Questions About First Language Acquisition

Language acquisition

First language acquisition (L1): a.k.a. developmental psycholinguistics

Questions about first language acquisition

• How is it that by age 5 children know their language?
• What they do along the way and why?
• Is language development independent of intelligence, other cognitive skills?

Methods of studying first language acquisition

Production studies

Spontaneous productions (diary studies)

Elicited productions (e.g. “which doll should he pick up?”)

Introspection. E.g. “Can you say ‘What did the hippo do?’”

Comprehension studies

Perception tasks. E.g. present stimulus, change stimulus; measure pacifier sucking rate, heart beat

Judgement tasks. E.g. "The hippo fell over. Is that right?"

Act-out tasks. E.g. "make the hippo jump over the rhino, then make bullwinkle jump over him."

Production lags behind comprehension

• Recognition of sounds precedes the ability to produce them.

“fis” example in O’Grady p. 444:

‘One of us, for instance, spoke to a child who called his inflated plastic fish a fis. In imitation of the child’s pronunciation, the observer said: “This is your fis?” “No,” said the child, “my fis”. He continued to reject the adult’s imitation until he was told, “That is your fish.” “Yes,” he said, “my fis.”

• Recognition of polite forms precedes the ability to produce them.

Puppets requesting candy used direct forms like:

‘Give me candy.’

Or indirect forms like:

‘I would like some candy.’ Or: ‘May I have some candy?’

Indirect forms were judged more polite.

Milestones in first language acquisition

Babbling

0-1 months: crying, coughing

2-3 months: cooing, gooing; production of velar consonants

4-6 months: produce greater variety of sounds, sounds more like language

7-9 months: CV syllables, often reduplicated; e.g. [tata]

12 months: relatively long sequences of gibberish

18-20 months: babbling ceases

Universal characteristics of babbling; babbling independent of what sounds are heard:

• deaf children babble
• hearing children of deaf parents babble.
• some sounds produced may not be heard in child's linguistic environment

One-word stage

Emerges around 12-18 months. Characteristics:

• words used as sentences; starting to acquire word meaning
• typically, functions: communicating child's action or desire for action, emotion; naming
• simpler phonology: CV syllables; CVCV words

Words known by Eve at 15 months:

Mommy / cup
Daddy / what?
Go / wawa [water]
gimme / go?
baba [grandma] / nana [blanket]
dollie

2-word stage

Emerges few months after 1-word stage. Characteristics:

• short (2-word) sentences
• no inflectional affixes (e.g., genitive, 3sS -s)
• minimal use of syntactic function words (e.g. determiners)
• pronouns rare

Eve at 18 months:

more grape juice / right down
eating / no celery
open toybox / Mommy read
write a paper / my pencil
Mommy head? / drink juice
Mommy soup / Oh! Horsie stuck
What doing, Mommy?

Beyond 2-word stage (“all hell breaks loose”)

Eve at 27 months:

Put my pencil in there.

Don’t stand on my ice cubes.

An’ I want to take off my hat.

You come help us.

Just like Mommy has, and David has, and Sara has.

What is that on the table?

I put them in the refrigerator to freeze.

This is not better.

We’re going to make a blue house.

You make a blue one for me.

I have a fingernail.

And you have a fingernail.

I go get a pencil ‘n write.

See, this one better but this not better.

There some cream.

Put in you coffee.

They was in the refrigerator, cooking.

That why Jacky comed.

How ‘bout another eggnog instead of cheese sandwich?

Categorical perception of speech sounds

When sounds are perceived, they are assigned to categories (phonemes).

Phonetic categories have prototypical and non-prototypical members.

Prototypes as “perceptual magnets'': sounds which are at a certain perceptual distance from the prototype are perceived as more like the prototype than sounds which are at the same perceptual distance from a non-prototype.

There are differences between languages with respect to prototypes: adult Swedish speakers' prototype /i/ is different from English speakers' prototype /i/; Swedish speakers will often judge English /i/ more like Swedish /e/.

Adults’ categorical perception of speech sounds

Linguistic experience influences categorical perception.

E.g., Japanese speakers are not good at distinguishing [r] and [l]; English speakers are. Categorical perception thus interferes with the ability to discriminate phonetic contrasts.

Children’s categorical perception of speech sounds

Infants are born able to:

• discriminate fine phonetic differences

(perceive boundaries between sounds outside of their own language)

• normalize across speakers
• categorize in different contexts

By six months

The ability to discriminate phonetic contrasts diminishes after about 10-12 months with lack of exposure to phonetic contrasts; i.e. categorical perception (ability to distinguish some nonphonemic contrasts declines) emerges.

