Language Language AcquisitionAcquisitionLanguage Language

AcquisitionAcquisition

Instructor Marwan Alalimi

Revision

• Linguistics• Applied linguistics• Linguistics in language

teaching• language teaching operation.• Competence vs. performance.

First language acquisition

• Acquisition vs. learning. • First language acquisition

vs. Second language a acquisition.

• Foreign language.• Dialect vs. accent

First language acquisition theories

• Behaviorist theory: (say what I say).• Behaviorism (1940s- 1950s)• Language is not a mental

phenomenon; it’s a behavior.• It’s learned by a process of habit

formation.• Language development= immitation

practice

The key principles of behaviorist school

• Stimulus response principle.Stimulus response principle.

• Repetition and reinforcement Repetition and reinforcement principle.principle.

• Reward – punishment principle. Reward – punishment principle.

• Stimulus response principle.Stimulus response principle.

• Repetition and reinforcement Repetition and reinforcement principle.principle.

• Reward – punishment principle. Reward – punishment principle.

The main components of the habit formation

process• The child imitates the sounds and

patterns hearing around him.• People recognize the child attempts as

being similar to adults’ utterance• They reinforce or reward the sounds, by

approval or by desirable reaction.• The child repeats the sounds to gain more

rewards, such repetitions become habits. • In this manner, the verbal behavior is

shaped until the habits coincide with the adult models.

Stimulus response Stimulus response principleprinciple..

S = child asking for food R= mother gives food S = child asking for food R= mother gives food to her child.to her child.

Repetition and Repetition and reinforcement principlereinforcement principle..

Teacher explains → Student doesn’t Teacher explains → Student doesn’t understand understand

→ → teacher repeats again for → teacher repeats again for → reinforcement.reinforcement.

Reward – Reward – punishment punishment

principleprinciple..Student → studies hard rewarded by → Student → studies hard rewarded by →

successsuccess

Student doesn’t study hard punished by Student doesn’t study hard punished by →failure.→failure.

We will examine a transcripts from a child

and his mother- Child: No body doesn’t like me.- Mother: No, say “nobody likes me”.- Child: No body don’t like me.(the dialogue continues for several times)

- Mother: Now listen carefully-say “No body likes me”.

- Child: Oh, No body don’t like me.

We conclude.…• Children don’t learn by imitation.• They don’t learn through

reinforcement.• They don’t learn through structural

input.• They construct their own grammar.

Inadequacies of behaviorism

• Language is not just verbal behavior. • Creativity’s not possible if we rely on

learnt behavior.• Habit-formation can’t explain student’s

competence. • Observing and imitating verbal behavior

can’t explain the difference between surface and deep structure.

E.g. john is easy to please/ john is eager to please.

Cognitive or innatist approach (it’s all in your

mind) • Chomsky: All human languages are

fundamentally innate and that the same universal principles underlie all of them.

• A human child is born with the ability to learn any language. This ability enables them to use a language creatively.

• (Language Acquisition Device) “LAD” refers to that children have inborn ability to learn a language which other beings don’t have. However, they learn from the environment in which they are brought up.

UG (Universal Grammar)

• A name for Linguistic theory of the genetic component of the language faculty. There’s a reason why a child identifies some part of her/his environment as language related, how that happened?

- It’s a Miracle.- Specifically Genetic capacity.We all have the same capacity for learning any

language in the world.

Language UniversalsLanguage UniversalsLINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS > UNIVERSAL LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS > UNIVERSAL

GRAMMARGRAMMARAll languages have:

1. A grammar2. Basic word order (in terms of SOV, etc.)3. Nouns and verbs4. Subjects and objects5. Consonants and vowels

Language development

Involves: • Phonological development - learning

to produce speech sounds.• Semantic development - learning to

understand the meanings of words.• Acquisition of grammar - the rules

through which words can be arranged into sentences in a certain language

1. Crying: Since birth, different cries for different needs.

2. Cooing: 2-3 months; vowel like sounds3. Babbling: 3-9 months, adding

consonant sounds to the vowels to make babbling sound, which at times can almost sound like real speech

Stages of firstlanguage development

Stages of first language

development3. One-word sentence: just before or

around 1 yr, most children begin to say actual words. Typically nouns and may seem to represent an entire phrase of meaning (holophrases). E.g. “Milk!”

4. Two-word sentence: around a two years children being to produce two words such as “ no juice” I don’t want juice or .

Stages of language

development5. Clipped sentences: 2-4 years children

construct longer sentences – rapid speech.6.Whole sentences: Moving through

preschool years, they learn to use grammatical terms and increase words in their sentences. By age of 6 or so, nearly as fluent as an adult although the number of words they know is still limited when compared to adult vocabulary.

• Chomsky’s ideas are linked to the (CPH)- Animals including humans are generally programmed to acquire certain kinds of knowledge and skills at specific time in life, beyond those critical periods it’s either difficult of impossible to acquire the those abilities.

• Regarding language, CPH suggest that children who are not given access to language in infancy and early childhood will never acquire language if these deprivation go on for too long.

• The case of Victor and Genie.

Critical Period Hypothesis

Thank you