First Language Acquisition

Presented to: Prof Nazir Malik

Presenters
Muhammad Ayyaz
Muhammad Ajmal Khurshid
Imtiaz Ahmed
Sajjad Ahmed

UNIVERSITY OF MANAGEMENT AND TECHNOLOGY

Reviewing Linguistic Stages
■ 6-12 weeks: Cooing (googoo, gurgling, coocoo)
■ 6 months: Babbling (baba, mama, dada)
■ 8-9 months: Intonation patterns
■ 1-1.5 years: Holphrastic stage (one word)
■ 2 years: Two-word stage
■ 2.5 years: Telegraphic stage
■ 3,4 – 11 years: Fluent speech w/errors
■ 12 years+: Fluent speech
• Features:
SPEED:
First language acquisition is remarkable for
the speed with which it takes place.

SOPHISTICATED LANGUAGE USER:

Long before a child starts school, he or she
has become an extremely sophisticated
language-user, operating a system for self-
expression and communication
that no other creature, or computer, comes
close to matching.
OVERT INSTRUCTIONS:

In addition to the speed of acquisition, the fact that

it generally occurs, without overt instruction, for all
children, regardless of great differences in their
circumstances, provides strong support for the idea
that there is an innate predisposition in the human
infant to acquire language.
SPECIAL CAPACITY:
We can think of this as a special capacity for
language with which each newborn child is
endowed. By itself, however, this inborn language
capacity is not enough.
 Basic requirements

INTERACTION:

During the first two or three years of development,

a child requires interaction with other language-
users in order to bring this general language
capacity into operation with a particular language
such as English.
LANGUAGE USING ENVIRONMNET:

We have also identified the importance of cultural

transmission, meaning that the language a child
learns is not genetically inherited, but is acquired in
a particular language-using environment.
PHYSICAL CAPABILITY:

The child must also be physically capable of

sending and receiving sound signals in a
language. All infants make ‘cooing’ and
‘babbling’ noises during their first year, but
congenitally deaf infants stop aftCer about six
months
EXPOSURE TO TV, etc:

One reported case has demonstrated that, with deaf

parents who gave their normal-hearing son ample
exposure to TV and radio programs, the boy did not
acquire an ability to speak or understand English.
What he did learn very effectively, by the age of
three, was the use of American Sign Language – the
language he used to interact with his parents.
OPPORTUNITY:

The crucial requirement appears to be the

opportunity to interact with others via language.
 The acquisition schedule
All normal children develop language at roughly
the same time, along much the same schedule.
Since we could say the same thing for sitting up,
standing, walking, using the hands and many other
physical activities, it would seem that the language
acquisition schedule has the same basis as the
biologically determined development of motor
skills. This biological schedule is tied very much to
the maturation of the infant’s brain.
LINGUISTIC ‘INPUT’

We could think of the child as having the biological

capacity to cope with distinguishing certain aspects
of linguistic ‘input’ at different stages during the
early years of life.

For example:
At one month an infant is capable of
distinguishing between sounds such as [ba] and
[pa].
CONSTATNT TYPE OF ACQUISITION:

What this acquisition capacity then requires is a

sufficiently constant type of ‘input’ from which the
basis of the regularities in a particular language can
be worked out. In this view, young children are
seen as actively acquiring the language by
identifying
the regularities in what is heard and then applying
those regularities in what they say.
 Caregiver speech
Under normal circumstances, human infants are
certainly helped in their language acquisition by
the typical behavior of older children and adults
in the home environment.
ADDRESSING THE LITTLE CHILDREN:

Adults such as mom, dad and the grandparents tend

not to address the little creature before them as if
they are involved in normal adultto-adult
conversation. There is not much of this: Well, John
Junior, shall we invest in blue chip industrials, or
would grain futures offer better short-term
prospects? However, there does seem to be a lot of
this: Oh, goody, now Daddy push choo choo? The
characteristically simplified speech style adopted by
someone who spends a lot of time interacting with a
young child is called caregiver speech.
FREQUENT USE OF QUESTION:

Salient features of this type of speech (also called

‘motherese’ or ‘childdirected speech’) are the
frequent use of questions, often using exaggerated
intonation, extra loudness and a slower tempo with
longer pauses.
CONVERSATIONAL STRUCTURE:

Built into a lot of caregiver speech is a type of

conversational structure that seems to assign an
interactive role to the young child even before he
or she becomes a speaking participant.

