First Language Acquisition

FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 

I. Acquisition:

 For a human to understand language, they have to interact with other language users since they were an infant. This is to bring the capacity of general language to come into contact with a particular language such as English. 

 The child is also must have the ability to receive and send sound signals of a language. It's also important for an infant to be able to hear as a deaf child will stop producing sound after six months after birth.

*Input:

 Many factors that help with the development of a child's language acquisition such as the behaviour of their parents and relatives who live with them in the same environment and provide language samples are called input.

 The speech style characterized by it's simplified word which is used a lot by a person who has a lot of experience with young children is associated with "baby talk". 

*Caregiver Speech:

 This speech style is characterized by the frequent use of questions combined with amplified intonation, some loudness and a slower tempo with longer pauses when talking.

It assigns children to an interactive role, giving the feeling that the child is in a conversation between two people. The word components of the speech also only contain simple sentence structure and paraphrasing. Additionally, use a lot of references that are restricted to the here and now.

II. The Acquisition Schedule:

 The language adaptation development of children has the same schedule as the development of motor skills.

 The linguistic capacity of children can be separated into multiple stages and arranged in chronological order alongside their growth.

*Cooing:

 The earliest stage of using speech-like sounds is called cooing. During this stage, the child is capable of producing sequences of vowel-like sounds, specifically the [i] and [u]. At four months old, the back of the tongue is placed at its regular spot, contact the back palate. This allows children to create velar consonants [k] and [g]. At this point, they can know the difference between the [i] and [a] sounds and discriminate btween syllables like [ba] and [ga].

*Babbling:

 Between 6-8 months, the child is able to combine individual sounds into a sequence such as ba-ba-ba and ga-ga-ga, and recognize the intonation patterns of consonant and vowel sounds being produced. During this stage, the nasal sounds become more common demonstrated through syllable sequences such as ma-ma-ma and da-da-da.

*The One-Word Stage:

 Between 12-18 months, the child begins to product a variety of recognizable single-unit utterances. This is usually called the one-word stage. In this stage, the child use a single term to use for objects such as "cookie", "milk", "cat" and "dog". Moreover, the term holophrastic (single form using as a phrase or sentence) to describe utterance that could be a word, a phrase or a sentence.)

*The Two-Word Stage:

 Begin at 12-18 months old. The child will start to combine two words together. This creates variety of combination such as baby chair, mommy eat and cat bad. Still, most of these combinations are very much tied to their utterance.

*Telegraphic Speech:

 In this stage, the word use of children is almost complete. This is characterized by strings of word in words or phrases such as this shoe is wet, cat drink milk and  daddy go bye-bye. We can identical that in these phrases have a vague presence of lexical morphemes. Moreover, inflection (-ing) begin to appear and preposition (in, on) are also used.

III. The Acquisition Process:

 It's clearl that children don't study language through adult instruction or any principal. In contrast, their brain only try to find the correct form of word combinations through the process of hearing everything around them. In another word, they are imitating what the adults said and rearranging the words based on what they know.

*Learning through Imitation?:

 The children do not entirely repeat the whole sentences the adults said, but just only a part of them, and they repeat the words using their own ideas without changing the context of the said sentences.

*Learning through Correction?:

 The "correction" method is somewhat effective in guiding the children to pronounce correctly, but mostly, the children are likely to prefer their personally constructed form despite many hints that the parents have been used in a subtle manner to correct the child's pronunciation.

IV. Developing Morphology:

 By the time the child reaches 2.5 years old. They have already able to use inflectional and functional morphemes. The prepositions also be used in with inflectional morphemes.

 The next morphological development is following the use of regular plural with the -s form. The plural marker is often accompanied by a process called overgeneralization. The child use this process to overgeneralize the apparent rule of adding -s to form plurals.

 The irregular plurals are next to appear, along with the irregular past tense and the different form of the verb "to be". Not long after, the possesive inflection -'s become a part of noun phrase come along with the use of articles "a" and "the".

 Finally, the regular past tense -ed, and present tense -s are used in normal speech.

V. Developing Syntax:

 The process of developing syntax has three stages:

*Forming Questions:

 There are two procedures in first stage of forming a question. Add a wh- form (Where) to the beginning of the expression (Where kitty?) or utter the expression with the rise in intonation toward the end (Sit chair?).

 In the second stage, the use of the wh- form is more frequent and the formed expressions are more complex with the tone of intonation not changed. (You want eat?), (Why you smiling?).

 At the final stage, the auxiliary verbs in English start to change their position called inversion happens to appear in a child's speech such as (I can have ...=> Can I have ...), but it doesn't spread to the wh- form questions. Although children might still use the wh- type questions even if they have gone to school to form negative sentences like (Why kitty can't do it?). Overall, despite there are still some errors with the morphology of verbs in forming the questions, the final stage is the most similar phase to the adult model.

*Forming Negatives:

 In first stage, the easiest stratergy is to put No or Not at the beginning. The negative maybe used for denial (I am not doing this) or to express a desire (I'm don't want to do it). They can also be putted with a noun or a verb.

 In second stage, the additional Don't and Can't appear, and the use of No and Not in front of a verb is becoming more common. The children also use the form Don't more than the alternative form Do not.

 In the third stage, there is cooperation between auxiliary forms such as Didn't and Won't. The latest form of negative is also been found in the form Isn't which is used less than the form Not in stage two. 

VI. Developing Semantics:

 During the holophrastic stage, children tend to use their limited vocabulary to refer to a large amount of unrelated objects. This process is called overextension. The most simple explanation is the child will overextend the meaning of an object based on it's similarities in shape, sound and size. This is believed to be the method of how children gradually develop semantics, by overextending the context of words and narrowing down the usage of each term as more words are learned.