Download First Language Acquisition

Teguh Ardianto
Introduction

 How children acquire their first language?
 Is it through listening to adults around and imitating?
 Do they learn the grammar bit by bit? Or does the
grammar fall into place naturally?
 Is the rate of their language development influenced
by the way adults speak with them?
 Is the sequence among children in acquiring language
the same or not?
Introduction

 Acquisition is the initial cognitive and social process of
language learning. (p.12)
 First language acquisition normally takes place between
birth and the age of four. (p.12)
 Second language acquisition is the learning of a language
by an individual who already has some degree of control
over another language. (p.12)
 First language refers to the first language people learn in
the life. (p.29)
 Second language refers to any language learned later in
life and usually learned after the age of five. (p.29)
Three crucial issues in
LA

 Rice (1986) identifies three crucial issues in language
acquisition:
 The nature of language
 What the child brings to language acquisition
 What the environment contributes to language
development
The Nature of Language

Teguh Ardianto
The nature of language

 Whether language is seen as a set of grammatical
rules? focus on how this rules processed internally
 Whether language is seen as a tool to socialize and to
communicate?  focus on how children learn to use
language for expressing pragmatic intentions
The Role of
the Child in LA

Teguh Ardianto
The role of the child
in LA

Piagetian view of cognitive
and language development
Vygotskyan view of cognitive
and language development
Piagetian view

 Cognitive development and language acquisition 
closely interrelated processes
 Toddlers develop an abstract knowledge about the
world  experience and observing the object
 This linked to sensorimotor from B  18 months
 the language manifested in accordance with the
cognition capacity
 In short: experience with object  processed in the
child cognition  children try to manifest the world
by using language
Experience
with objects

Cognitive
development
(thought)
Cognitive
Determinism
Language
Criticism to Piagetian
View

Relationships is not always one way 
children use language to express
concepts at the same time when the
concepts are being learned
Vygotskyan view

 Different Piagetian and Vygotskyan view:
 Vygotsky stressed the importance of connection between
cultural and social environments and language learning.
 Cognition is seen as closely related to language but not in
deterministic manner as Piaget argued.
 Through language used by themselves and the people
around them, children learn to interpret new
experiences which further develops their ability to think.
Interaction
with the
world and
with others

Cognitive
Development
(thought)
Language
Relationship between Cognitive
Development and Language
The Role of
the Environment in LA

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The role of environment
in LA

 Social environment  the circumstances in which
children are brought up and learn things about
world.
 Linguistic environment the circumstances in
which children interact with other people using
language, as well as receiving input, and getting
explicit and implicit feedback on their language use.
Adult interaction
behaviors

 Joint referencing adult and child attend to the
specific objects, evens or actions in an act of
communication which often includes naming or
describing.
 Joint action  a shared action sequence by adult and
child.
Adult conversational
strategies

 Register  adults use different register (speech
variants, topics) when they are talking to children
 Conversation strategies adults encourage children
to speak  repetitions, modelings, promptings,
reformulations, and contingent utterances.
 Contingent speech  commenting on or a response
to a topic established by the child.
Theoretical Models in LA

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Theoretical models

The three influential theoretical models for
explaining language acquisition and how
language, the child and the environment
connected each other, those models are:
 The behaviorist model
 The innatist model
 The interactionist model
The behaviorist model

 This theory was popularized by Ivan Pavlov (and his
dog, of course ), John Watson, and Edward
Thorndike.
 Learning was seen as behavior change through habit
formation, conditioned the presence of stimuli and
strengthened through practice and selective
reinforcement
 Language learning was seen as being similar to any
other kind of learning.
The behaviorist model

 Language acquisition was a form of operant
conditioning directly resulting from adult modeling
and reinforcement, imitation, practice and habit
formation on the part of the child.
 Environment  adult modeling and child imitation
to change child’s behavior to habit  drilling
Criticisms of the
behaviorist model

 The absent of overt correction on form.
 Adult input is often ‘degenerate’ -- full of false starts,
hesitations, slip of the tongue and redundancies 
insufficient for adequate modeling but children are still
able to learn the correct structures  Syntactic rules.
 Children could not learn all they have to say by only
imitating adults.
 Inability to explain of complex syntactic learning.
The innatist model

 This theory was proposed by Chomsky which
emphasized the role of mental or psycholinguistic
processes.
 Language is not behavior learned through imitation
and conditioning, it is rule based and generative in
nature, processed and produced through
complicated cognitive processes and mechanisms.
The innatist model

 The assumption of the innatist model toward
language learning:
 Human beings possess an innate mental capacity 
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)  Universal
Grammar
 Language development follows a biological and
chronological program
 Because children are equipped with LAD, a large
amount of input is not necessary  input is necessary
only when it triggers the process.
Criticisms of the innatist
model

 It does little in explaining the developmental of language
acquisition  too much focus on innate ability for
language learning.
 It focuses only on internal knowledge of an ideal
speaker/listener rather than messy product of real
speech.
 It neglects the important of environment on language
acquisition
 “real” children are more focused on meaning rather than
structure/syntactical rules  in comprehending children
talk, analyzing syntactic rules is not sufficient, adults
need to analyze the semantic process through rich
interpretation.
The interactionist model

 The primary focus of the interactionist approach is
how language and cognitive developments take
place within key contexts of interaction.
 In interactionist model, adult-children interaction
provides opportunities for children to use and
experiment with language.
 Language acquisition in this model considers both
the child’s cognitive capacities as well as social
capacities for learning.
Criticisms of the
interactionist model

 It doesn’t adequately explain the cognitive processes
that children engage in when noticing and using
language during interaction.
 Needs to draw on development in other related
fields to help explain the cognitive processes that
take place during language processing and
development.
Behaviorist
Innatist
Interactionist
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Concerned with learning in general
Important linguistic input from the environment
Modeling
Imitation
Practice
Reinforcements
Habit formation
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Concerned with specific aspect of language learning
‘degenerate’ input from the environment
Biological program (critical period hypotheses)
Special language learning ability
Universal grammar
Linguistic rule extraction
Hypothesis testing
Natural order of acquisition
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Concerned with social and psychological aspects of language learning
Meaningful linguistic input from the environment
The importance of communicative contexts
Child’s pragmatic intentions
Adult conversational/interactional strategies
Child directed speech (Motherese)
Adult’s rich interpretation and feedback
Conversational adjustments
Child’s capacity for learning
Interdependence of cognitive and language development

Key features of
Behaviorist,
Innatist, and
Interactionist
model
Behaviorist
Innatist
Interactionist
Language
Child
Environment
It is a subset of all
learned behaviors
A ‘clean slate’
It is a source of
language models
and provides
selective
reinforcements

All languages have
characteristics in
grammatical structure
that are universal
(UG)
Born with syntactic
knowledge for
analyzing
linguistic input
The input from
the environment
is ‘degenerate’ but
necessary for
‘triggering’ innate
knowledge
Language has social
and communicative
purposes
Uses contextual
clues from
interaction to
process language
The environment
provides
meaningful
contexts for
language input
and language use
Comparison of Acquisition Issues
addressed by Theoretical Models