contracted copula I’m happy. 14. Contracted auxiliary Mommy’s going shopping.

Stages of Grammatical Development and Normative Ages Ranges

Age Range (months) Mean Length of Utterance (words) 10-26 1.01-1.49 18-31 1.50-1.99 21-35 2.00-2.49 24-41 2.50-2.99 28-45 3.00-3.49 31-50 3.50-3.99 37-52 4.00-4.49 41- 4.5+

Stages of Development Children go through stages of development.

Question Formation Stage 1. Intonation

Cookie? Mommy book? Stage 2. Intonation with sentence complexity

Yes/no questions. Children use declarative sentence order with rising intonation: You like this? I have some? Wh-questions: Question word with declarative order: Why you catch it?

Stage 3. Beginning of inversion Wh-questions maintain declarative order: Can I go? Is that mine? Why you don’t have one?

Stage 4. Inversion Do you like ice cream? Where I can draw them? Use of do in yes/no questions (but not in wh-questions).

Stage 5. Inversion with wh-questions When negation needs to be included, the declarative form is maintained: Why can he go out? Why he can’t go out?

Stage 6. Overgeneralization of inversion I don’t know why can’t he go out.

Negation Stage 1. Negation is usually expressed by the word ‘no’, either all alone or as the first word in the utterance:

No. No cookie. No comb hair. Stage 2. Utterances grow longer and the sentence subject may be included. The negative word appears just before the verb. Sentences expressing rejection or prohibition often use ‘don’t’.

Daddy no comb hair. Don’t touch that!

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Stage 3. The negative element is inserted into a more complex sentence. Children may add forms of the negative other than ‘no’, including words like ‘can’t’ and ‘don’t’. These sentences appear to follow the correct English pattern of attaching the negative to the auxiliary or modal verb. However, children do not vary these forms for different persons or tenses:

I can’t do it. He don’t want it. Stage 4. Children begin to attach the negative element to the correct form of auxiliary verbs such as ‘do’ and ‘be’:

You didn’t have supper. She doesn’t want it. They still may have difficulty with other features related to negatives:

I don’t have no more candles.

Theories of Language Development

Nativist-Linguist Theory

 Noam Chomsky: infants are born with a language acquisition device (LAD) that makes each child biologically prepared to acquire language regardless of setting.

 Children must acquire language within a critical developmental period because language is determined by a biological timetable.

 Children must figure out meaning from the surface structure samples provided by the environment.

 Language is species-specific and unique to humans which has a strong genetic basis that makes language development look very similar across languages and cultures.

 The language environment does not provide sufficient samples from which to discover the complex adult grammar using learning mechanisms.

 The child acquires language by developing a succession of hypotheses about grammar.

 It is assumed that without some innate rules, children would never figure out the correct rules because they receive insufficient data from the environment-this phenomenon is referred to as the poverty of the stimulus argument.

 The child acquires grammar because it is a universal property of language, and all a child need do is hear enough language to impute the rules of language.

 The LAD uses the raw linguistic data to abstract the grammatical rules of the native language.

Behaviorist-Learning Theory

 Relies on the components of classical and operant conditioning, cf. B. F. Skinner.

 Classical conditioning pairs neutral stimuli to reflexes, as in the original Pavlovian paradigm, where the dog would salivate (reflex) when presented with a tone (stimulus) that signaled that food was coming.

 As for language, associations would be formed between words and their internal responses. When a child says milk prior to feeding, the word becomes associated with the milk.

 Once milk reliably elicits a response, it can be conditioned to another word like bottle.

 Operant conditioning refers to how we use behavior to obtain consequences, such that the behavior operates on the environment to bring about favorable consequences or avoid adverse ones.

 Children utter words because they cause adults to give them things they want.

 Behaviorists assume that the child’s speech will be rewarded the more it sounds like adult speech.

 Adultlike utterances get rewarded, and inappropriate or meaningless speech does not.

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Social Interaction Theory

 This approach proposes that children acquire language through close interaction with adults and older children and that the structure of language arises out of the social and communicative functions of language.

 A more adult-like form of speech will produce a more sophisticated social life for the child.

