The
Linguistic Capacity of Children.
They extract the
rules from the language they hear around them on all their own, in effect
“reinventing” the grammar of mature speakers. They do not require any specific
kind of environment to do this. Children exposed to different languages under
different cultural and social circumstances all develop their native language
during a narrow window of time, going through similar, possibly universal,
developmental stages.
What’s
learned, what’s not?
The ease and rapidity
of children’s language acquisition and the uniformity of the stages of
development for all children and all languages, despite the poverty of the stimulus they receive, suggest that the language
faculty is innate and that the infant comes to the complex task already endowed
with a universal grammar. UG is not a grammar like the grammar of English or
Arabic, but represents the principles and parameters to which all human
languages conform. Language acquisition is a creative process. Children create
grammars based on the linguistic input and are guided in this process by UG.
Stages
in Language Acquisition.
Children do not wake
up one morning with a fully formed grammar in their heads. In moving from first
words to adult competence children pass through linguistic stages. They begin
by babbling, they then acquire their first words, and in just a few months they
begin to put words together into sentences.
The Perception and Production of
Speech Sounds.
A newborn will respond to
phonetic contrast found in human languages even when these differences are not
phonemic in the language spoken in the baby’s home. In the babbling stage the sounds produced in this period include many
sounds that do not occur in the language of the household. Babbles begin to
sound like words, although they may not have any specific meaning attached to
them. At the same age, deaf children exposed to sign language produce a
restricted set of signs in each case the forms are drawn from the set of
possible sounds or possible sounds or possible gestures found in spoken and
signed languages. First words stage,
in this stage the child may differ from the words of the adult language. During
the second year, they learn many more words and the develop much of the
phonological system of the language. Most children go through a stage in which
their utterances consist of only one word. This is called the holophrastic or “whole phrase” stage.
One method of segmenting speech is prosodic
bootstrapping infants can use the stress pattern of the language as a start
to word learning.
The Acquisition of Phonology.
The phonemic inventory is much smaller than is found
in the adult language. It appears that children first acquire the small set of
sound common to all languages regardless of the ambient language (s), and in
later stages acquire the less common sounds of their own language
.
The
Acquisition of Word Meaning.
Eventually children
do figure out the adult meanings of words. How do they do this? Most people do
not see this aspect of acquisition as posing a great problem. The intuitive
view is the children look at an object, the mother says a word, and the child
connects the sounds with the object. Children often overextend a word’s meaning. A child may learn a word such as papa or daddy, which she first uses only
for her own father, and then extend its meaning to apply to all men. Children
may also use a lexical item in an overly restrictive way. This is referred to
as underextension. The complement
types that a verb selects can provide clues to its meaning and thereby help the
child. This learning of word meaning based on syntax is referred to as syntactic bootstrapping.
The
Acquisition of Morphology.
The child’s
acquisition of morphology provides some of the clearest evidence of rule
learning. Children’s errors inflectional morphology reveals that the child
acquires the regular rules of the grammar and then over applies them. This overgeneralization occurs when children
treat irregular verbs and nouns as if they were regular. We have probably all
heard children say bringed, drawed, and
runned, or foots mouses, and sheeps. These mistakes tell us much about how
children learn language because such forms could not arise through imitation.
The
Acquisition of Syntax.
Children mature at
different rates and the age at which children start to produce words and put
words together varies, chronological age is not a good measure of a child’s
language development. Instead, researches use the child’s mean length of utterances (MLU) to measure progress. MLU is the
average length of the utterances the child is producing at a particular point.
MLU is usually measured in terms of morphemes, so words like boys, danced, and crying each have a
value of two (morphemes). In order to apply morphological and syntactic rules
the child must know what syntactic categories the words in his language belong
to. In semantic bootstrapping the
child may have rules such as “if a word refers to a physical object, it’s a
noun” or “if a word refers to an action, it’s a verb”, and so on. Word Frames may also help the child to
determine when words belong to the same category. During the telegraphic stage, the child produces
longer sentences that often lack function or grammatical morphemes.
The
Acquisition of Pragmatics.
Children do not
always respect the pragmatic rule for articles. Implicatures are another part
of pragmatics that young children have difficulty with. It may take a child
several months or years to master those aspects of pragmatics that involve the
felicitous use of determiners and pronouns, or the conversational maxims which
when violated(usually purposely) result in implicatures. Other aspects of
pragmatics are acquired very early.