6-month-old infants learning American English treat Swedish /y/ (high front rounded vowel) as a non-prototype (bad example of a phonetic category).

Thus exposure to a specific language has altered infants' perception of speech by 6 months of age.

By ten months

Janet Werker (UBC), in a series of experiments:

• Compared English adults, English infants (around 6-8 months), and Hindi adults wrt ability to discriminate two pairs of Hindi phonemes not used in English: /tha/ vs. /da/ and /a/ vs. /ta/. Results:

English infants at ages 6-8 months can discriminate these sounds as well as Hindi adults can

English adults cannot discriminate these sounds as well as Hindi adults (particularly bad at place of articulation contrast).

English children at ages 12, 8, and 4 years were as bad at this as English adults.

• Compared English adults, English infants (around 6 months), Thompson speaking adults wrt to discrimination of Thompson /k'i/ vs. /q'i/. Results

80% of the English infants could discriminate the sounds

only 30% of the English adults could discriminate the sounds

ten-month-old infants did no better than English adults

Summary (categorical perception)

Categorical perception emerges between 6-12 months.

Six-month-olds can distinguish phonetic differences between sounds not in their language.

Ten-month olds have lost this ability.

Theories of first language acquisition

• Imitation hypothesis: children learn solely by imitating what they hear
• Reinforcement hypothesis: children learn by being positively or negatively reinforced for certain kinds of behavior
• Active construction of grammar hypothesis: children are actively constructing and refining a grammar of the language of their environment (much like linguists).

Evidence for Active construction of grammar hypothesis:

• Children don't get a lot of corrections

they do get some lexical/content corrections

they don't get a lot of grammatical corrections

• Children don't absorb a lot of the corrections they do hear

Child: / My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
Adult: / Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits?
Child: / Yes.
Adult: / What did you say she did?
Child: / She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
Adult: / Did you say she held them tightly?
Child: / No, she holded them loosely.
Child: / Nobody don’t like me.
Mother: / No. Say ‘nobody likes me’.
Child: / Nobody don’t like me.

...

Mother: / Now listen carefully. Say ‘nobody LIKES me’.
Child: / Oh...Nobody don’t LIKES me.

• Children produce novel utterances (not in imitation of adult productions)

‘other one spoon’

causatives:

'you're fedding me up'

(wants mother to change sister’s diaper before feeding her) ‘Don’t eat her yet. She’s smelly!’

‘These flowers are sneezing me!’

nouns used as verbs:

‘Put me that broom. Let’s get brooming.’

‘Why you didn’t jam my bread?’

‘I hate you and I’ll never unhate you or nothing!’

• Children make systematic, not random, errors

Systematic phonological errors

Affect natural, not random, classes of consonants

Inventory of English consonants (age 2)

p b / t d / k g
f / s / h
m / n
w

Inventory of English consonants (age 4)

p b / t d / k g
t d
f v / s z /  / h
m / n / 
l
w / r / j

Create novel phonological rules

child / target / rule:
“[gu] here” / glue / no consonant clusters
“it not [lu] off” / flew / are allowed
“no me [lip]” / sleep
“[kak] ticking” / clock
“daddy [kk]” / stick
“allgone [t]” / twig
“eat [ol]” / granola
“more [brd]” / bread
“mummy [gb]” / give / syllable-final consonants
“me got [æpm]” / asthma / are stops
“me [ll]” / little / only vowels can be
“bus [ltu] no” / little / syllable peak
“it [btu] me” / bitten
“take [mnæn]” / banana / all consonants in a word must be either oral or nasal

Systematic morphological errors

Regularization of plurals: gooses

Regularization of past tense forms of verbs: heared, hitted, goed, bringed, comed; I tooked it smaller

Regularization of comparative forms of adjectives: He hitted me. He’s a puncher he is. He’s being badder and badder.

