Language Acquisition Process

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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.

2 - Physical Fitness

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.

3 - The Critical Age

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:

a - Cooing

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.

III - Morphology:

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.

IV - Syntax:

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.

2 - Rationalism:

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.