idioma

1. Universidad Cristiana de Panamá
Name:
Uziel Rios
Subject:
Principles and theories for the acquisition of a second
language.
Profesor:
Israel Torres
Date:
10.4.19

2. Introduction
Language acquisition is the process whereby children acquire
their first languages. All humans (without exceptional physical
or mental disabilities) have an innate capability to acquire
language. Children may acquire one or more first languages.
Acquisition occurs passively and unconsciously through
implicit learning. In other words, children do not need explicit
instruction to learn their first languages but rather seem to
just "pick up" language in the same way they learn to roll over,
crawl, and walk. Language acquisition in children just seems to
happen.

3. Theoretical frameworks
Languageacquisition is the process by which humans acquirethe capacity to
perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be
awareof language and to understand it), as well as to produce and
use words and sentences to communicate.
Languageacquisition involves structures, rules and representation. The
capacity to successfully uselanguagerequires one to acquirea rangeof tools
including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an
extensive vocabulary. Languagecan be vocalized as in speech, or manual as
in sign. Human language capacity is represented in the brain. Even though
human languagecapacity is finite, one can say and understand an infinite
number of sentences, which is based on a syntactic principle called recursion.
Evidence suggests that every individual has three recursivemechanisms that
allow sentences to go indeterminately.
These three mechanisms are : relativization, complementation and
coordination.
There are two main guiding principles in first-languageacquisition: speech
perception always precedes speech production and the gradually evolving
systemby which a child learns a language is built up one step at a time,
beginning with the distinction between individual phonemes.
Linguists who are interested in child language acquisition for many years
question how language is acquired, Lidz et al. states "The question of how
these structures areacquired, then, is more properly understood as the
question of how a learner takes the surfaceforms in the input and converts
them into abstractlinguistic rules and representations.

4. Findings
The capacity to acquire the ability to incorporate the pronunciation of new
words depends upon many factors. Before anything the learner needs to be
able to hear what they are attempting to pronounce. Another is the capacity
to engage in speech repetition. Children with reduced abilities to repeat
nonwords (a marker of speech repetition abilities) show a slower rate of
vocabulary expansion than children for whom this is easy. Several
computational models of vocabulary acquisition have been proposed so far
There is also some tis that helps us to learn another language:
Learn only the words you need:
The principle can be applied in every language, which indicates that 80% of
the effects come from 20% of the causes. Applied to the language, this
means that knowing a small percentage of the vocabulary we can
communicate in most situations.