Systematic semantic errors

Overextension (broadening, hypernymy):

child’s word / first referent / extensions
‘moon’ / moon / cakes, postmarks, round marks on window, the letter O, round shapes in books
‘bird’ / sparrows / cow, dog, cats, any moving animal
‘fly’ / fly / specks of dirt, dust, all small insects, child’s own toes, crumbs, small toad
‘koko’ / rooster crowing / piano, phonograph, tunes played on violin, accordian, all music, merry-go-round
‘wau-wau’ / dog / toy dog, soft slippers, picture of old man in furs, all animals

Underextension (narrowing, hyponymy):

child’s word / first referent / extensions
‘car’ / the family’s Pontiac / none
‘plant’ / the fern in the kitchen / none
‘mow-mow’ / the family’s cat / none
‘dish’ / the child’s dish / none

Systematic syntactic errors

stage / productions / rule
1 / No...wipe finger. / Attach ‘no’ or ‘not’ to the
No a boy bed. / beginning or end of a sentence.
No singing song.
No the sun shining.
No money.
No sit there.
No play that.
No fall!
Not...fit.
Not a teddy bear.
More...no.
Wear mitten no.
2 / No square is...clown.
I can’t catch you. / ‘no’, ‘not’, ‘can’t’, and
I can’t see you. / ‘don’t’ appear after the
We can’t talk. / subject and before the verb
I don’t want it.
Don’t bite me yet.
No pinch me.
He no bite you.
He not little, he big.
That no Mommy.
There no squirrels.
Touch the snow no. / ‘no’ can appear at the end
This a radiator no. / of a sentence
3 / I don’t want cover on it. / ‘no’, ‘not’, ‘can’t’, ‘don’t’
I didn’t see something. / and ‘won’t’ appear after the
I not hurt him. / subject and before the verb
I gave him some so he won’t cry.
We can’t make another broom.
I not crying
That not turning.
Don’t put the two wings on.
I didn’t did it.
You didn’t caught me.
I am not a doctor. / ‘not’ appears after forms of
It’s not cold. / ‘be’
This not ice cream.
I isn’t...I not sad.

First language acquisition as an innate behavior

Innate behaviors: walking, language

Not innate behaviors: football, gymnastics, ballet, etc.

Characteristics of first language acquisition

1. Emerges before needed. Speed of learning L1 ( age 5)

2. Not the result of a conscious decision.

3. Not triggered by (extraordinary) external events.

Needed for L1: immersion in linguistic environment. Poverty of stimulus: Children exposed to motherese, adult performance

4. Not affected by explicit instruction.

5. Normal stages of achievement, independent of environment, can be identified. Cross-linguistic regularities (milestones) in learning. Uniformity of resulting grammars (UG)

6. There is a ‘critical age’ for the acquisition of the behavior

Critical age L1 cases: Genie, Chelsea

Creoles

Creole language: pidgin that is L1 for some speech community’s

Examples of creoles (over 100): Hawaiian Creole, Haitian Creole, Sranam (Surinam), Tok Pisin Creole (also a pidgin)

map pp. 534-535

Evolution of Hawaiian Creole

1790- on: Pidgin English and Pidgin Hawaiian

1791: Take care. By and by you dead. Tiana too many men.

1901: No can. I try hard get good ones. Before, plenty duck; now, no more.

1876: Expansion of Hawaiian sugar plantations (relaxation of US tariff laws)

1876-1900: Immigration of indentured laborers from China, Phillippines, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Brazil, Puerto Rico, etc. (outnumber Hawaiians and Europeans 2-1)

Development of pidgin based initially on Hawaiian, later on English

late 19th century-1920: Creolization: development of Hawaiian Creole English. Many native speakers of Hawaiian Creole English were children of linguistically mixed marriages.

1906: “I think we more better go home. That white thing he kahuna.” (Oahuan, pp. 2-3)

1913: “He bin steal...Paul been steal quarter, I been make shirt.” (Oahuan, pp. 29-30)

1917: “I think more better for I write that answer.” (Pacific Commericial Advertiser, p. 4)

Contemporary description: 1904: “However pure the English, Chinese, Portuguese or Hawaiian they may speak in the school or homes, they have a complex pidgin that is a universal language. They all meet on the ‘I-bin-go’ level of conversation.” (Paradise of the Pacific, pp. 43-44)

Claimed characteristics of creoles: (but also depend on the degree of expansion of pidgin)

Uniformity (in contrast to great variability of pidgins)

Fully expressive

Characteristics of Hawaiian Creole English

Nouns: no number distinction

Us two bin get hard time raising dog. ‘The two of us had a hard time raising dogs.’

Verbs:

Tense/aspect marked with preverbal auxiliary

past/perfect (“had gone”): bin or wen: get ‘there is, there are’; bin get ‘there was’: Bin get one wahine she get three daughter. ‘There was a woman who had three daughters.’

future/conditional (“will go”, “would go”): go

habitual/present (“goes, is going”): stay: John them stay cockroach the kaukau. ‘John and his friends are stealing the food.’

