How languages are learned

Patsy Lightbown
&
Nina Spada
 The first three years:
Milestones and developmental sequences
 At interesting thing about first language acquisition
is the high degree of similarity in the early language
of children all over the world.
 The earliest vocalization are simply the involuntary
cry that babies do when they are hungry or
uncomfortable.
 Soon, however, we hear the cooing and gurgling
sounds of contented baby, lying in their beds looking
at fascinating shapes and movement around them.
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 By the age of two, most children reliably produce at least
50 different words and some produced many more.
 About this time, they begin to combine words into simple
sentences such as ‘Mommy juice’ and ‘baby fall down’.
 These sentences are sometimes called ‘telegraphic’
because they leave out such things as articles,
prepositions, and auxiliary verbs.
 We recognize them as sentences, even though function
words and grammatical morphemes are missing.
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 Researchers have shown that tiny babies can hear
the difference between ‘pa’ and ‘ba’, for example.
 By the end of their first year, most babies
understand quite a few frequently repeated words.
 They wave when someone say ‘bye-bye’; they
eagerly hurried to the kitchen when ‘juice and
cookies’ are mentioned.
 At 12 months, most babies will have begun to
produce a word or two that everyone recognizes.
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 As children progress through the discovery of language in
their first three years, there are predictable patterns in the
emergence and development of many features of the
language they are learning.
 For some language features, these patterns have been
described in terms of developmental sequences or
‘stages’.
 These stages in language acquisition are related to
children’s cognitive development.
 For example, children don’t use temporal adverbs like
‘tomorrow’ until they understand time.
 Grammatical morpheme
 In the 1960s, several researchers focused on how
children acquire grammatical morphemes in English.
 In his book (1973), Roger Brown studied
(longitudinally) the language development of 3
children (Adam, Sarah and Eve).
 Brown found that 14 grammatical morphemes were
acquired in a remarkably similar sequence.
 The following list shows some of the morphemes
Brown’s studied:
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 Present progressive –ing (Mommy running)
 Plural –s (Two books)
 Irregular past forms (Baby went)
 Possessive –s (Daddy’s hat)
 Copula (Annie is happy)
 Articles the and a
 Regular past –ed (She walked)
 Third person singular simple present –s (She runs)
 Auxiliary be (He is coming)
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 Brown found that a child who had mastered the
grammatical morpheme at the bottom of the list was
sure to have mastered those at the top, but the
reverse was not true.
 Thus, there was evidence for a ‘developmental
sequence’ or order of acquisition.
 However, the children didn’t acquire the
morphemes at the same age or rate.
 Eve mastered all the morphemes before she was 2.5,
while Sarah and Adam after 4.
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 Jill and Peter de Villiers (1973) confirmed Brown’s
study in a cross-sectional study of 21 children.
 Many hypotheses have been advanced to explain
why these grammatical morphemes are acquired in
the observed order.
 However, there has been no simple satisfactory
explanation for the sequence.
 Most researchers agree that the order is determined
by an interaction of different factors.
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 Some carefully designed procedures have been
developed to further explore children’s knowledge
of grammatical morphemes.
 One of the first and best known is the so-called
‘wug test’ developed by Jean Berko Gleason in the
1950s.
 This kind of experiment shows that children’s
language is not just a list of memorized words; but it
demonstrates that they know the rule for the
formation of plural in English.
 Negation
 Children learn the functions of negation very early.
 Although children understand and express
negation, it takes them some time to express them
in sentences using the appropriate word order
(Bloom 1991).
 The following stages of negation development have
been observed in the acquisition of English. Similar
stages have been observed in other languages as
well.
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 Stage 1
Negation is usually expressed by the word ‘no’.
No. No cookie. No comb hair.
 Stages 2
Utterances are longer and may include a subject.
Daddy no comb hair. Don’t touch that!
 Stages 3
Negation is used with complex sentences. New
forms of negation appear.
I can’t do it. He don’t want it.
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 Stage 4
Children attach negative elements to correct forms
of auxiliary verbs.
You didn’t have supper.
She doesn't want it.
 Even though their language system is by now
quite complex, they may still have difficulty with
other features related to negatives; e.g.,
I don’t have no more candies.
 Questions
 There is a remarkable consistency in the way
children learn to form questions in English.
 There is a predictable order in which the wh-
words emerge (Bloom 1991).
 The first form of a wh-question seems to be the
chunk ‘whassat?’.
 ‘Where’ and ‘who’ emerge very soon. These seem
to be the first wh-questions to be asked by adults,
for example; ‘where’s mommy?’, ‘who’s that?’
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 Child when can we go outside?
 Parent in about 5 minutes.
 Child 1-2-3-4-5!! can we go now?

