First Language Acquisition
By Lorraine Rice, Anne Bruehler, and Beth Specker

Does language learning come naturally to children? Are we as humans hardwired to learn languages? Answers to these questions and the natural development, stages and abilities of children and how it applies to learning a second language.

Still today, it is the commonly held belief that children acquire their mother tongue through imitation of the parents, caregivers or the people in their environment. Linguists too had the same conviction until 1957, when a then relatively unknown man, A. Noam Chomsky, propounded his theory that the capacity to acquire language is in fact innate. This revolutionized the study of language acquisition, and after a brief period of controversy upon the publication of his book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, in 1964, his theories are now generally accepted as largely true. As a consequence, he was responsible for the emergence of a new field during the 1960s, Developmental Psycholinguistics, which deals with children’s L1 acquisition. He was not the first to question our hitherto mute acceptance of a debatable concept – long before, Plato wondered how children could possibly acquire so complex a skill as language with so little experience of life. Experiments have clearly identified an ability to discern syntactical nuances in very young infants, although they are still at the pre-linguistic stage. Children of three, however, are able to manipulate very complicated syntactical sentences, although they are unable to tie their own shoelaces, for example. Indeed, language is not a skill such as many others, like learning to drive or perform mathematical operations – it cannot be taught as such in these early stages. Rather, it is the acquisition of language which fascinates linguists today, and how it is possible. Noam Chomsky turned the world’s eyes to this enigmatic question at a time when it was assumed to have a deceptively simple explanation.

There are many distinctions between the processes of learning and acquisition. For instance, the terms are generally used to separate L1 acquisition from L2 learning, and implied within this distinction is the gap between children of 0-5 years learning their mother tongue, and those beyond puberty who may begin at this stage to learn a second language, or more. The process is a conscious one in learning whereas it is subconscious in acquisition, and in language acquisition the focus is on communication or reception of a message as opposed to syntax and grammar as is the case in language learning. Moreover, the context is usually crucial and meaningful in language acquisition, but need not be important to the same extent in language learning. Motivation, too, is a factor which may broaden the gulf between learning and acquisition, as for the latter the language is a matter of urgent necessity. Most importantly, however, the usual outcome of language acquisition is fluency, which is by no means guaranteed in language learning.

There are six Universal Stages of language development generally recognized to govern children’s language acquisition. These are as follows:

• Pre-linguistic stage
• Crying
  
• Cooing
  
• Babbling
  
• Holophrastic stage
  
• Two-word stage
  
• Telegraphic stage
  
• Intermediate development stages
  
• Adult stage

At first, there is what is known as the ‘silent period’ which is a relatively long period where the infant does not produce any formulated sounds; he only cries. In the next two stages, distinct language-specific sounds begin to emerge, and he then begins to utter his first words. This single-word communication is known as ‘holophrastic speech’. The child’s vocabulary then begins to increase until around the age of 28 months he reaches the stage at which he begins to produce what Brown and Frasier in 1963 were the first to term ‘telegraphic speech’. Here, as in telegrams, articles, auxiliary verbs and any sort of inflections are omitted. At this level, the child generally uses one pivot word plus one or two additional words, such as ‘Mummy go shops’, ‘Give dolly’. Telegraphic speech is marked by its own grammar, especially in terms of structure: pivot words tend to occupy a consistent position in the sentence and the word order reflects the order of adult utterances, the only difference being that in telegraphic speech the less semantically important words disappear. By five years, they have mastered adult language skills and need only to develop them with experience.

However, the telegraphic stage is still in the early stages of phonetic progress. Children go through various processes including syllable simplification, substitution, and assimilation. Syllable simplification involves reducing consonant clusters by deleting one or more segments. For example, stop becomes [tap]. It may also take the form of deletion, as in dog becoming [da]. Substitution consists of a variety of processes: stopping, fronting, gliding, and denasalization. Basically, a child substitutes one sound with another one that is easier to articulate: sea becomes [tij]. Assimilation occurs when one or more features modifies to become more like neighboring sounds, such as soup becoming [zuwp]. Research continues to appear to prove that children are able to perceive the correct phonemic constrasts, while they are still unable to produce them. For example, a small boy refers to his plastic fish as a fis. When an adult called it a fis, the boy said that was wrong. “It’s a fis.” After the adult called it a fish, the boy was relieved and said,”Yes, it’s my fis.”

As the children’s lexical and syntactic productivity increases, so their sentences become fuller, and they ventures into the grammatical dimensions. This tends to be around the age of 30 months. At this point in their progress, they tend to utilize rising intonation to signal yes-no questions. After they have auxiliary verbs, they incorporate them into the sentence without undergoing inversion, such as “Can he can look?” it usually takes a few months to completely acquire inversion with the proper use of auxiliaries. Wh questions emerge between the ages of two and four; this type of structure goes through three stages and ultimately combines the wh question with inversion.

