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Language acquisition

What is psycholinguistics?

Psycholinguistics is the study of language with reference to human psychology. It has

a very broad scope but is frequently used with specific reference to processes of language
acquisition, especially of one's first language. In the more general psycholinguistics covers
the following areas:

1) Neuro-linguistics (the study of language and the brain).

This has a physical dimension to it and is the domain of neurologists concerned with
impairments of language due to brain lesions, tumors, injuries or strokes. It also has an
observational domain which is the concern of linguists. Here certain phenomena like slips
of the tongue, various performance errors (due to nervousness, tiredness for instance) are
examined for the insights which they might offer about the structure of the language
faculty in the human brain.

2) Language pathology

The breakdown of language has been studied intensively from at least two main
angles. The first is that of medicine where attempts are made to help patients regain at least
partially the ability to use language normally. A second group is formed by patients who
have had a tumor in the brain which impairs their speech areas. Language disorders are
known in linguistics and medicine as aphasia. There are many different types depending on
the impairment which a patient shows.

3) Language acquisition

Language acquisition is a process which can take place at any period of one's life. In
the sense of first language acquisition, however, it refers to the acquisition (unconscious
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learning) of one's native language (or languages in the case of bilinguals) during the first 6
or 7 years of one's life (roughly from birth to the time one starts school).

Acquisition is carried out in the first years of childhood and leads to unconscious
knowledge of one's native language which is practically indelible. Note that acquisition has
nothing to do with intelligence, i.e. children of different degrees of intelligence all go
through the same process of acquiring their native language.
Learning (of a second language) is done later (after puberty) and is characterized by
imperfection and the likelihood of being forgotten. Learning leads to conscious knowledge.

 First language acquisition: This is the acquisition of the mother tongue.

Chronology is important here. The degree of competence acquired may vary from
individual to individual and may be checked by later switching to another language.
Language acquisition is largely independent of intelligence, although individuals can and
do differ in their mastery of open classes such as vocabulary.

 Bi- and multilingualism: This is the acquisition of two or more languages from
birth or at least together in early childhood. The ideal situation where all languages are
equally represented in the child's surroundings and where the child has an impartial
relationship to each is hardly to be found in reality so that of two or more languages one is
bound to be dominant.
 Second language acquisition: This is the acquisition of a second language after
the mother tongue has been (largely) acquired. Usually refers to acquisition which begins
after puberty, i.e. typically adult language acquisition. Sometimes replaced by the term
further language acquisition.

Linguistic Milestones – General Trends (By Matthew Saxton)

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Conditions of acquisition

 NATURAL This is characterized by continuous exposure to language data. This

data is not ordered, i.e. the (child) learner is exposed to the performance of adult speakers
of the language he/she is acquiring. There is little if any feedback to the acquirer with
regard to this intake.
 CONTROLLED This is intervallic if not to say sporadic. Furthermore it takes
place against the background of another language, usually the first language of the learners.
In exceptional cases acquisition can be both natural and controlled, i.e. where one obtains
formal instruction (or gives it one to oneself) and lives in an environment where the target
language is spoken. Controlled acquisition is further characterized by an ordered exposure
to the data of the language.
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 GUIDED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION This is an intermediary type between

the two just discussed and is characterized by prescriptive corrections on the part of the
child's contact persons, i.e. mother, father, etc. Corrections show the transfer of adult
grammars to children whereas natural language acquisition shows the gradual
approximation of the child’s grammar to the adult’s.

Child is not corrected as often by his/her mother as one might imagine. Self-
correction is most common (but not immediate) due to two factors. Most broadly
speaking, because of lack of communication (here immediate correction may take place)
and secondly by consistently hearing correct usage on the part of the mother, the child
eventually drops his/her incorrect forms, which while perhaps communicatively effective,
are grammatically wrong. It is also true that children do not learn language just from the
mother. If siblings are present, then they too form a source of input for the child. And
siblings do not correct others or simplify their language for the younger ones among them.

