Language is learned because of an innate, biological ability we are born with.

Chapter 2 

First Language Acquisition

1. Theories of First Language Acquisition

Telegraphic utterance : Tow-word and three-word sentences that appear about 18 months of age

ex) all gone milk / shoe off / baby go boom

Behaviorist : Children come into the world with a tabula rasa, a clean slate bearing no preconceived notions about the world or about language, and that these children are then shaped by their environment and slowly conditioned through various schedules of reinforcement.

Constructivist : Not only the congnitivist claim that children come into this world with very specific innate knowledge, predispositions, and biological timetables, but that children learn to function in a language chiefly through interaction and discourse.

1) Behavioral Approaches

: One learns to comprehend an utterance by responding appropriately to it and by being reinforced for that response.

Operant conditioning (Skinner) : conditioning in which the organism (human being) emits a response, or operant (a sentence or utterance), without necessarily observable stimuli.

2) Challenges to Behavioral Approaches

(1) Critics

Noam Chomsky

Operant conditioning (Skinner)<-> Lingual Creativity : every sentence you speak or write is novel, never before uttered either by you or by anyone else.

(2) Modified

Mediation theory : the linguistic stimulus (a world or sentence) elicits a mediating response that is self-stimulating (representational mediation process)

But, The abstract nature of language and the relationship between meaning and utterance were uresolved. the level of underlying meaning, such depths of language were scarcely plumbed by mediational theory.

Jenkins and Palermo, synthesized notions of generative linguistics and mediational approaches to child language : The child may acquire frames of a linear pattern of sentence elements and learn the stimulus-response equivalences that can be substituted within each frame; imitation was an important, if not essential, aspect of establishing stimulus-response associations.

But, failed to account for the abstract nature of language, for the child's creativity, and for the interactive nature of language acquisition.

3) The Nativist Approach

Nativist : Language acquisition is innately determined, that we are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic perception of language around us, resulting in the construction of an internalized system of language.

Eric Lenneberg : language is a species-specific behavior and that certain modes of perception, categorizing abilities, and other language-related mechanisms are biologically determined.

Chomsky : The existence of innate properties of language to explain the child's mastery of a native language in such a short time despite the highly abstract nature of the rules of language.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD) : The ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment / The ability to organize linguistic data into various classes that can later be refined / Knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that other kinds are not / The ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing linguistic system so as to construct the simplest possible system out of the available linguistic input.

->This notion of linguistically oriented innate predispositons fits perfectly with generative theories of language : children were presumed to use innate abilities to generate a potentially infinite number of utterances

Universal Grammar : a system of universal linguistic rules.-The 'wug' test

Pivot Grammar : The child's first two-word utterances seemed to manifest two separate word classes.

ex) my cap / that horsie / bye-bye Jeff / mommy sock

The first class of words was called "pivot", since they could pivot around a numver of words in the second, "open" class. 

Sentence -> Pivot word + Open word

4) Challenges to Nativist Approaches

Parallel distributed processing (PDP)

: information is processed simultaneously at several levels of attention. A child's linguistic performance may be the consequence of many level of simultaneous neural interconnections. A sentence is not generated by a series of rules. Sentences are the result of the simultaneous interconnection of a multitude of brain cells.

Connectionism : Experience leads to learning by strengthening particular connections-sometimes at the expense of weakening others.

ex) go-went => goed (x) => went

There are no rules of grammar. Instead, the systematicities of syntax emerge from the set of learned associations between language functions and base and past tense forms, with novel responses generated by 'online' generalizations from stored examples.

Emergentism : the complexity of language emerges from relatively simple developmental process being exposed to a massive and complex environment. The interactions that constitute language are associations, billions of connections, which co-exist within a neural system as organisms co-exist within an eco-system. And systematicities emerge as a result of their interactions and mutual constraints. <-> Universal Grammar (Therefore, no innate grammatical system.)

=> 

(1) Freedom from the restrictions of the so-called scientific method to explore the unseen, unobservable, underlying, abstract linguistic structures being developed in the child.

(2) The construction of a numver of potential properties of Universal Grammar, through which we can better understand not just language acquisition but the nature of human language in general.

(3) Systematic description of the child's linguistic repertoire as either rule-governed, or operating out of parallel distributed processing capacities, or the result of experiential establishment of connections.

5) Functional Approaches

-Language was just one manifestation of the cognitive and affective ability to deal with the world, with others, and with the self.

-They dealt specifically with the forms of language and not with the deeper functional levels of meaning constructed from social interaction.

=> Problems of nativist approach

6) Cognition and language development

Lois Bloom : criticism of pivot grammar; the relationships in which words occur in telegraphic utterances are only superficially similar.

ex) Mommy sock

Three possible underlying relations : agent-action, agent-object, possessor-possessed

Children learn underlying structures, and not superficial word order.

Piaget : What children learn about language is determined by what they already know about the world, a point of view that others.

Dan Slobin : Two major pacesetters to language development

(1) on the functional level, development is paced by the growth of conceptual and communicative capacities, operating in conjunction with innate schemata of cognition.

(2) On the formal level, development is paced by the growth of perceptual and information-processing capacities, operating in conjunction with innate schemas of grammar.

7) Social Interaction and Language Development

Holzman : "reciprocal model"; a reciprocal behavioral system operates between the language-developing infant-child and the competent adult language user in a socializing-teaching-nurturing role.

Berko-Gleason : the interaction between the child's language acquisition and the learning of how social systems operate in human behavior.

