Summary

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.