Defining First Language Acquisition

First language acquisition refers to how a child develops its ability to speak and
use the language of its environment: its native language or languages.

Language is part of the environment that a child is born into, and it is even part of
the environment before birth. Therefore, first language acquisition begins at or
before birth. This means we have to begin by talking about babies.

Stages of First Language Acquisition

There are roughly six stages of acquisition:

1. Prelinguistic Stage
2. Babbling Stage
3. First Words
4. Two-word Stage
5. Telegraphic Stage
6. Beyond Telegraphic Stage

1. The Prelinguistic Stage

The prelinguistic stage ranges from birth to approximately 6 months. Noises in
this stage include crying, whimpering, and cooing. These sounds are not
considered language because they are involuntary responses to stimuli. Linguists
consider human language creative – as free from internal or external stimuli. Since
these noises do not fit within the definition of language, this stage occurs before
language is produced by the child. It is, therefore, the prelinguistic stage.
During this stage, babies’ vocal tracts are more like an animal’s than an adult
human’s. The larynx is high, there is no pharynx, and the epiglottis and velum can
be in contact with each other. Additionally, the velum cannot firmly close off
nasal cavity, so all sounds are nasalized. The tongue fills the entire mouth and is
controlled by external muscles. Extrinsic muscle control of the tongue only allows
the tongue to be "shoved" in and out, up and down, as a whole. Some muscular
contractions of the tongue itself are possible, but tongue body constrictions are the
only ones that can be produced. This accounts for nature of (early cooing).
One development in the ability to produce sounds seems to occur in this stage. At
about two months, infants seem to be able to coo voluntarily, whereas previously
they were only able to make sounds involuntarily.

Even though infants can’t produce linguistic sounds, they can perceive them. This
stage might more appropriately be called the pre-production stage. Infants alter
their sucking patterns when presented with a phonetic distinction in sounds. The
alteration in sucking shows an awareness of the change in sound, but infants do
not seem to attach meaning to the changes in sounds. They only register that they
notice them. This awareness is exhibited as early as one month old.

Infants can differentiate between sounds that are allophones in a language that
adult speakers of that language have learned to ignore, such as [p] and [ph].

2. The Babbling Stage

The babbling stage begins at approximately 6 months of age and continues until a
child is about one year old. One key development leading to babbling occurs
during the prelinguistic stage; around 4 months of age, larynx starts to drop,
creating pharyngeal cavity. Once the larynx has dropped, more varied
constrictions can be formed, which leads to a new stage of vocal play or babbling.

The child is also more able to raise and lower the jaw. A lower jaw also lowers the
tongue, creating the possibility of more vowels. Raising the jaw allows for more
lip and tongue tip constrictions.

Source: http://sapir.ling.yale.edu/ling165/
2 Types of Babbling May Occur:

1. Repetitive babbling - same syllable in each successive cycle

2. Variegated babbling - variation in syllables in successive cycles

Universality of the Babbling Inventory

Essentially, all children use the same sounds when they babble, no matter what the
language around them is. "The consonants that occur with substantial frequency
in the babbling of infants, regardless of language environment (Locke, 1983) are:

/b/ /d/ /g/ /p/ /t/ /k/ /m/ /n/ /w/ /j/ /h/

Vowels in babbled syllables tend to be low front:" /æ/ "or central:" /a/.

The universality of babbling makes sense when you realize that the easiest way to
make a sound is to simply open and close the mouth. It is not surprising that stops
will be highly prevalent in the inventory since they are produced by closing the
oral cavity, which happens when closing the mouth occurs. The rest of the
difference between the stops is where in the mouth the tongue contacts the other
parts of the vocal tract. For example, depending on whether a child rests the
tongue on the bottom of the mouth behind the lower teeth or whether it rests in the
middle just behind the front teeth accounts for the difference in the production of
bilabial and alveolar sounds in babbling. All the child has to do is open and close
the mouth, and different sounds will be made.
Think of the words (we'll use English here) that we use to refer to many baby
items and caretakers:

 Baba (bottle)
 Mama (mother)
 Nana (grandmother)
 Papa (father)
 Dada (daddy)

These utterances show repetitive babbling of the low central vowel with stop
consonants. Now add the high back round vowel:

 Bubu (hurt)
 Mumu
 Nunu
 Pupu (poopoo)
 Dudu (doodoo)

These utterances also show repetitive babbling, but with a different vowel sound.
The two different syllables can be mixed together:

 Mami (mommy)
 Papi (Poppy, often used for grandfather)
  Pupi (poopy)

These utterances show variegated babbling.