 Language learning relies on frequent one-on-one contact with an older speaker who provides questions, comments, and speech to be listened to.

 What motivates language acquisition is social precocity.

 This approach assumes that language development is about acquiring grammatical rules, similar to the linguistic view. However, the assumption is that these rules have evolved from associations and imitations in a social context.

 The function of language in social communication is the central theme: grammatical structures are immaterial if they do not have a practical function such as comprehension and making oneself understood.

 Social interaction attempts to account for grammatical development by looking at how the changes function in social communication.

Connectionism

 Also known as the parallel distribution process (PDP), the connectionist approach is a neurolinguistic-inspired account for how children learn phonology, grammar, and morphological properties of words and word endings.

 Holds the position that language exists in a neuronlike network of nodes or processing units on phonological, morphological, and syntactic levels.

 PDP is predicated on the information processing paradigm where language is input, stored, and retrieved to be used by neurons in the brain.

 The child learns associations between sound sequences, words, and meanings by hearing them in the environment. Each neural processing unit (e.g., sound sequences, words, and meanings by hearing them in the environment.

 Each neural processing unit (e.g., sound, word, concept) is activated or strengthened by hearing or using it.

 The child learns that the inflection –ed is added to verbs to produce the past tense by hearing people talk about things that have already happened.

 What the child does in learning language is build a network of nodes based on language input.

 Learning is a matter of associations and node strengths rather than rule learning.

 Children don’t learn rules.  Phonological, morphological, and syntactic nodes are concurrently activated, acting in parallel

with each other and affecting the activation thresholds of nodes involved or anticipated.

Cognitive Theory

 Language is viewed as a general ability that emerges within the context of other general cognitive abilities like memory, attention, and problem solving.

 Piaget assumed that language is not a separate facility but one of several cognitive abilities.

 Language is structured or constrained by the changes in cognition.

 The reason nouns occur early in linguistic development is because they are the center of attention during the sensorimotor stage (a focus on objects in the world and how they operate).

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 The child’s first word combinations depend on perceptions of semantic relations between people and objects in the environment.

 Infants have to know what people are talking about before they learn the precise words.

 The first step in language acquisition: figure out what people are talking about.

Theories Explaining Second Language Learning

Nativist-Linguist Theory

 Linguists have argued that Universal Grammar offers the best perspective from which to understand second language acquisition

 Others argue that it is not a good explanation for the acquisition. The UG may be present and available to second language learners, but its exact nature has been altered by the acquisition of other languages. Second language learners may need explicit instruction about what is not grammatical in the second language.

Krashen’s Monitor Model  The acquisition-learning hypothesis: we acquire as we are exposed to samples of the second

language in much the same way as children pick up their first language, with no conscious attention to language form. The acquired system initiates a speaker’s utterances and is responsible for spontaneous language use. The learned system acts as an editor or monitor making minor changes. Such monitoring takes place only when the speaker/writer has plenty of time, is concerned about producing correct language, and has learned the relevant rules.

 The natural order hypothesis: as in first language, second language unfolds in predictable sequences. The language features that are easiest to state and thus to learn are not necessarily the first to be acquired.

 The input hypothesis: acquisition occurs when one is exposed to language that is comprehensible and that contains i + 1. The ‘I’ represents the level of language already acquired, and the ‘+ 1’ is a metaphor for language (words, grammatical forms, aspects of pronunciation) that is just a step beyond that level.

 The fact that some people who are exposed to large quantities of comprehensible input do not necessarily acquire a language successfully is accounted for by Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis. The ‘affective filter’ is a metaphorical barrier that prevents learners from acquiring language even when appropriate input is available. ‘Affect’ refers to feelings, motives, needs, attitudes, and emotional states. A learner who is tense, anxious, or bored may filter out input, making it unavailable for acquisition.

Cognitive/Developmental Perspective

 Some theories use the computer as a metaphor for the mind, comparing language acquisition to the capacities of computers for storing, integrating, and retrieving information.

 Other theories draw on neurobiology, seeking to relate observed behavior as directly as possible to brain activity.

 Cognitive/developmental psychologists argue there is no need to hypothesize that humans have a language specific module in the brain or that ‘acquisition’ and ‘learning’ are distinct mental processes. They believe that general theories of learning can account for the gradual development of complex syntax and for learners’ inability to spontaneously use everything they know about language at a given time.

