First language acquisition
Language acquisition in children
• two different psychological processes:
a) speech understanding
b) speech production
• understanding starts a long time before production
• acquisition = happens automatically vs.
learning = conscious process
Stages of language acquisition
1) pre-linguistic stage: ~ 0-6 month
2) babbling:
• around the 6th month
• large variety of sounds, many of which do not occur in the parent‘s language, e.g. “mu“
• children learn to maintain the “right“ sounds and suppress the “wrong“ ones.
• earlier theory, that babbling was pre-linguistic and simply neuromuscular in origin.
3) first words
• sometime after 1 year
• children have learned that sounds are related to meanings
• one word = one sentence stage; these sentences are called holophrastic sentences
• Words in the holophrastic sentences serve 3 major functions:
a) they either are linked with a child‘s own action
or desire for action
b) are used to convey emotion
c) serve a naming function
4) two-word stage
• Around the 2nd birthday
• children put two words together
• The intonation contour of the two words extends over the whole utterance rather than being separated by a pause between the two words
E.g. baby chair
• No syntactic or morphological markers (i.e. no inflections for number, person, tense…). Pronouns are rare
5) complete sentences
• there is no three-word sentence stage.
• the first childhood utterances longer that two words have a special characteristic. The function words (grammatical morphemes) such as to, the, can, is… are missing; only the words that carry the main message – the open-class content words – occur. → telegraphic speech
• nevertheless, children‘s utterances adhere to the word order constraints of the language they are acquiring
Invalid theories about language acquisition
• imitation theory
• reinforcement...