And we’re back to Baby Talk. Baby talk has two different meanings:

1. It is the way that babies themselves talk, and when baby talk is used with
this meaning, it refers in particular to the babbling stage and the first words
stage of language acquisition, universal stages for all infants in all
languages.
2. It is the way that adults talk when they talk to babies. When baby talk is
used with this meaning, it captures the fact that adults accommodate their
speaking style to that of the child. They help the child attach meaning to
their utterances by using the same utterances with the meaning attached.

Even deaf children babble.The hand gestures of deaf children occur in repetitive
patterns the way that the babbling of hearing children repeats. Deaf children
babble in sounds, too, but it seems different than the babbling of hearing children.

In other words, deaf children babble in sign language and just make noises with
their mouths. Hearing children babble with their mouths, and just make gestures
with their hands. For hearing children, language is produced with the mouth, and
extralinguistic communication with the hands. For deaf children, language is
produced with the hands and extralinguistic communication with the mouth.

The Perception of Language

During the Babbling Stage infants begin to ignore/lose the ability to distinguish
between the sounds of their parents’ (caretakers’) language and other sounds.

They respond only to sounds that are the language distinctions of their parents’
(caretakers’) language.

In other words, prelinguistic Korean infants respond to the difference between [l]
and [r]; children in Arabic environments do the same with [p] and [b]; children in
Spanish environments the same with [i] and [I]. But in the babbling stage, they no
longer respond to the difference, treating both sounds the same.

Remember that this starts at about 6 months of age; the early disappearance of
awareness of phonetic distinctions has great implications for second language
learning and pronunciation and lends support to the critical period hypothesis for
first language acquisition.

3. The First Words Stage

Stage 3, the First Words Stage,starts at about one year and continues for
approximately 6 to 12 months (up to approximately age 1-1/2 or 2 years old).
This stage is also referred to as the Holophrastic Stage because a "one word = one
sentence" pattern seems to exist in the utterances produced by the child. Babbling
may overlap with the production of the first words, and indeed the first words
often exhibit the same structure as babbled syllables, with a CV (consonant-
vowel) syllable used as a word. However, at this stage, meaning is attached to the
syllables produced by a child, and this characteristic distinguishes a babble from a
word.
Examples of some first words include:

1. [no]
2. [da] (dog)
3. [ma] (mom)
4. [dæ] (dad).

The words produced are primarily noun-like (e.g. [da] (dog), [ma] (mom)) with
verbs second (e.g. [go]) and adjectives [ha] (hot)) third. Words also include
displeasure/rejection words (e.g. [no]). Words include social interaction words (e.g
[bai bai] (bye-bye) [nai nai] (night-night)).
As children begin to produce utterances that count as words, they continue to
develop their abilities to produce more and more individual sound segments. The
sounds they produce are typically sounds in the language of their environment,
and they add to their repertoire in a systematic way.
Developmental order of sounds articulated:
1. The full range of vowels in the native language is produced before the full range
of consonants
2. Consonants are typically added in the following sequence of manner (exampls
of sounds in each category come from English): Nasals [m] [n] [ŋ], Glides [w] [j],
Stops [p] [b] [t] [d] [k] [g], Liquids [l] [ɹ], Fricatives [f] [v] [s] [z], Affricates[tʃ]
[dʒ]
3. Consonants are typically added in a front to back order of place, with certain
front sounds being delayed: labials (sounds produced with the lips) come first,
then alveolars (sounds produced just behind the teeth), then velars (sounds
prodcued near the back of the roof of the mouth), then alveopalatals (sounds
produced behind the teeth and a little further back). Interdentals (sounds produced
by placing the tongue between the teeth) come last.
4. New contrasts generally show up in the initial position first. That is, when a
child adds a new sound segment to his/her repertoire, he/she uses it as the first
sound in a word, then puts it in other positions later (i.e., in the middle or at the
end of a word).
Children can perceive more sound segments than they can produce. As a result,
they will often substitute one sound for another in their own utterances. The
substitutions or alterations they make are systematic in nature; they will always
use the same sound as a substitute for their intended sound, such as always using
[w] for [l], producing [wajk] instead of [lajk] for like. The substitutions and
alterations make articulation easier until they can develop more control over the
vocal tract. As control develops, more sounds are added and a vocabulary is
constructed.

Stage 4: The Two Word Stage

Overextensions may not be a misunderstanding of a word on a child's part,
but may be a compensatory technique to overcome vocabulary limitations.
The process of overextending a word's meaning plugs a hole until the child
can learn the proper word.

Example: If it's alive, and non-human, it's a sheep!

Sheep! Sheep! Sheep! Sheep! Sheep!

Underextension may also occur. In underextension, a child doesn't use a

word for enough particular cases. It's the opposite of overextension where a
child uses a word for too many different cases.

Example of underextension: Kitty might mean the family cat, but not other
cats.

