FIFIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
First Language Acquisition
April 20th, 2015

Before first words
• The earliest vocalizations
–Involuntary crying
–Cooing and gurgling – showing satisfaction or
happiness
● “Babbling”
–Babies use sounds to reflect the characteristics
of the different language they are learning.

First words
Around 12 months (“one-word” stage):
–one or two recognizable words (esp. content
word);
–Single-word sentences.

By the age of 2 (“two-word” stage)
1) at least 50 different words
2) “telegraphic” sentences (no function words
and grammatical morphemes) e.g., “Mommy
juice”, “baby fall down”
3) reflecting the order of the language. e.g.,
“kiss baby”, “baby kiss”
4) creatively combining words. e.g., “more
outside”, “all gone cookie”

By the age of 4
Most children are able to:
–ask questions,
–give commands,
–report real events,
– create stories about imaginary ones with
correct word order and grammatical
markers most of the time.

School Age
-Complex structures are internalized.
-Vocabulary is expanded.
-Communicatively skills are sharpened.
-Social functions of language are learned,

BBC

Theories of First Language
Acquisition
Behaviorism
Language is the result of
❑ imitation (word-for-word repetition),
❑ practice (repetitive manipulation of form),
❑feedback on success (positive
reinforcement)
❑ habit formation.

THEORIES OF FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
• Behavioral approaches
● Publicly observable responses
● Reinforcement & punishment
• Nativist approach
● LAD (language acquisition device)
• Ability to distinguish speech sounds
• Ability to organize linguistic data into classes
• Knowledge that only certain system is possible
• Constant evaluation of the linguistic system
Language acquisition is innateUniversal grammar

Nativist Approach
Chomsky (1959) argues that behaviorism cannot provide
sufficient explanations for children’s language acquisition for the
following reasons:
● Children come to know more about the structure of their
language than they could be expected to learn on the basis
of the samples of language they hear.
● The language children are exposed to includes false starts,
incomplete sentences and slips of the tongue, and yet they
learn to distinguish between grammatical and
ungrammatical sentences.
● Children are by no means systematically corrected or
instructed on language by parents.

Nativist Approach
Important concepts:
● Language Acquisition Device (LAD).
● Universal Grammar.
● At any stage language is systematic.
Three important contributions:
1. Freedom from the restrictions of the “scientific
method”.
2. A child’s linguistic repertoire is rule-governed.
3. The construction of a number of potential
properties of Universal Grammar.

FUNCTIONAL APPROACH
● Language: dealing with the world
● Social context functions purposes
What children know about the
world determines what they
learn about the code.
Language is used for
interactive communication
Cognition Social interaction
Pragmatics

Functional Approaches
Bloom (1971). Criticism to pivot grammar.
“Mommy sock”
● agent-action
● agent-object
● possessor-possessed
Depending on the social context, “mommy
sock” could mean a number of different things
to a child.

Functional Approaches
The function of language in discourse
The study of language in interactive
communication (day-to-day performance)
-Talking to others.
-Relation between sentences.
-Interaction between hearer and speaker.
-Conversational clues.
-Hesitations, pauses, among others.

Theories of First Language
Acquisition

ISSUES IN FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
• Competence: underlying knowledge of the language
system (unobservable)
• Performance: manifestation of competence
(observable)