Child Language (L1) Acquisition

From Baby Born Talking Describes Heaven (Steven Pinker: Language Instinct, chp 9)

What you already should know

Acquisition is different than learninglearning comes from teaching Acquisition just happens in normal children Teaching kids to talk is like teaching kids how to sit up Kids arent genetically disposed to learning any particular language

A chinese kid stands no better shot at learning chinese than lithuanian if he is adopted into a Lithuanian family Kids want to have a real language- they will piece one together from what ever input they can get Creole Sign language It takes a long time for the physical organs needed for speech to develop and to have the fine motor control. Kids can learn as many languages fluently as they receive consistent input for. Usually one language become more dominant though.

How do you test babies?

Differential sucking Babies suck hard on a sucking machine you play sounds for them until they get used to the sound. When the sound changes, they will suck harder. You can know what differences they can hear.

Head turning Eye tracking- looking at different objects or TV screens Older kids

Show me the picture Tasks- put the blocks in the box

As soon as they are born (4 days old), babies can distinguish the language their mother spoke from all other languages Differential sucking- French babies. The French babies suck harder when they hear French than when they hear Russian. There is also a statistically greater increase in sucking when it changes from Russian to French than when it changes from French to Russian Babies prefer their own native language

Acquisition of phonetics

They filtered out vowels and consonants and just left the melody, called the PROSODY PROSODY is what the babies use to distinguish their language from others. It turns out that the PROSODY of a language is what is most helpful to babies in learning morphology and syntax too

Acquisition of phonemes
Jusczyk- differential sucking- infants heard ba ba ba ba, then it switched to pa pa pa pa. We know that infants are able to hear the voicing contrast Whats amazing is that two bas that differ as much as the ba and pa, but are both heard as ba didnt interest the babies. Categorical perception.

Acquisition of phonemes
The b p contrast is heard by Spanish and Kikuyu babies who dont make the contrast. English babies distinguish contrasts used in Hindi and Czech, that English speaking adults cant distinguish after hundreds of trials of training The sound hasnt changed remember though adult ears dont hear the actual sounds people make. We only hear phonemes, which is a mental idea. Our ears play a trick on us.

Subtractive principle
Babies are born with the ability to hear all contrasts used in human language- hundreds of phonemes. Acquisition consist of dumping the contrasts they dont need- not learning the contrasts they do They arent contrasting words- theyre not listening for the difference between beet and bit since they dont know those words- they are comparing individual phonemes directly. They use the individual sounds as the first step in breaking down the stream of speech into grammar

Acquisition of speech productionbabbling

5-7 months- babies play with soundstheir noises begin to sound like consonants and vowels 7-8 months- suddenly they produce real syllables In all languages the same- they start with the most common syllables. 12 months- vary syllables

Production
If a baby has a tracheotomy, they are unable to produce voiced sounds Their speech is setback-they need to play with sounds for awhile, but they catch up Deaf children also babble- with their hands, in ways that match oral babbling

Acquisition of morphology
At around 11 months, children begin to understand words Around 1, babies produce words- called the one word stage Do any of you know what your first word was? The lists are identical- objects (juice, eye, car, doll, bottle, light, dog, dada)

Morphology acquisition
Other words (off, eat, allgone, more, yes, no, byebye, what-is-that (not a sentencelearned as a single word)) They learn a word by listening for what is in stressed position- look at the DOGGIE Then they fill in the gaps between the words they know and treat those gaps as words

Morphology
Misses in extracting unknown residues: I dont want to go to your ami (from Miami) Children use prosody to hear invisible word boundaries 18 months- new word every two hours minimum pace that lasts all throughout adolescence Parataxis begins- 2 word pairs

All dry, siren by, airplane allgone, mail come, our car Some of these are sentences, others just a single NP or VP 95% of the time they are properly ordered for their language

Acquisition of syntax
The next thing that comes is syntax. They use syntax to perceive words even in the one word stage Perception is always greater than production in child language Television screen Oh Look! Big Bird is tickling Cookie Monster find Big Bird tickling Cookie Monster

The babies have to look at the correct screen

This shows they understand SVO word order

Syntax

The two-three word stage shows that they understand more complicated syntax, but cant produce it but do their components (Brown) Mother gave John lunch in the kitchen Mommy fix Mommy pumpkin I ride horsie Give doggie paper Put truck window Adam put it box Tractor go floor

Stages of Acquisition?

