N

W E
Theories of First S
Language
Acquisition
Introduction: Clark, 2003

 Small babies – babble and coo their first words.

and cry and vocally or  By 18 months – their words
nonvocally send an have multiplied considerably
extraordinary number of and are beginning to appear in
messages and receive even two-word and three-word
more messages. sentences; production tempo begins
 By the end of their first year- to increase and more and more
words are spoken every day and
they make special attempt to
more and more combinations of
imitate words and speech multi-word sentences are uttered.
sounds they hear around them,
and about this time they utter
Introduction:
 By two years of age- they are  This fluency and creativity continues
comprehending more sophisticated into school age as they internalize
language and their production increasingly complex structures,
repertoire is mushrooming, even to expand their vocabulary, and sharpen
forming questions and negatives. communicative skills.
 By about age 3 – they can
comprehend an amazing quantity of
 How can we explain this
linguistic input; their speech and
comprehension capacity fantastic journey?
geometrically increases as they
become generators of nonstop
chattering and incessant
conversation.
 Two polarized positions in the study of
first language acquisition
• Extreme behaviourist position: • Extreme constructivist position:
• Children come into this world • The cognitivist claim that the
with a tabula rasa, a clean slate children come into this world
bearing no preconceived with very specific innate
notions about the word or about knowledge, pre-dispositions,
language, and that these and biological timetables; and
children are the shaped by their • Children learn to function in a
environment and slowly language chiefly through
conditioned through various interaction and discourse.
schedules of reinforcement.
 Behavioral approaches
• Language is a fundamental part of total human behaviour.
• This approach focused on the immediately perceptible aspects of
linguistic behaviour – the publicly observable responses- and the
relationships or associations between those responses and events in
the world surrounding them.
• A behaviour might consider effective language behaviour to be
production of correct responses to stimuli; if the response is
reinforced, it becomes habitual or conditioned.
• This children produce linguistic responses that are reinforced.
• A behavioural model of linguistic behaviour was embodied in B.F.
Skinner’s classic, Verbal Behavior (1957).
• This is an extension of his general theory of learning by Operant
conditioning which refers to conditioning in which the organism emits
a response, or operant (a sentence or utterance), without necessarily
observable stimuli; that operant is maintained (learned) by
reinforcement ( eg. A positive verbal or nonverbal response from
another person).
• According to Skinner, verbal behaviour like other behaviour is
controlled by its consequences.
• When consequences are rewarding, behaviour is maintained and is
increased in strength and perhaps frequency; when punishing or
there is total lack of reinforcement, behaviour is weakened and
eventually extinguished.
 The Mediation Theory

• Modified theoretical positions for behaviour theory

• Linguistic stimulus (a word or sentence) elicits a “mediating
response” that is self-emulating.
• Self-emulation, a representational mediation process- is a process
that is really covert and invisible, acting within the learner (Osgood,
1957).
 The Nativist Approach

• Nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that 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.
 Innateness hypotheses

• Language is a specific-specific behaviour and that certain modes of

perception, categorizing abilities, and other language-related
mechanisms are biologically determined (Lennberg, 1967).
• The existence of innate properties of language which is embodied in
a metaphorical “little black box” in the brain (language acquisition
device-LAD) explain the child’s mastery of a native language in such
a short time despite the highly abstract nature of the rules of
language (Chomsky, 1965).
 Language acquisition device

• Four innate linguistic properties (Mcneil, 1966):

• The ability to distinguish speechs 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.
• The notion of linguistically oriented innate predispositions fits
perfectly with generative theories of language: children were
presumed to use innate abilities to generate a potentially infinite
number of utterances.
• This line of inquiry through a genre of child language acquisition has
come to be known as Universal Grammar.
• UG research attempts to discover what it is that all children,
regardless of their environment stimuli (the languages they hear
around them) bring to the language acquisition process.
• Research has shown that the child’s language, at any given point, is
a legitimate system in its own right.
• The child’s linguistic development is not a process of developing
fewer and fewer “incorrect structures” – not a language in which
earlier stages gave more mistakes that later stages.
• Rather, the child’s language at any stage is systematic in that the
child is constantly forming hypotheses on the basis of the input
received and then testing those hypotheses in speech (and
comprehension).
• The early grammars of child language were referred to as pivot
grammars.
• It was commonly observed that the child’s first two-word utterances
seemed to manifest two separate word classes, and not simply two
words thrown together at random.
 Functional Approaches

• Researchers began to see that language was just one manifestation

of the cognitive and affective ability to deal with the world, with
others and with the self.
• The generative rules that were proposed under the nativist
framework were abstract, formal, explicit, and quite logical, yet they
dealt specifically with forms of language, and not with the deeper
functional levels of meaning constructed from social instruction.
• Examples of forms of language are morphemes, words, sentences,
and the rules that govern them.
• Functions are the meaningful, interactive purposes within a social
(pragmatic) context that we accomplish with the forms.
 Cognition and Language
Development
• Children learn underlying structures, and not superficial word order
(Bloom, 1971).
• Depending on the social context, two-word utterances could mean a
number of different things to a child.
• E.g. “Mommy sock”
• Mommy is putting the sock on (Agent-action)
• Mommy sees the sock (agent-object)
• Mommy’s sock ( possessor-possessed)
• Piaget (1955) described overall development as the result of
children’s interaction with their environment, with an interaction
between their developing perceptual cognitive capacities and their
linguistic experience.
• What children learn about language is determined by what they
already know about the world.
• In all languages, semantic learning depends on cognitive
development and that sequences of development are determined
more by semantic complexity than by structural complexity (Slobin,
1997).
 Two major pacesetters to
language development (Slobin, 1986)

• On the functional level, development is paced by the growth of

conceptual and communicative capacities, operating in conjunction
with innate schemas of cognition.
• On the formal level, development is paced by the growth of
perceptual and information- processing capacities, operating in
conjunction with innate schemas of grammar.
• An explanation of language development depends upon an
explanation of the cognitive underpinning of language: what children
know will determine what they learn about the code both for
speaking and understanding messages (Bloom, 1976).
 Social Interaction and Language
Development
• Holzman (1984) in her receptional model of language development,
proposed that a reciprocal behavioral system operates between
language-developing infant-child and the competent (adult) language
user in a socializing-teaching-nurturing role.
 Application to Language
Teaching
• 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 (Direct Method by
Maximillian Blitz, 1880).
 Principles of the Direct Method
(Richards and Rodgers, 2001)

• Classroom instruction was conducted exclusively in the target language

• Only everyday vocabulary and sentences were taught.
• Oral communication skills were built up in a carefully graded progression
organized around question-and-answer exchanges between readers and
student in small, intensive classes.
• Grammar was taught inductively.
• New teaching points were introduced orally.
• Concrete vocabulary was taught through demonstration, objects, and
pictures; abstract vocabulary was taught by association of ideas.
• Both speech and listening comprehension were taught.
• Correct pronunciation and grammar were emphasized.