Vocabulary acquisition

The capacity to acquire the ability to incorporate the pronunciation of new words
depends upon many factors. Before anything the learner needs to be able to hear what they
are attempting to pronounce. Another is the capacity to engage in speech repetition.
Children with reduced abilities to repeat nonwords (a marker of speech repetition abilities)
show a slower rate of vocabulary expansion than children for whom this is easy. Several
computational models of vocabulary acquisition have been proposed so far. Various studies
have shown that the size of a child's vocabulary by the age of 24 months correlates with the
child's future development and language skills. A lack of language richness by this age has
detrimental and long-term effects on the child's cognitive development, which is why it is
so important for parents to engage their infants in language. If a child knows fifty words or
less by the age of 24 months, he or she is classified as a late-talker and future language
development, like vocabulary expansion and the organization of grammar, is likely to be
slower and stunted.
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Meaning

Children learn, on average, ten to fifteen new word meanings each day, but only one
of these words can be accounted for by direct instruction. The other nine to fourteen word
meanings need to be picked up in some other way. It has been proposed that children
acquire these meanings with the use of processes modeled by latent semantic analysis; that
is, when they meet an unfamiliar word, children can use information in its context to
correctly guess its rough area of meaning. A child may expand the meaning and use of
certain words that are already part of its mental lexicon in order to denominate anything
that is somehow related but for which it does not know the specific words yet. For instance,
a child may broaden the use of mummy and dada in order to indicate anything that belongs
to its mother or father, or perhaps every person who resembles its own parents, or say rain
while meaning I don't want to go out.

Significant Language Milestones (stages)

Language milestones are successes that mark various stages of language development.
They are both receptive (hearing and understanding) and expressive (speech). This means
that in addition to being able to make sounds and words, baby also needs to be able to hear
and understand. Not every baby says the same thing at the same time. Language milestones
are an approximation, when most babies do certain things.

One of the firmest pieces of evidence that language acquisition is genetically

predetermined is the clear sequence of stages which children pass through in the first five
years of their lives. Furthermore there are characteristics of each stage which always hold.
For instance up to the two-word stage only nouns and/or verbs occur. No child begins by
using conjunctions or prepositions, although he/she will have heard these word classes in
his/her environment.

These following divisions of the early period of first language acquisition are
approximate and vary from individual to individual.
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 Cooing

This stage can be called the silent period. Cooing is a stage of infants’ pre-linguistic
speech development and consists of the production of single syllable, vowel-like sounds.
The verbal behavior of infants during the first year of life is termed the pre-linguistic
period because it does not contain actual words. Common noises during early infancy
include crying, cooing, and variations in patterns of intonation. Emerging between 6 and 8
weeks of age, cooing is a stage of pre-linguistic speech that is characterized by infants’ first
non-crying verbal behavior. Consisting of brief, vowel-like utterances, such as “oo,” or
“aa” sounds, or consonant-vowel combinations such as “goo,” cooing provides vocal
practice and entertainment to infants, and aides in the development of motor control over
vocalizations.

 Laughing

Usually at around 16 weeks, baby will laugh in response to things in their world.

 Babbling or early production

Babbling is the first proper stage of language acquisition occurs between birth and
approximately 11 months of age. This is when children start to recognize and produce
sounds. The sounds children produce in the babbling stage are universal. Children quickly
learn which sounds attract the attention of their parents and which sounds are positively
reinforced and encouraged, which supports the behaviorism approach towards language, as
children here are simply learning and imitating what their parents want them to learn and
reward them for this. Children in the babbling stage lack all features of language except for
phonology, where they can form and recognize sounds/speech but could not use any of this
information to form sentences or to define words/understand what words mean.
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 The word “no”

Between 6 and 11 months of age, baby should learn to understand the word no and
will stop what he is doing (though he may immediately do it again!).

 One-word (Holophrastic) Stage.

The one word or holophrastic stage occurs between approximately 11 months of age
and 1.5 years of age. By this point in time, children can produce a small number of
isolated, single words and many sounds. This is now more language specific rather than
universal babbling. By this point in time, children know which sounds and words get the
attention of their parents (e.g. mama, dada, etc.) and are again, positively reinforced.
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Children will over-generalize to maximize the effectiveness of their communication, and

might call all four-legged animals a dog for example.
This early stage of the one word stage is definitely behaviorism later though, when the
child moves into the more holophrastic part of this stage, it becomes more interactionism as
the child starts using one word with the most information/meaning to replace whole
phrases or even sentences. They learn to associate one word with multiple meanings, which
generally isn't taught to them and it's just something they pick up from interacting with
adults around them. An example of this holophrastic use is 'milk'. By only using the word
milk, the child could mean multiple things such as 'I want milk', 'I spilled my milk', 'Where
is the milk?', etc.
By this point, a child can use and understand many features of language. They
understand phonology and can distinguish between the different sounds they hear. Children
here are developing a wider lexicon, and are well on their way in understanding
morphology and the different rules words have. While they may be in the holophrastic
stage, they are developing their syntax and semantic skills

 Two-word Stage.