Purpose clauses (“went to see X”)

accomplished: go: John bin go Honolulu go see Mary ‘John went to Honolulu to see Mary (and saw her)’

not accomplished: for: John bin go Honolulu for see Mary ‘John went to Honolulu to see Mary (and may or may not have sen her)’

Derek Bickerton (U. Hawaii): Suggests importance of creoles for Innateness Hypothesis

‘since creoles must have been invented in isolation, it is likely that some general ability, common to all people, is responsible for the linguistic similarities’

I.e., creoles are the way they are due to L1

Skepticism about Bickerton’s claims (some other ways of accounting for similarities of creoles):

--universal strategies of language learning

--similarities among substratum and superstratum languages (most based on IE languages)

First vs. second language acquisition

Some fundamental questions about SLA:

• How is it that children are able to completely master a first language, whereas adults rarely can completely master a second language?
• What processes/strategies do adults use to acquire the target language?
• What is the role of Universal Grammar in L2? Do adults have access to principles of UG?

Some terminology

Interlanguage: adult learner’s linguistic system (contains elements of native language, target language)

Transfer: portions of adult learner’s native language in interlanguage

Similarities and differences between L1, L2

Similarities. Both types of learners:

• produce novel utterances
• exhibit semantic overgeneralization
• regularize morphology (“falled” instead of “fell”)
• regularize syntax (“not went” instead of “didn’t go”)

Differences:

L1 / L2
lack of instruction / overt instruction
speed of learning / slowness of learning
uniformity of resulting grammars / lack of uniformity of resulting grammars
regular stages / no defined stages

Theories of SLA

Contrastive analysis theory:

Errors can be predicted from differences in structure between native language, target language

Success: predicting phonological errors

Target: Spanish [pe]

English speakers often produce: [phdej]

Problems:

Empirical: makes incorrect predictions about syntactic errors

Theoretical: based on stimulus/response behaviorist theory

Active construction of grammar theory

learner actively builds a grammar

Some L1, L2 differences accounted for by strategic differences between learners

L2 strategy: strive for grammatical competence

L1 strategy: acquire high semantic content words first

Order of acquisition of bound morphemes (with L2, also depends on native language experience)

L1 / L2
1 / -ing / -ing
2 / plural -/z/ / be (copula)
3 / irregular past tense verbs (high frequency) / articles
4 / possessive -/z/ / be (auxiliary)
5 / be (copula: John is a nurse) / plural -/z/
6 / articles / irregular past tense
7 / regular past tense / regular past tense
8 / 3sS agreement -/z/ / 3sS agreement -/z/
9 / be (auxiliary) / possessive -/z/

Possible role of UG in second language acquisition

Markedness and implicational universals

> (less marked than, more common cross-linguistically)

• CV > CVC

If a language has CVC syllables, the language also has CV syllables.

• Voicing distinctions: word initial > word medial > word final

If a language makes voicing distinctions word finally, it will also make voicing distinctions word medially, and if a language makes voicing distinctions word medially, it will also make voicing distinctions word initially.

no voicing distinctions: Mandarin

initially only: Sardinian

initially and medially: German

initially, medially, finally: English

• Relativization hierarchy:

head noun is: subject > direct object > indirect object > object of preposition > genitive > object of comparison

subject: the man who ___ sang

DO: the man who Rose knows ___

Obj of P: the man who Rose gave the book to ___

Genitive (possessor): the man whose ___ mother sang

Object of comparison: the man who John is taller than ___

If a language allows relativization on objects of comparison, it will also allow relativization on genitive nouns.

Hypothesis: marked structures are harder to learn

Markedness differential hypothesis: speakers whose native language contains less marked structures will have difficulty learning the more marked structures

Some evidence for MDH:

Acquisition of final voicing distinctions

German native speakers: tend to devoice

Mandarin: add word-final []

Acquisition of relative clauses

Hypothesis: acquisition of structures lower on relativization hierarchy implies acquisition of structures higher on hierarchy

Experiment: (2 groups of learners, mixed native language)

Group 1: were taught SU, DO strategies

were tested on all relatization strategies: had learned SU, DO

Group 2: were taught object of P strategy

were tested on all relatization strategies: had also learned SU, DO

Support for access to markedness by L2 learners

Suggests interlanguage is a natural language

Another implicational universal:

If a language has prepositions, it will have post-nominal genitives.

Spanish: en la casa ‘in the house’, la casa de Juan ‘John’s house’

If a language has postpositions, it will have pre-nominal genitives.

Witsuwit’en: ywe, Johnby

Parameter (re)setting: learning a new rule (typically, a major descriptive difference between languages)