SIMPLE SENTENCE STRUCTRES

Caregiver speech is also characterized by simple
sentence structures and a lot
of repetition
Stages in the acquisition process
 Cooing and babbling

The earliest use of speech-like sounds has been

described as cooing. During the first few months
of life, the child gradually becomes capable of
producing sequences of vowel-like sounds,
particularly high vowels similar to [i] and [u].
FOURTH MONTHS OF AGE:

By four months of age, the developing ability to

bring the back of the tongue into regular contact
with the back of the palate allows the infant to
create sounds similar to the velar consonants [k]
and [g], hence the common description as
‘cooing’ or ‘gooing’ for this type of production.
FIVE MONTHS OF AGE:

Speech perception studies have shown that by the

time they are five months old, babies can already
hear the difference between the vowels [i] and [a]
and discriminate between syllables like [ba] and
[ga].
SIX AND EIGHT MONTHS:

Between six and eight months, the child is sitting

up and producing a number of different vowels
and consonants, as well as combinations such as
ba-ba-ba and ga-ga-ga. This type of sound
production is described as babbling.
NINE TO TEN MONTHS:

In the later babbling stage, around nine to ten

months, there are recognizable intonation patterns
to the consonant and vowel combinations being
produced, as well as variation in the combinations
such as ba-ba-da-da. Nasal sounds also become
more common and certain syllable sequences such
as ma-ma-ma and da-dada are inevitably
interpreted by parents as versions of ‘mama’ and
‘dada’ and repeated back to the child.
TENTH AND ELEVENTH MONTHS:

As children begin to pull themselves into a standing

position during the tenth and eleventh months,
they become capable of using their vocalizations
to express emotions and emphasis.
 The one-word stage

Between twelve and eighteen months, children

begin to produce a variety of recognizable single-
unit utterances. This period, traditionally called
the oneword stage, is characterized by speech in
which single terms are uttered for everyday
objects such as ‘milk’, ‘cookie’, ‘cat’, ‘cup’ and
‘spoon’ (usually
pronounced [pun]).
HOLOPHRASTIC:

We sometimes use the term holophrastic (meaning

a single form functioning as a phrase or sentence)
to describe an utterance that could be analyzed as
a word, a phrase, or a sentence.
SUCH UTTERANCES:

While many of these holophrastic utterances seem

to be used to name objects, they may also be
produced in circumstances that suggest the child
is already extending their use.
 The two-word stage

Depending on what we count as an occurrence of

two distinct words used together, the two-word
stage can begin around eighteen to twenty
months, as the child’s vocabulary moves beyond
fifty words.

By the time the child is two years old, a variety of

combinations, similar to baby chair, mommy eat,
cat bad,will usually have appeared
RECEIVING FEEDBACK:

The child not only produces speech,

but receives feedback confirming that the utterance
worked as a contribution to
the interaction.
 Telegraphic speech
Between two and two-and-a-half years old, the
child begins producing a large number of
utterances that could be classified as ‘multiple-
word’ speech.

STRINGS OF WORDS:
This is characterized by strings of words (lexical
morphemes) in phrases or sentences such as this
shoe all wet, cat drink milk and daddy go bye-
bye.
SENTENCE BUILDING CAPACITY:

The child has clearly developed some sentence-

building capacity by this stage and can get the
word
order correct.

GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS:
While this type of telegram-format speech is being
produced, a number of grammatical inflections begin
to appear in some of the word-forms and simple
prepositions (in, on) are also used.
TWO AND A HALF-YEARS:

By the age of two-and-a-half years, the child’s

vocabulary is expanding rapidly and the child is
initiating more talk while increased physical
activity includes running and jumping.

BY THREE:
the vocabulary has grown to hundreds of words and
pronunciation has become closer to the form of
adult language.
 The acquisition process

As the linguistic repertoire of the child increases, it

is often assumed that the child is, in some sense,
being ‘taught’ the language.

NO INSTRUCTIONS:
For the vast majority of children, no one provides
any instruction on how to speak the language.
TRYING OUT CONSTRUCTIONS AND
TESTING:

The child’s linguistic production appears to be

mostly a matter of trying out constructions and
testing whether they work or not.
PROCESS OF IMITATING:

It is simply not possible that the child is acquiring

the language principally through a process of
imitating adult speech. Certainly, children can be
heard to repeat versions of what adults say on
occasion and they are clearly in the process of
adopting a lot of vocabulary from the speech they
hear.
ADULT CORRECTION:

It is also unlikely that adult ‘corrections’ are a very

effective determiner of how the child speaks.

ACTUAL USE OF SOUND AND WORD

COMBINATION:
One factor that seems to be important in the child’s
acquisition process is the actual use of sound and
word combinations, either in interaction with
others or in word play, alone
 Developing morphology

By the time a child is two-and-a-half years old, he

or she is going beyond telegraphic speech forms
and incorporating some of the inflectional
morphemes that indicate the grammatical
function of the nouns and verbs used. The first to
appear is usually the -ing form in expressions
such as cat sitting and mommy reading book.
REGULAR PLURALS:

The next morphological development is typically

the marking of regular plurals with the -s form, as
in boys and cats. The acquisition of the plural
marker is often accompanied by a process of
overgeneralization.
OVERGENERALIZATION:

The child overgeneralizes the apparent rule of

adding -s to form plurals and will talk about
foots and mans.