Underextensions may occur because a general word (like kitty) is almost

taken as a name, not as a word. It could also be related to the prototype
concept of word meaning. The prototype theory suggests that people have
 mental concepts of a word's meaning and attach a word to the concept. The
concept is developed through interaction with the world. If the family pet is
what a child interacts with, but it is unusual, then a child might not see the
word for the family cat as appropriate to another cat that lacks the unusual
features of the source of the concept.

Example: If this is what kitty means in your

house, what would you use to call the animal in
the picture on the right?

Image from:
http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/
dialect-dangerous-to-cats/
Contextual clues are extrememly important for attaching meaning in this stage.
An adult may need to follow a child's gaze or their pointing in order to determine
the exact meaning of an utterance. Or an adult might need to observe what the
child is doing in order to determine the meaning of the utterance. Likewise, a child
in this stage needs to use the context to make sense of what an adult is saying.

5. The Telegraphic Stage

The Telegraphic stage occurs around the age of 2 1/2 years.

In this stage, children begin stringing more than two words together, perhaps three
or four or five at a time. However, the style of speaking children use in this stage
resembles the way of writing that used to be used in telegrams. That’s why this
stage is called telegraphic. In the past, every word in a telegram cost money, so
people used to write the shortest possible messages to save money. For example,
to send the message "We arrived in Paris on Monday," someone might write
"Arrived Paris Monday." Function words (pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions)
and even grammatical morphemes (-ed) are typically absent.

Articulation of sounds continues to develop in order described in earlier stages. 20

consonants are articulated, and all vowels are articulated by approximatey 3 years
of age. All vocabulary development processes continue, and more words are
added. Utterances exhibit phrase structure, that is, they tend to follow the
grammatical rules of the language.

6. Beyond The Telegraphic Stage

The Beyond Telegraphic stage begins around the age of 3 years and continues
into fully developed language skills.

Vocabulary development continues, including its strategies of overextension. In

fact, a similar pattern of overgeneralization is used for morpheme development: -
ed, meaning past, shows up in such utterances as goed, or putted. Derivational
affixes and compounding show up early in this stage: age 3 or 4. Inversion in
questions comes in later.
To conclude, children go through approximately six different stages in learning
their native language.

The next question is, "When are they finished?" That is, "When can we say that a
child has learned language?"

The End of the Acquisition Process

One answer to the question is that a child has acquired language by six years of
age.

This makes sense if you think about it. One reason we traditionally send kids off
to school at age six is because they now have enough language to manage on their
own. There are, of course, other developmental milestones that have also been
reached (such as toilet training), allowing a child of six to manage away from
regular caretakers, but an important benchmark is the language level that they
have reached.

And what do we teach kids about language at school?

Think of the three Rs:

 Reading
  'Riting
 ‘Rithmetic

Children learn to read and write: to correlate the sounds and words of the language
to the written symbols for them. That means they already have the sound system
and know the essential words of the language. They already have all the language
skills that can be learned through the natural process of first langauge acquisition.
A second answer is never.

Consider the following point of the argument for this answer:

Even adults keep adding to their vocabularies. One of the hallmarks of the college
years is a tremendous increase in vocabulary. Of course, if a person doesn’t attend
college, the increase is not as significant. So the vocabulary increase may not be
tied to age so much as to the college experience.

Nevertheless, the human brain continues to develop until about age 25, and if
Vygotsky is correct in describing a codevelopment of thought and language, why
wouldn't we expect continued development of language until age 25? Of course,
Vygotsky describes the situation as more of the intertwining of language and
thought, which is a rather different from ongoing development.

Still, we should also consider that language is a system comprising phonology,

morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In the discussions of the stages
given so far, focus has been given to these categories except pragmatics. Dr. John
Madden (personal communication) has suggested that further language acquisition
stages deal more with pragmatics than with some of the other linguistic areas.

And so the debate continues. However, for the moment, the age of six can be
taken as a key age in the attainment of language skills. A child of six can fairly
readily be said to be able to speak, something that is not as clear for young
children, whose language use is often described with mitigating terms such as
"She's just starting to talk." or "He knows some words." Rarely would one look at
a six-year-old and ask the parent, "Can he talk yet?" It's not even a question that
comes to one's mind, since most children of this age can not only talk but can also
talk just fine.
Teaching Language
The fact that there is a relationship between age and language development
suggests that the age of the learner is an important factor in language teaching.
The fact that language development begins as early as birth suggests that even
preschool environments shouldn’t ignore language, especially spoken language.

 The question arises whether learning a second language is the same as or

different than learning a first.
 The question also arises whether learning two languages at the same time
follows the same developmental patterns in the same time frame.

These issues and questions form the basis of methods of teaching language and
differentiate L2 teaching from L1 teaching.