Why is the theory of imitation now thought unacceptable? If children really acquired all of their linguistic knowledge from what they hear adults say, how could we explain the frequent errors which occur due to overgeneralization (i.e. systematic application of general rules, even where exceptions should occur)? Examples include the systematic addition of –ed to put verbs into the past tense, resulting in sentences like ‘she holded the baby rabbits’, a phrase which could obviously never have been copied from an adult’s speech. Indeed, this type of error is also found in young deaf children. They, too, can extract grammar from the language to which they have been exposed, even (as in the case of hearing children) if this information has come to them in patchy and incomplete form.

Others have explained this type of error by the theory that children use analogy to draw conclusions, which they apply overall, as well as to create new sentences. (Indeed, the human language is so rich that with a finite number of words and structures, we are able to create an infinite number of different sentences with a freqency of occurrence of zero.) However, this theory too is deficient in relation to children’s use of language because, although doubtless valuable in many cases, we can see that there is a number of logical errors which we may perhaps expect to occur by analogy, but never hear from small children. An example is the conversion of ‘I painted the barn red’, with a change of verb, to ‘I saw the barn red’. This last is clearly illogical, and no child would ever make that mistake. Is it not, then, a natural conclusion to draw that children have an innate and unconscious awareness of certain universal linguistic properties and characteristics? Those errors made are logical errors, which may shed more light on the unnecessary complications we as adults inflict upon the world of grammar, rather than on any amount of deficiency on the part of the children who make them.

Chomsky’s Innate Hypothesis is based on the observation of a number of indisputable facts in relation to language acquisition:

• All children, regardless of I.Q. level, can acquire language;
• Children acquire language effortlessly, and in a relatively short period of time;
• Children do not have to be taught formally to acquire language;
• Language is a complex system;
• Children discover the system of language from a small, unsystematic amount of data;
• Language acquisition involves very little imitation;
• Language acquisition is an active process, involving ‘mental computation’: Children say things that they have never heard from adults, e.g. camed. From these observations, Chomsky drew the following conclusions:
• Infants are born with what he termed a Language Acquisition Device (LAD). This area cannot be pinpointed in the brain, but is generally presumed to exist through the neurological networks we have developed; Exposure is all that is necessary for a child to learn language.

Chomsky’s first conclusion is drawn from the assumption that, as the brain is divided into specialized areas, so the LAD is among them. Like learning to walk or developing limbs, the human facility for language is inherent in our genes, and just as we are designed to walk upright rather than climb trees, so we are designed to talk. Language acquisition, as opposed to language learning (which implies a degree of consciousness in relation to the process), is as natural as human physical growth.

Not all aspects of language are innate, however. Chomsky has claimed that in fact we are all born with what he terms a Universal Grammar, an inherent sensitivity to linguistic structure and patterns applicable to every human language. From this point (at the cooing stage), a child begins to reproduce the particular language-specific sounds he encounters in his linguistic environment, and these are the sounds he eventually produces when he acquires the lexis and specific grammar of his own language. To summarize in Saussurian terms, then, the child is born with an innate capacity for langage and parole, but needs to learn the langue.

For the theory of a Universal Grammar to hold water, we must compare all the languages of the world to establish whether the human species has common properties of language. Papua New Guinea alone harbors 750 native languages, each different in varying degrees from the next. Although thought of as primitive by the developed world, these languages are startling in their complexity. A single one of them may have up to two or three thousand forms for each verb, as compared to the five English verbal forms. There are around five thousand languages in the world, but these are all founded in similar ground, to the extent that some talk of them as dialects of one language, human language, governed by a Universal Grammar: some underlying set of characteristics which is true of all languages everywhere. Languages have several possible variables, such as the position of the verb, word order or affixes, but all have words which act as verbs or nouns, and all express negation, interrogation, number, gender and definiteness in some way. Accordingly with the theory of an inherent Universal Grammar, children seem to love rules and have an innate pre-disposition toward them. There appears, as well, to be a specific developmental sequence for acquiring language, particularly for English. However, this seems to deviate from the sequence most commonly heard by children. This leads to the conclusion, once again, that humans are born with some sort of LAD, as supported by Chomsky.

To continue the discussion of children’s logical errors as a result of overgeneralization, we never come across certain types of error, which would, given the nature of our language, be perfectly comprehensible. Thus, a child would never ask ‘What did you eat your eggs and?’, but rather ‘What did you eat your eggs with?’, although he may be answered ‘I ate eggs and ham’. Such an error, we may conclude, would violate the principles of the Universal Grammar. In other words, every grammatical or syntactical error a child makes is an affirmation of what may well apply in another language somewhere in the world, but children will never make the kind of error which opposes this Universal Grammar.

It is noteworthy that deviant utterances are immediately corrected when learning a language, whereas a native child will not be so avidly corrected. That is to say that even when parents tirelessly repeat the correction of their child’s persistent error, the child seems quite content to ignore them until he is in a sense biologically ready for the next grammatical step. All of a sudden, the persistent errors iron themselves out, apparently regardless of parental intervention.

