FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

MY DEAR FRIENDS THIS TERM WE HAVE A LANGUAGE ACQUISITION CLASS DON'T WORRY BUT I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER THIS LESSON IT IS not so easy but we know that if we work on that we can achieve lets start with some basic knowledge about it.

FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES

I - INTRODUCTION

First language acquisition theories are expected to answer such questions as:

a- WHAT do children learn when they acquire their first language?

b- HOW do they learn what they learn? For example, how do they determine what words mean, or how to produce grammatical utterances they have never heard before?

c- WHY do they learn (a) language?

Do they learn it:

-because their parents or adults teach it to them?

- because they are genetically programmed to acquire a language?

- because it is just there, thus they can't help learning it?

-in the service of some need to communicate with others and to meet their needs through language?

- because their mental productivity forces them to emit their production so that others may know it and because the same productivity forces them to have insight what others emit?

Gleason and Ratner (1998) argue that theories which attempt to explain first language acquisition must account for some facts about the phenomenon.

1- Children learn language rapidly. In only a few years, they progress from no language comprehension or production to almost adult capacity.

2- Across languages, some systematic regularities exist in what children learn both early and late, as well as some differences that require explanation.

3- There are systematic errors in children's language production. (e.g We holded the baby rabbit.)

4- There is a predictable sequence of acquisition of linguistic components. (e.g.1 Concrete nouns are acquired before abstract nouns. e.g 2 Young children respond more rapidly to relative clauses formed on the subjects than on objects. Keenan and Comrie, 1977)

5- Every average (even those who are retarded) child learns the language s/he is exposed to. Children who are not exposed to a language, for some reasons, have developed a language which abides with UG principles.

Two poles in the explanation of language acquisition

At the one pole, there are scholars who claim that language acquisition/production is a learned behavior which is not different from general learning system and that parents teach language to their children.

At the other pole, there are scholars who assume that language is innate, that there are universal principles which govern language acquisition which are prewired at birth.

There are many dimensions in language acquisition theories which are derived from these two poles.

Nature or Nurture

Is language innate in the sense that it is encoded on the genes of human beings or is it learned/taught through interaction with the environment?

Continuity or Discontinuity?

Is language development continuous without any transitions and stages or does it occur in discernable stages?

Universal competence or Individual variation?

Do all normal speakers of a language share the same linguistic knowledge? Does individual knowledge vary greatly? Do all the children acquire language in the same way or is each child unique in language acquisition?

Structure or Function?

Should researchers who study language concentrate on the grammar of the language or the ways children use it in various situations?

Autonomy or Dependency?

Is language a separate faculty of human mind which works according to its own principles or is it a subordinate part of general human cognition?

Rules or Associations?

Is a child who is acquiring a language internalizing a set of abstract cognitive principles or is s/he learning language as a set of connections?

First Language Acquisition Theories	Theoretician(s)	Development, Hypotheses and assumptions
Behaviorist/Learning Theory	Watson (Psychologist) Pavlov B.F. Skinner Albert Bandura Charles Osgood	Watson(1913), behavior could be explained in terms of observable acts that could be described by stimulus-response sequences Hypothesis: Language is acquired according to the general laws of learning and is similar to any other learned behavior. Classical conditioning Operant conditioning Social learning (There is a mediator between the stimulus and response: the human mind. Osgood's mediation theory (though Osgood places his theory in the behavioristic paradigm, his theory is based partly on cognitivism and innativism for a number of reasons) Pitfalls:  Novel utterances which have never been heard by children Lacking of some categories in production (e.g function words) No explanation for the logical problem of first language acquisition.
Linguistic/Innatist Theory	Psammetichus Lenneberg(critical period hypothesis) Chomsky Goldin-Meadow (deaf children's developing language) Bickerton (pidgin--creaole) Lightfoot	Hypothesis: Many aspects of language development are preprogrammed in the individual and a child does not require explicit teaching or experience in order to acquire language. (Not "a" language)  Language is autonomous (Modular) There are Universal Principles (UG) which any natural human language obeys. LAD Evidence for the hypothesis Studies with deaf  Pidgin -- > creole studies deficiency of input (Lightfoot) Negative evidence and correction
Cognitive Theory	Piaget (1970s)	Hypothesis: Language is a subordinate part of cognitive development. Object permanence Children develop in many ways simultaneously Children learn the world around them first (Language is mapped onto an individual's set of prior cognitive structures, and the principles of language are no different from other cognitive principles.) Temporal development Counter evidence: Children whose sensory-motor developments are not completed were able to learn language. (p. 385)
Social Interactionist Theory	Bruner  Gleason	Hypothesis: Language is learned through active interaction between the child and the environment. Language learning is a process of socializaton. CDS--> bootstrapping LAD exists, but No critical period LASS (Language Acquisition Socialization System)  Watching TV or listening to  the radio Children are not little grammarians, motivated to decode the syntax of the language around them through the operation of their LAD, but social beings who acquire language in the service of their needs to communicate with others. Marriage of Chomsky's LAD and Bruner's LASS.
Connectionist Models	McClelland Rumelhart	Hypothesis: Language is built through connections, but not rules. (Post-behaviorist theory)  meaning of words (bottle-->milk) PDP (Parallel Distributed Processing) Sufficient exposure Connectionist theories model language acquisition at the neural level. (acquisition of inflectional system)