The Study of Language by George Yule 6th (ed) Summary

   Chapter.13:  First Language Acquisition

First language acquisition is without overt instruction for all children, regardless of great differences in their circumstances, provides strong support for the idea that there is an innate predisposition in the human infant to acquire language. It is a special capacity for language with which each newborn child is endowed. By itself, however, this inborn language capacity is not enough.

Acquisition

Some basic requirements of the process of language acquisition are;

1. Interaction with language users: During the first two or three years of development, a child requires interaction with other language-users in order to bring the general language capacity into contact with a particular language. For example, Genie a child does not hear or is not allowed to use language will learn no language.

2. Cultural transmission, meaning that the particular language a child learns is not genetically inherited, but is acquired in a particular language-using environment.

3. Physical Capacity: The child must also be physically capable of sending and receiving sound signals in a language. All infants make “cooing” and “babbling” noises during their first year, but congenitally (by birth)  deaf infants stop after about six months. So, in order to speak a language, a child must be able to hear that language being used. By itself, however, hearing language sounds is not enough.

Input

ü Under normal circumstances, human infants acquire language by the typical behavior of older children and adults in the home environment who provide language samples or input to the child.

ü Adults such as mom, dad and the grandparents tend not to address the little creature as if they are involved in normal adult-to-adult conversation like Oh, goody, Well, John Junior, 

Baby Talk

• A simplified speech style adopted by someone for interacting with a young child is baby talk.
• Other names of baby talk speech style are motherese or child-directed speech, or caregiver speech.

Characteristics of Baby Talk

• Simplified words (tummy, nana ) or alternative forms, with repeated simple sounds and syllables, for things in the child’s environment (choo-choo, poo-poo, pee-pee, wa-wa).
• Frequent use of questions, often using exaggerated intonation, extra loudness and a slower tempo with longer pauses.

Caregiver Speech

• In caregiver speech, a young child interacts with the speaking participants via his actions like smiles and sounds.

Characteristics of Caregiver Speech

• Caregiver speech is characterized by simple sentence structures and a lot of repetition and paraphrasing, with reference largely restricted to the here and now. 

The Acquisition Schedule

ü All normal children develop language roughly at the same time and schedule. They learn physical and motor skills like sitting up, crawling, standing, walking and using their hands for physical activities, as well as, language acquisition develops biologically in the infant’s brain.

•    It seems that the child has linguistic capacity biologically, which develops with the passage of time, during the early years of life when a child hears any sound and reacts by smiling or turning his head in the direction of the sounds.
•    At one month, an infant is capable of distinguishing between [ba] and [pa].
•     During the first three months, the child produces big smiles in response to a speaking face, and starts to create distinct vocalizations.

 Cooing/gooing

•    The earliest use of speech-like sounds is described as cooing.
•    During the first few months of life, the child gradually becomes capable of producing sequences of vowel-like sounds, particularly high vowels similar to [i] and [u].
•    By four months of age, the developing ability to bring the back of the tongue into regular contact with the back of the palate allows the infant to create sounds similar to the velar consonants [k] and [ɡ ], hence the common description as “cooing” or “gooing” for this type of production.
•     Speech perception studies have shown that by the time they are five months old, babies can already hear the difference between the vowels [i] and [a] and discriminate between syllables like [ba] and [ɡ a].

Babbling

•    Between six and eight months, the child is sitting up and producing a number of different vowels and consonants, as well as combinations such as ba-ba-ba and ga-ga-ga . This type of sound production is described as babbling.
•    In the later babbling stage, around nine to ten months, there are recognizable intonation patterns to the consonant and vowel combinations being produced, as well as variation in the combinations such as ba-ba-da-da .
•    Nasal sounds also become more common and certain syllable sequences such as ma-ma-ma and da-da-da are inevitably interpreted by parents as versions of “mama” and“dada” and repeated back to the child.
•     As children begin to pull themselves into a standing position during the tenth and eleventh months, they become capable of using their vocalizations to express emotions and emphasis. This late babbling stage is characterized by more complex syllable combinations (ma-da-ga-ba ), a lot of sound-play and attempted imitations.
•     This “pre-language” use of sound provides the child with some experience of the social role of speech because adults tend to react to the babbling, however incoherent, as if it is actually the child’s contribution to social interaction.

The One-Word Stage

•    Between twelve and eighteen months, children begin to produce a variety of recognizable single-unit utterances. This period is traditionally called the one word stage. 
•   Single-word stage is characterized by speech in which single terms are used for objects such as “milk,” “cookie,” “cat,” “cup” and “spoon” (usually pronounced [pun]). 

Holophrastic speech

•    The holophrastic speech means a single form functioning as a phrase or sentence to describe an utterance that could be a word, a phrase, or a sentence.
•    Many holophrastic utterances seem to be used to name objects, they may also be produced in circumstances that suggest the child is already extending their use.
•     For example, an empty bed may elicit the name of a sister who normally sleeps in the bed, even in the absence of the person named. During this stage, then, the child may be able to refer separately to Karen and bed, but isn’t ready yet to put the forms together in a more complex phrase. 

The Two-Word Stage

• In two-word stage, a child uses two distinct words together, when his vocabulary moves beyond fifty words at around 18 to 20 months.

•     By this time, the child is two years old, a variety of combinations similar to baby chair, mommy eat, cat bad will usually have appeared. The adult interpretation of such combinations is tied to the context of their utterance. The phrase baby chair may be taken as an expression of possession (= this is baby’s chair), or as a request (= put baby in chair), or as a statement (= baby is in the chair), depending on different circumstances.
•     Here are some other examples reported from the two-word stage:

        big boat doggie bark hit ball mama dress more milk shoe off
The child actually intends to communicate through such expressions, the significant functional consequences are that the adults or older children behave as if communication is taking place. That is, the child not only produces speech but also receives feedback confirming that the utterance worked as a contribution to the interaction.

•     Moreover, by the age of two, whether the child is producing 200 or 300 distinct “words,” he/she will be capable of understanding five times as many.

Telegraphic Speech

•    In telegraphic speech, between two and two and a half years old, the child begins producing a large number of utterances that could be classified as multiple-word speech and the variation in word forms begins to appear.

Characteristics

•   Strings of words (lexical morphemes) in phrases or sentences such as this shoe all wet, cat drink milk and daddy go bye-bye.
•   Sentence-building capacity developed and child can get the correct word order correct like inflections (-ing ) begin to appear in some word forms and simple prepositions (in, on ).
•   Vocabulary expansion: By the age of two and a half, the child’s vocabulary is expanding rapidly and the child is initiating more talk while increased physical activity includes running and jumping.
•    Clear Pronunciation: By three, the vocabulary has grown to hundreds of words and pronunciation has become clearer.