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 Something other than UG is required for second language acquisition since it often falls short of full success.

Information Processing

 Second language acquisition is seen as the building up of knowledge that can eventually be called upon automatically for speaking and understanding.

 Learners pay attention to any aspect of the language they are trying to understand or produce. Pay attention means using cognitive resources to process information, which is limited.

 Pay attention to the main words in a message. Through experience and practice, information becomes easier to process so attention can be paid to other aspects like grammatical morphemes attached to the ends of words.

 Practice involves cognitive effort on the part of the learner.

 Change may be described as restructuring, through a gradual build-up of fluency through practice.

Connectionism (MacWhinney)

 Connectionism attributes greater importance to the role of the environment than to any specific innate knowledge in the learning, arguing that what is innate is simply the ability to learn.

 Learners gradually build up their knowledge of language through exposure to the thousands of instances of linguistic features they hear.

 Learners develop a stronger and stronger network of connections between these elements.

 Eventually, the presence of one situational or linguistic element will active the others in the learner’s mind.

 Evidence for this view comes from the observation that much of the language that we use in ordinary conversations is predictable.

Competition Model (MacWhinney and Bates)

 Closely related to the connectionist perspective

 Through exposure to thousands of examples of language associated with particular meanings, learners come to understand how to use the ‘cues’ with which a language signals specific functions: examples are: word order, grammatical markers, and the animacy of the nouns in the sentence signal the relationship between words in a sentence.

 Most languages make use of multiple cues but differ in the primacy of each.

 English uses word order as the most common indicator of the relationships between sentence components; most sentences have an S-V-O word order.

Interaction Hypothesis (Michael Long)

 Conversational interaction is an essential condition for second language acquisition.

 Speakers modify their speech and their interaction patterns to help learners participate in a conversation or understand some information.

 Modified interaction is the necessary mechanism for making language comprehensible.

 Learners need an opportunity to interact with other speakers, working together to reach mutual comprehension.

 Interlocutors figure out what they need to do to keep the conversation going and make the input comprehensible.

 Interactional modification makes input comprehensible.

 Comprehensible input promotes acquisition.

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 Interactional modification promotes acquisition.

 Corrective feedback during interaction.

The Noticing Hypothesis (Richard Schmidt)

 Nothing is learned unless it has been noticed.

 Noticing is the essential starting point for acquisition.

 Something new or different that fills a gap in their knowledge of the language.

The Sociocultural Perspective (Vygotsky)

 Cognitive development and language development result from social interactions, between individuals.

 Speaking and writing mediate thinking; people gain control over their mental process as a consequence of internalizing what others say to them and what they say to others.

 Learning is thought to occur when an individual interacts with an interlocutor within his or her zone of proximal development (ZPD), a situation in which a learner is capable of performing at a higher level because there is support from an interlocutor.

 The ZPD is a metaphorical location in which learners co-construct knowledge in collaboration with an interlocutor.

 Learning occurs through the social interaction.

 Sociocultural theory holds that people gain control of and reorganize their cognitive processes during mediation as knowledge is internalized during social activity.

Interlanguage (Larry Selinker)

 A basic concept in second language acquisition is that of interlanguage.

 Learners create a language system, known as an interlanguage.

 This system is composed of numerous elements: from the native language and the language being learned, known as the target language.

 There are elements in the interlanguage that do not have their origin in either the native language nor the target language.

 Learners impose structure on the available linguistic data and formulate and internalize a linguistic system.

U-Shaped Learning (Kellerman)

 Language learning does NOT proceed in a linear fashion.

 Refers to stages of linguistic use.

 In the earliest stage, a learner produces some linguistic form that appears to be error-free, e.g., He is taking a cake.

 Then, at a subsequent stage the learner appears to lose what she or knew at Stage 1.

 The linguistic behavior at Stage 2 now deviates from the norm, e.g., He take a cake.

 Stage 3 looks like Stage 1 in that there is again correct target language usage, e.g., He is taking a cake.

Stages of Development Question Formation

Stage 1. Single words, single units What? What is your name?

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