Roughly what weve seen so far is

Syllable babbling Gibberish babbling One-Word utterances Two-word strings Three-word (very small stage) What pinker calls All Hell Breaks Loose (rapid acquisition)

All Hell Breaks Loose

2,3: Play checkers, Big drum, I got horn 2,4: See marching bear go? That busy bulldozer truck 2,5: Now put boots on, Where wrench go?, What that paper clip doing? Trees are getting more complex all the time, as well as vocabulary Structure dependence: Ask Jabba if the boy who is unhappy is watching Mickey Mouse Roots, stems, inflections:This monster likes to eat rats; what do you call him?"

Universal stages of syntax

Linguists are on the search for if there is a predictable order in which syntactic structures are acquired Unstressed inflection words that head a tree (of, -ed, ing) which had been missing Wh-questions Embedded questions Relative clauses Comparatives Types of negations Passives Conjunctions NP, VP, IP Data are still being tabulated from all the worlds languages

Errors
If kids are so good, why do they make errors? Pronunciation errors are predictablefricative are pronounced as stops. Consonant clusters are reduced Stripes= tayp Their muscles cant keep up with their brain

Errors
Can any of you think of errors that you hear Spanish speaking children make? Errors in English: Mens, wents, Can you broke those? What he can ride in?, Going to see kitten. Only .1-8% of the time are the errors made. 90% of the time the kids are right When they make an error, it is usually an error that makes more sense than the correct thing (regulars, movement)

Errors
Stromswold, English Auxiliary system 24,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations of auxiliaries He might have eat He did be eating. Only 100 are grammatical. There are some tempting errors:

She found no errors among the 66,000 possible instances she examined

He seems happy does he seem happy? : He is smiling does he be smiling? He did eat Did he eat? : He did a few thing Didnt he a few things?

Irregulars

My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them I finded Renee English has 180 irregular verbs. The regular morpheme which kids learn, //d// has to be blocked by another learned morpheme //cut// or //knew// that interferes when the past tense morphemes is called up Childrens mistakes arent really mistakes. Even adults sometimes use a regular past tense where an irregular one is correct for low frequency verbs Strive, Tread, Dwell, Slay, Smite

Causative verbs
In English change of state (melt, break), accompanied motion (ride, dance), and manner of motion (slide, bounce) verbs can form a causative construction. The transitive is the same as the intransitive. He bounced the ball: The ball bounced He melted the butter: The butter melted He raced the horse: The horse raced Most verbs cannot do this

Causatives
Go me to the bathroom before you go to bed Dont giggle me The tiger will come and eat David and then he will be died. Even adults can stretch it sometimes

Sparkle your table with Cape Cod classic glassware That decided me. - In 1976 the Parti Quebecois began to deteriorate the health care system

How do we know its not learned from teaching?

The Stromswold experiment wiith unspeaking child chldren learn from positive evidence and extend what they know: picture with active and passive: the dog

chased the kid vs the dog was chased by the kid

Children like adults mostly make up new sentences Negative evidence doesnt work either
Child: Momma isnt a boy, he a girl Mother: Thats right Child: Walt Disney comes on on Tuesday Mother: No he does not Children cannot count on being corrected for their errors. 90% of all errors in some studies went uncorrected, and when they were corrected it is very inconsistent

What kind of input is necessary?

It was once advised that hearing children of deaf parents watch a lot of TV. Never did this work You need genuine interaction with a person to acquire a first language TV can help you learn a second language, but surprisingly first language acquisition requires a human Motherese- not necessary, but it may help, slower, more exaggerated pitch (prosody), more directed to the real visible world, more grammatical.

Fossilization
It can be very hard to change our accentsonce we have acquired a system, it is there Joseph Conrad- a great English writer- his accent was so thick he could hardly be understood Arnold Schwarzenegger

Critical period

Newport. Korean and Chinese children in the US were given a list of 276 English sentences with grammatical errors (The farmer bought two pig. The little boy is speak to a policeman) Age on Arrival 3-7 y.o. performed identically to American students AoA 8-15 increasingly worse, the later they arrived AoA 17-39 huge variability, unrelated to age

Critical period

Genie- only able to produce paratactic sentences Mike paint, I like elephant eat peanut Chelsea- born deaf, not recognized as deaf until she was thirty one. Hearing aids allowed her to hear and learn to speak. (The small a the hat. Richard eat peppers hot. Orange tim car in. Combing hair the boy) As a second language learner, these mistakes arent a problem, because you have an L1 grammar to hang things on Apparently these language deprived individuals have no grammar with which to organize their second language (which is actually their first language)