Budwig :the function of language in discourse.

               Behaviorist          Mediation Theory                  Nativist                                  Functional

2. Issues in First Language Acquisition

1) Competence and Performance

Competence : one's underlying knowledge of a system, event, or fact. It is the nonobservable ability to do something.

Performance : the overtly observable and concrete manifestation or realization of competence.

Language Competence : one's underlying knowledge of system of a language-its rules of grammar, its vocabulary, all the pieces of a language and how those pieces fit together.

Language Performance : Actual production (speaking, writing), or the comprehension (listening, reading) of linguistic events.

=>Chomsky : a theory of lanuguage had to be a theory of competence lest the linguist try in vain to categorize an infinite numver of performance variables that are not reflective of the underlying linguistic ability of the speaker-hearer.

The difficulty of attempting to extract underlying grammatical knowledge-the "pop-go"weasel" effect

Heterogeneous Competence : all of a child's (or adult's) slips and hesitations and self-corrections are potentially connected to this abilities that are in the process of being formed.

2) Comprehension and Production

Myth : comprehension = competence, production = performance

=> Comprehension = competence / performance

        Production    = competence / performance

In child language, most observational and research evidence points to the general superiority of comprehension over production: Children seem to understand more than they actually produce.

3) Nature or Nurture?

Nativists : a child is born with an innate knowledge of or predisposition toward language, and that this innate property (the LAD or UG) is universal in all human beings.

A problem of LAD : one must now scientifically explain the genetic transmissions of linguistic ability.

Environmental factors cannot by any means be ignored.

Derek Bickerton : human beings are bio-programmed to proceed from stage to stage.

4) Universals

: Language is universally acquired in the same manner, and moreover, that the deep structure of language at its deepest level may be common to all language.

Principles : invariable characteristics of human language that appear to apply to all languages universally. certain properties that all language possess.

Parameters : vary across languages, certain features that vary across language in limited way.

Structure dependency : language is organized in such a way that it crucially depends on the structural relationship between elements in a sentence (such as words, morphemes. etc.)

English - head first

Japanese - head last

5) Systematicity and Variability

Systematicity : from pivot grammar to three- and four-word utterances, and to full sentences of almost indeterminate length, children exhibit a remarkable ability to infer the phonological, structural, lexical, and sementic system of language.

Variability : difficult to define stages of language acquisition yet certain typical patterns appear. 

(U-shape pattern; went->goed->went)

6) Language and Thought

Piaget : cognitive development is at the very center of the human organism and that language is dependent upon and springs from cognitive development

Jerome Bruner : sources of language-influenced intellectual development : words shaping concepts, dialogues between parent and child or teacher and child serving to orient and educate, and other sources.

Vygotsky : social interaction, through language, is a prerequisite to cognitive development. Every child reaches his or her potential development, in part, through social interaction with adults and peers, as demonstrated earlier in Vygotsky's ZPD (zone of proximal development.)

Benjamin Whorf : Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity; each language imposes on its speaker a particular "worldview".

7) Imitation

Echoing : salient strategy in early language learning. an important aspect of early phonological acquisition. behavioral principles of language acquisition.

Surface-structure imitation : a person repeats or mimics the surface strings, attending to a phonological code rather than a semantic code. (ex.rote pattern drills)

Deep-structure imitation : as children perceive the importance of the semantic level of language, they attend to a greater extent to that meaningful semantic level-the deep structure of language. The imitation of the deep structure of language can literally block their attention to the surface structure.

For an adult attends to a rather technical, surface grammatical distinction, and yet the child attends to the truth value of the utterance (to derive some meaning value).

8) Practice and Frequency

Practice : monologues, children's practice seems to be a key to language acquisition.

Frequency : certain very frequent forms are acquired first. <-> telegraphic speech

->frequency of meaningful occurrence

9) Input

In the long run, children will, after consistent, repeated  models in meaningful contexts, eventually transfer correct forms to their own speech and thus correct "dat" to "that's".

Adult and peer input seems to shape the child's acquisition. in this case, nuture and environment are tremendously important.

10) Discourse

Conversational or discourse analysis. In order for successful first language acquisition to take place, interaction, rather than exposure, is required.

Initiations and responses : the child learns not only how to initiate a conversation but also how to respond to another's initiating utterance.

3. First Language Acquisition Insights Applied To Language Teaching

Language learning is primarily a matter of transforming perceptions into conceptions. Language is a means of thinking, of representing the world to oneself.

Gouin : Series Method : a method that taught learners directly (without translation) and conceptually (without grammatical rules and explanations) a series of connected sentences that are easy to perceive.

Berlitz : Direct Method : Second language learning should be more like first language learning : lots of active oral interaction, spontaneous use of the language, no translation between first and second languages, and little or no analysis of grammatical rules.

(1) Classroom instruction was conducted exclusively in the target language.

(2) Only everyday vocabulary and sentences were taught.

(3) Oral communication skills were built up in a carefully graded progression organized around question-and-answer exchanges between teachers and students in small, intensive classes.

(4) Grammar was taught inductively.

(5) New teaching points were introduced orally.

(6) Concrete vocabulary was taught through demonstration, objects, and pictures; abstract vocabulary was taught by association of ideas.

(7) Both speech and listening comprehension were taught.

(8) Correct pronunciation and grammar were emphasized.

Are we born with innate language abilities?

Is language learned or is it innate?

What is the innate biological ability of humans to acquire and develop language?

Why is language an innate human ability?