When the alternative pronunciation of the plural

morpheme used in houses (i.e. ending in [-əz])
comes into use, it too is given an overgeneralized
application and forms such as boyses or footses can
be heard.
IRREGULAR PLURALS:

At the same time as this overgeneralization is taking

place, some children also begin using irregular
plurals such as men quite appropriately for a while,
but then try out the general rule on the forms,
producing expressions like some mens and two
feets, or even two feetses.
FORMS OF VERB ‘TO BE’

At about the same time, different forms of the verb

‘to be’, such as are and was, begin to be used.
The appearance of forms such as was and, at
about the
same time, went and came should be noted. These
are irregular past-tense forms that we would not
expect to hear before the more regular forms.
 Developing syntax
Similar evidence against ‘imitation’ as the basis of
the child’s speech production has been found in
studies of the syntactic structures used by young
children. One child, specifically asked to repeat
what she heard, would listen to an adult say
forms such as the owl who eats candy runs fast
and then repeat them in the form owl eat candy
and he run fast. It is clear that the child
understands what
the adult is saying. She just has her own way of
expressing it.
DEVELOPMENT OF SYNTAX:

There have been numerous studies of the

development of syntax in children’s speech. We
will look at the development of two structures
that seem to be acquired in a regular way by most
English-speaking children. In the formation of
questions and the use of negatives, there appear
to be three identifiable stages.
THE AGES: at which children go through these
stages can vary quite a bit, but the general pattern
seems to be that stage 1 occurs between 18 and
26 months, stage 2 between 22 and 30 months,
and stage 3 between 24 and 40 months.
 Forming questions
In forming questions, the child’s first stage has two
procedures. Simply add a Wh-form(Where,Who)
to the beginning of the expression or utter the
expression with a rise in intonation towards the
end, as in these examples:
Where kitty? Doggie?
Where horse go? Sit chair?
IN THE SECOND STAGE:
more complex expressions can be formed, but the
rising intonation strategy continues to be used. It is
noticeable that more Wh-forms come into use, as in
these

examples:
What book name? You want eat?
Why you smiling? See my doggie?
IN THE THIRD STAGE: the required inversion of
subject and verb in English questions appears (I can
go→Can I go?), but the Wh-questions do not
always undergo the required inversion.
 Forming negatives

In the case of negatives, STAGE 1 seems to involve

a simple strategy of putting no or not at the
beginning, as in these examples:
no mitten not a teddy bear no fall no sit there
In the SECOND STAGE, the additional negative
forms don’t and can’t appear, and
with no and not, are increasingly used in front of
the verb rather than at thebeginning of the
sentence, as in these examples:

-He no bite you I don’t want it

-That not mommy You can’t dance
The THIRD STAGE sees the incorporation of other
auxiliary forms such as didn’t and won’t while the
typical stage 1 forms disappear. A very late
acquisition is the negative form isn’t, with the result
that some stage 2 forms (with not instead of isn’t)
continue to be used for quite a long time, as in the

examples:
I didn’t caught it He not taking it
She won’t let go This not ice cream
 Developing semantics

The anecdotes that parents retell about their child’s

early speech (to the intense embarrassment of the
grown-up child) usually involve examples of the
strange use of words. Having been warned that
flies bring germs into the house, one child was
asked what “germs” were and the answer was
“something the flies play with”. It is not always
possible to determine so precisely the meanings
that children attach to the words they use.
HOLOPHRASTIC STAGE:

It seems that during the holophrastic stage many

children use their limited vocabulary to refer to a
large number of unrelated objects.
OVEREXTENSION:
One child first used bow-wow to refer to a dog and
then to a fur piece with glass eyes, a set of cufflinks
and even a bath thermometer. The word bow-wow
seemed to have a meaning like ‘object with shiny
bits’. Other children often extend bow-wow to refer
to cats, cows and horses. This process is called
overextension and the most common pattern is for
the child to overextend the meaning of a word on
the basis of similarities of shape, sound and size,
and, to a lesser extent, movement and texture.
SIMILARITIES OF TEXTURE:

Apparently due to similarities of texture, the

expression sizo was first used by one child for
scissors, and then extended to all metal objects.
DEVELOPMENT OF SEMANTICS:

The semantic development in a child’s use of words

is usually a process of overextension initially,
followed by a gradual process of narrowing down
the application of each term as more words are
learned.
COMPLETION:

Despite the fact that the child is still acquiring

aspects of his or her native language through the
later years of childhood, it is normally assumed
that, by the age of five, the child has completed
the greater part of the basic language acquisition
process
L 2 LEARNING:

According to some, the child is then in a good

position to start learning a second (or foreign)
language. However, most people don’t start
trying to learn another language until much later.
THE QUESTION that always arises is: if first
language acquisition was so straightforward and
largely automatic, why is learning a second
language so difficult? The next presenters will
answer this particular question.