After a few months of producing one-word utterances, a child will begin to use two
word utterances and continue to do so until they are around the age of 2.5 years old. These
two-word utterances are usually in the form of noun-noun or noun-verb. Much of this is
almost identical to one-word utterances, and so for a while there may be a large overlap in
the way they use one-word utterances and two-word utterances. An example of a two-word
utterance (noun-verb) might be 'doggie bark', meaning the dog is barking. This stage only
contains content words (no function words or morphemes yet). A child's lexicon usually
develops to around 50 words and then takes a dramatic leap forward and is sometimes
commonly called the 'word spurt' or the 'naming explosion'.
This is definitely interactionism, and somewhat nativism in the way that they
definitely aren't taught how to structure their phrases, but know how to thanks to what is
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known as the LAD (Language Acquisition Device), which is located in the brain. The LAD
is a language mechanism or process that is supposed to have the function of being able to
learn and process symbolic nature easily.
The features of language are also very similar; the only change here though is that a
child has a better understanding of syntax and semantics. Children here still highly
abbreviate words and still lack many of the smaller grammatical words and endings of
English such as 'the, of, -s' etc. as well as '-s possessive'. They are beginning to develop an
understanding of the different rules some words possess, how to use these words, etc.
They're developing an understanding of how to categorize words they hear from adults.
Children at this stage don't necessarily need to be taught something, but instead can
develop their own sense of meaning when it comes to words that they may have never
heard before. If a child is offered something like lemonade, they may not know what
lemonade is, but from the question they will understand that lemonade is a food, and then
associate the taste of lemonade with that word. The word ordering a child uses at this stage
is the same as an adult’s grammar.

 Telegraphic Stage.

The telegraphic stage is the last stage of language before a child can speak fluently
and begins roughly around 2.5 years of age and onward indefinitely until a child has fluent
language skills. As Stilwell Pecci points out, "There is no three-word stage as such. What
follows is a period of two to three years of astonishing progress on a variety of fronts."
Children at this stage progress very quickly and develop language at a much faster rate now
that they have grasped the very essentials of language.
During this stage, children seem to have a much better understanding of syntax and
semantics. Over the course of this stage (more specifically after the age of two), children
often expand their lexicon by as many as ten to twelve new words a day, most of which are
new social interaction words such as yes, no, please, by, etc. to discover these new words,
many children at this age ask a large amount of questions typically beginning with 'wh',
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such as 'who, where, what' etc. and in a sentence they may look like 'Where Mummy? What
that? etc.'. They tend to develop a fairly good understand of what each individual word
means and how to use it in a sentence.
During this stage, children do not appear to be making word order errors, but their
sentences are shortened dramatically. They generally follow the order of the subject, verb
and object, such as 'doggie bark me' might mean 'the dog barked at me'. The first inflection
children learn is usually 'ing', followed by an understanding of plurals and how plurals are
formed as well as starting to develop exceptions. Simple prepositions (i.e. in, on, etc) are
generally learnt after this.
Children may have a lot of trouble in terms of phonology. They know the difference
between sounds and can distinguish between even the hardest sounds with ease, but they
may not be able to physically pronounce them yet. This is known as the 'Fis
Phenomenon' (see the link below). Children in the telegraphic stage are still
lacking function words and morphemes and do not quite know how to use these in
sentences, but when heard, they can understand them and how they give a sentence
meaning.
Recent research
Salim and Mehawesh in 2014 conducted a research on “Stages in Language
Acquisition”. The principle goal of this study was to follow the language advancement of
the youngster “Anwar” from a Jordanian Arabic-speaking home, from her first vocal
sounds to the main sentences. The present investigation which depends on "naturalistic
observation" covers the obtaining of Arabic amid her pre-school age. The investigation was
completed by keeping up the correct records of the kid expressions as a 'diary' and the
customary strategy for phonetic interpretation was utilized to record articulations. It was
discovered that she had obtained Arabic when she was four. That year she was admitted to
kindergarten. The entire study is kept to various phases of language acquisition.
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References

Berk, L. E. (2009). Child development (8th ed.). Boston: Pearson Education.

Google Scholar

Lightfoot, D. (2010). Language acquisition and language change. Wiley Interdisciplinary

Reviews: Cognitive Science, 1(5), 677–684. doi:10.1002/wcs.39

McKee M.L. (2011) Cooing. In: Goldstein S., Naglieri J.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Child
Behavior and Development. Springer, Boston, MA

Salim, J. A., & Mehawesh, M. (2014). Stages in Language Acquisition: A Case Study.
English Language and Literature Studies, 4(4). doi:10.5539/ells.v4n4p16

White, E. J., Hutka, S. A., Williams, L. J., & Moreno, S. (2013). Learning, neural
plasticity and sensitive periods: implications for language acquisition, music
training and transfer across the lifespan. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 7.
doi:10.3389/fnsys.2013.00090