Summary

 

Language Acquisition

1.    The Linguistic Capacity of Children

Children exposed to different languages ​​in different cultural and social circumstances develop their mother tongue over a small window of time, going through similar, possibly universal stages of development. Even deaf children of signing deaf parents acquire languages ​​in stages that parallel those of children acquiring spoken languages.

A.   Stages in Language Acquisition

The words and sentences that the child produces at each stage of development conform to the set of grammatical rules it has developed up to that point. although child. Grammars and adult grammars differ in certain respects, they also share many formal properties. Just like adults, children have grammatical categories like NP and VP, rules for building sentence structures and for moving constituents, as well as phonological, morphological, and semantic rules, and adhere to universal principles such as structure dependency.

In moving from first words to adult proficiency, children go through linguistic stages that are:

·         Babbling: Around six months, the baby begins to babble. the sounds produced in this period many sounds are included that do not occur in the language of the familiar. By the end of the first year, the babble comes to include only those sounds and combinations of sounds that occur in the target language.

·         First Words: Some time after the age of one, the child begins to use the same string of sounds repeatedly to mean the same thing, thereby producing her first words. The age of the child when this occurs varies and has nothing to do with the child's intelligence.

 

·         Segmenting the Speech Stream:  Speech is a continuous flow interrupted only by pauses in breathing. In intonation, the pauses that exist do not always correspond to words, phrases, or sentences limits. The adult speaker can use his knowledge of the lexicon and grammar of a language to impose structure on the speech he hears. but how babies, who have not yet learned the lexicon or the rules of grammar, extract the words of the speech they hear around them? The children are in the same solution. where you could be if you tune in to a radio station in a foreign language. You he would have no idea what was being said or what the words were saying. were. The ability to segment the continuous stream of voice into discrete units, words, is one of the remarkable feats of language acquisition.

 

·         Most children go through a stage in which their utterances consist of only one word. This is called the holophrastic or “whole phrase” stage because these one-word utterances seem to convey the meaning of an entire sentence. For example, when J. P. says “down” he may be making a request to be put down, or he may be commenting on a toy that has fallen down from the shelf

 

·         During the telegraphic stage, the child produces longer sentences that often lack function or grammatical morphemes. The child’s early grammar still lacks many of the rules of the adult grammar but is not qualitatively different from it. Children at this stage have correct word order and rules for agreement and case, which show their knowledge of structure. Children make specific kinds of errors while acquiring their language. For example, they will overgeneralize morphology by saying bringed or mans.