A number of points can be raised from Chomsky’s second conclusion. It would seem to be borne out by case studies of so-called ‘wild children’, discovered around the period of their puberty, who had been isolated from human contact all their lives until that point. Studies carried out showed that although they were able to learn individual words and concepts after they were found, their progress ultimately slowed and stopped altogether because they had passed the Critical Period (Lenneberg) for the internalization or acquisition of the grammatical and syntactical rules of language. Most prominent are the cases of Genie (1970s) and Victor (19th century), which illustrate this point exactly.

On the other hand, a group of linguists known as Interactionists agree with Chomsky on all points except this last conclusion. They argue that exposure itself is insufficient for a child to acquire language, but that together with social interaction it is possible. Thus, if a child were isolated with a television set until puberty, Interactionists claim that he could not possibly internalize all that children normally infer from the language in their environment, without contact and social interaction with other human beings. In fact, then, this group of linguists suggests that for language to emerge there must be interaction between the biological component and the environment; between nature and nurture. However, we should note at this point that Chomsky has never made explicit his definition of ‘exposure’, and he may therefore have intended the inference ‘exposure to those circumstances which usually surround our discovery of language’.

Lexical development is a realm fascinating to visit for linguists in terms of a child’s acquisition of vocabulary. Children seem to associate a word with an object, but may then in future use that word to describe a number of other objects in their environment. Thus for a child a word stands for a concept, but that concept is open to interpretation in that he selects a category of relatively similar objects and applies the lexical item throughout. This phenomenon is known as over-extension. Under-extension also occurs, although less frequently. Children underextend when they use a lexical word over restrictedly. For example, a dog may refer to beagles and scotties, but not to poodles. On a slightly different bearing, researchers have noticed that children associate words with the whole object shown to them, rather than just a part of it. So even when there are any number of different possibilities in the concept (such as, for the animal rabbit, ears, fur, eyes, tail, etc.), the child will naturally assume that the word indicates the whole of the concept, i.e. the rabbit in its entirety. This is known as the Whole Object Assumption. Professor Quine summarizes the question in terms of what he calls the ‘Gavagai’ problem’. This means that if a foreigner uses the word ‘gavagai’ to refer to something, we naturally draw the most obvious conclusion, namely that it is the whole object that he is pointing out rather than just some part of it. Adults still reason in the same way, as experiments along just these lines have shown. By extension, when children hear a word in association with an object, they assume that the word refers to this object only, and no other. This is termed the Mutual Exclusivity Principle.

One of the key questions addressed by the field of Developmental Psycholinguistics is when language actually begins. At 10 or 11 months, we may notice the production of language-specific intonation, but this is thought to begin even earlier in hearing and thought processing, and is carried over from the crying stage. To take this question further, does the mother’s response to these early sounds have any impact on the child’s speech development? Adult speech consists of a twofold cooperation of prosody and grammar, whereas the pre-linguistic child can rely on prosody only to communicate. A theory has been elaborated that it is in fact the transition period before the cry which leads to the discovery of new sounds, and that this period has a physiological tie with learning to speak.

Interactionists claim that all social communication has an effect on subsequent language acquisition, from breastfeeding onwards. This activity subconsciously instils the principle of turn-taking, which conversation will later develop, as when the baby is sucking the mother tends to remain relatively motionless, but when the sucking stops temporarily, the mother may begin actively communicating with the infant through touch and caress. Even during this early stage, tests have shown that the infant is sensitive to speech signals, and an awareness of the social use of language comes well before those first words. Indeed, even those first words, rather than simply having a ‘naming’ or referential purpose as was hitherto thought to be the case, have been shown by Jean Berko Gleason to be expressions useful in social interaction.

She argues further that when children begin to understand routinised phrases and their associations (such as ‘It’s time for your bath now’), they are not understanding the individual words and their syntax, but the familiar sentences from which they will later infer the grammar. Indeed, from the early pre-linguistic stages, we push our children into intentionality by responding to involuntary ejections such as burps with linguistic replies. We still do not know whether cognition came before language, as Piaget thought, or whether the reverse is true. Some experiments, however, have led certain linguists to believe that they originate at about the same time, and are in fact interdependent.

Interactionists, therefore, believe that constant interaction in structured forms is in fact crucial for language acquisition, and on an equal footing in importance with simple exposure. They do, however, agree with Chomsky’s theories in all other respects. This seems to be the most reliable theory, then, as it combines the essence of Chomsky’s biological language acquisition theory with the perhaps inseparable element of care and environment, nature and nurture, promoted by the Interactionist linguists.

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Reprinted with permission from Lorraine Rice. Website: www.ohiou.edu/~linguist/soemarmo/l270/Notes/lgacqui550.htm

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