Language Acquisition Process
By
Badr Assila,
badrassila2005[at]hotmail.com
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I
- the basic requirements:
1 - Exposure
It is the first basic
requirement for language acquisition. If we take a child
born of Moroccan parents and put him in another social
environment, such as Italy, he will speak the language
spoken there (i.e. Italian) not Moroccan Arabic. This
is called cultural transmission, not genetic transmission.
If the child were not exposed to a human language, “the
language faculty” (that is the ability to acquire language)
with which he is born, can not be activated.
There is no language
output if language faculty was not activated. This leads
us to say that language acquisition requires both the
auditory and the acoustic input.
The critical age, called
Puberty, occurs in the area where language is. Language
acquisition has to be activated before this age. If the
language faculty is not activated on time that is before
this age language acquisition will certainly fail.
II - Stages of Language Acquisition:
1 - Pre- Linguistic
Period:
During their first months, children
cry many times in a day; these cries are accompanied
by producing some sounds.
b - Babbling:
Babies all over the world
produce the same sounds and they may produce sounds that
are never used in their environment. Babbling is an internal
behaviour not a response to external stimulation. Children
around the sixth to the ninth month begin to differentiate
between the sounds and select the sounds that exist in
their environment.
2 - The Linguistic Period:
a - The Holophrastic Stage
After one year, children have learnt
that sounds are related to meanings; they begin to go
through the one-word which is considered for them as
one-utterance. The words in this stage serve three major
functions. First, they are linked with a child’ own
action or desire for action. Second, they are used to
convey emotions. Third, they serve a naming function.
b - The Two-Word Utterances:
Babies begin to produce two- word utterances
which can show different combination of word order.
In this stage, the words lack morphological and syntactic
markers but we can notice that there is a word order.
c - Telegraphic Stage:
At this stage, the word forms are beginning
to varry; inflectional morphemes begin to appear in
addition to the use of simple prepositions. The child
pronunciation is closer to the adult one.
Some inflectional morphemes will appear,
indicating functions of the nouns and the verbs. The
child is going to use all the verbs he knows in −ing
form, in the same way, all nouns with plural. This is
referred to as the process of Generalization.
For the past inflection, the child is
going to use the verb “go” with {−ed} and say ⁄goed⁄.
By the time, the baby learns further rules, he is going
to over generalize them.
The child’s speech shows
strong evidence against imitation because his own production
remains different on morphological and syntactic level.
Many studies about the development of syntax in the child’s
language have shown that the use of the child language
never violates the English syntactic rules. In the two-word
stage, the baby either begins his utterance with a wh-word
or only uses a rising intonation. By the Telegraphic speech,
he may not use inversion; he would use negation, and may
use double negation regularly.
V - Theories of Language Acquisition:
1 - Empiricism:
This school is based
on four theories or hypothesises. The stimulus theory,
the correctness theory; trial and errors theory, and the
imitation theory. The empiricists believe that the actual
experience is the source of ideas. The mind is at first
a “Tabula Rasa”, they believe that we have no special
inborn capacity to acquire language. Language is entirely
learnt through environmental stimulus and behavioural
response. The empiricists believe that the child imitates
the adult in speaking.
The rationalists believe
that the reason is the chief source of knowledge. They
stress on the fact that children acquire language so readily
because it is in their genes. They also believe that children
are born with a capacity to acquire many languages.
→ But these two schools agree on some
points. First, they agree that children have to be exposed
to a certain language. Second, they also agree on learning.
Do children learn language by imitation?
Close observation of babies acquiring their first language
show that children do not imitate and that also children
do not hear the corrections.
Children behave as efficient linguists; they form linguistic
rules and apply them by generalization. The over-generalization
process does not occur in adult’s speech and this is
another proof against the hypothesis of imitation.
Do children learn language through enforcement?
Of course children do not learn their language through
enforcement. And this example shows this:
Child: nobody don’t
like me
Adult: no, say, nobody likes me
Child: nobody don’t
likes me
Expansion:
It means that there are parents who try to expand their
children’s simple forms into proper sentences.
Motherese:
It means that there are some parents who try to simplify
their speech to their children using simple forms at
the early stages.
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