 The ability to use question words is at least partly

tied to children’s cognitive development.
 This development is not based on learning new
meanings, but rather learning different linguistic
forms to express meanings that are already
understood.
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 ‘Why’ emerges around the end of the second year
and becomes the favorite for the next year or two.
 Children seem to ask an endless number of
questions beginning with ‘why’, e.g., ‘why that lady
has blue hair?’.
 Finally, when the child has a better understanding of
manner and time, ‘how’ and ‘when’ emerge.
 Children sometimes ask the more cognitively
difficult why, when, and how questions without
always understanding the answers they get, e.g.,
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 Stage 1
children’s earliest questions are single words or
2/3 word sentences with rising intonation:
cookie? Mommy book?
 At the same time, they may produce some correct
questions – correct because they have learned as
chunks:
when is daddy?
What is that?
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 Stage 2
children use the word order of the declarative
sentence, with rising intonation:
You like this?
I have some?
 They continue to produce the correct chunk-
learned forms such as ‘what’s that?’ alongside
their own created questions.
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 Stage 3
children notice that the structure of questions is
different and begin to produce questions such as:
Can I go? Are you happy?
 Although some questions at this stage match the
adult pattern, the concept of fronting is not fully
understood:
Is the teddy is tired? Do I can have a cookie?
Why you don’t have one? Why you catched it?
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 Stage 4
some questions are formed by subject-auxiliary
inversion. There is more variety in the auxiliary that
appear before the subject:
Are you going to play with me?
 Children can even use do-support as in the
following:
do dogs like ice cream?
 At this stage, children seem to use either inversion
or a wh- word, but not both.
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 Stage 5
At this stage, both wh- and ‘ yes/no’ questions are
formed correctly:
Are these your boots?
Why did you do that?
Does daddy have a box?
 Negative questions may still be a bit too difficult.
why the teddy bear can’t go outside?
 Children seem to overgeneralize the inversion in
embedded wh-questions:
ask him why can’t he go out.
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 Stage 6
At this stage, children are able to correctly form
all question types, including negative and complex
embedded questions.
 The pre-school years
 By the age of four, most children can ask questions,
give commands, report real events, and create
stories about imaginary ones – using correct word
order and grammatical markers most of the time.
 It is generally accepted that by age four, children
have mastered the basic structures of the language
spoken to them in these early years.
 Three-and four-year-olds continue to learn
vocabulary at the rate of several words a day.
 The school years
 Although preschool children acquire complex
knowledge and skills for language, the school
setting will require new ways of using language and
bring new opportunities for language development.
 Learning to read gives a major boost to this aspect
of language development.
 Seeing words represented by letters on a page leads
children to a new understanding that language has
form as well as meaning.
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 Much of children’s language acquisition effort in
the late preschool years is spent in developing
their ability to use language in a widening social
environment.
 They use language in a greater variety of
situations.
 They also begin to develop metalinguistic
awareness.
 Children can tell you that it is silly to say ‘drink
the chair’, because it doesn’t make sense.
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 Another important development in the school
years is the acquisition of different language
registers.
 Children learn how written language differs from
spoken language, how the language used to speak
to the principal is different from the language of
the playground, how the language of science
report is different from the language of a narrative.
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 One of the most impressive language developments
in the early school years is the astonishing growth
of the vocabulary.
 Children enter school with the ability to understand
and produce hundreds or even a few thousand
words.
 Many more are learnt at school. Vocabulary grows
at the rate between several hundred and more than a
thousand words a year, depending mainly on how
much children read.