Lecture: Psycholinguistics Professor Dr. Neal R. Norrick
_____________________________________
Psycholinguistics
Universität des SaarlandesDept. 4.3: English Linguistics
SS 2009
5. First Language Acquisition
Natural acquisition with no special learning necessary
critical period resulting from a combination of factors:
• development of connections between nerve cells• myelination of nerve cells
• lateralization of brain functions• dominance of left hemisphere• corresponding development of motor skills• general cognitive stages of development
(Piaget)
5.1 Developmental sketch
Age Language General
(months)
9 babbling crawling
10 first words standing,
precurrent, maintained claps hand,
(ba)nana(na) for holds spoon
'banana, food, mama'
Age Language General(months)
11 5-10 recurrent words first steps, fulfills requests like: recognizesbring me the blue ball pictures inshow me the big red dog books
12 5 distinct vowels starts walking5 distinct consonants
Age Language General
(months)
13 recognizable words running,
daddy nein ball climbing furniture
allgone
14 imitations: horse, train simple puzzles,
reduplications: turns book pages
choochoo,
byebye, taktak ‘clock’
Age Language General
(months)
16 recognizes own name points to himself:
20+ words Where's Nicky?
18 vocabulary explosion climbs stairs
2-word units: without rail
ducky allgone
Nicky haben
Age Language General
(months)
20 3-word units: hangs on monkey
Nicky cookie haben bars, points to
also: eyes, nose, mouth
haben Nicky cookie
Age Language General
(months)
22 verb + particle: dramatic
lock up/ deck zu play,
4-word units: stuffed Mami Auto fahren kauft animals,
Inni gute Nacht sagen dolls
Age (months): 24
Language General
verb endings: Inni spuckt bisschen kicks soccer ball
statement: Nicky auch essen plays hide-n-seek
question: Nicky auch essen, ja? draws details:
command: Nicky auch essen ears, tails, wheels
word-formation: cutter ‘knife’
auskleben ’tear apart’
umwärts
Age (months): 26
Language General
participles: Mami ist weggegingt draws objectively das ist runtergefallt recognizable figures,
recognizes colorscomparison: Pferdchen ein kleineres
Mond grösser als Daddy
Monologues/ Mami kommt darein, tic-tacstories: Danke, Post schickt Daddy
Age Language General
(months)
27 future orientation: sings melodies
Let's build a castle
I'll put it in
28 recursive structures: counts to 5
Ich weiss nicht, wen recognizes letters:
der Deckel verloren hat N, C, O
questions with
when, how
Age Language
(months)
30 conditionals:
ich suche, ob ich den Hasen finde
Timmy ist traurig, wenn das
Osterhäschen hier schläft
plans: I want to read a book about a story
Age Language General (months)
32 first real narrative: builds LegosIt was a wooden lamby draws people and it was on the floor and housein a barn with chimneyand they took it home and windowsand they washed itand it wasn't ugly
Age Language General (months)
34 reports on TV program: learns toPlötzlich kamen zwei peddle
trikeKrokodile und haben das Kälbchen ge'essen
reports on activities:I'm pretending this is a castle
(continued: 34 months)
explains actions:
I break it that I can make it new
predicts:
It's gonna be real beautiful,
you're gonna love it
Age (months): 36
Phonetics• voiced th: initial okay in the this etc• medial v in other• voiceless th: initial s in sing• final f in both• vocalizes final l and r• mispronunciations: amimals, cimamon, pasketti
Morphology• double plurals: mens, feets, mices• double preterites: sawed, standed• regularized preterites: goed, sitted• reverse word-formations: popcorner, mowgrasser
Syntax• negation: I see it not, That doll sits not right• questions: What it did? What the lady said?• counting: 1 2 3 4 5 6 20 14 fiveteen 16
Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)
as standard measure of first language development as opposed to age
5.2 Natural order of acquisition:
5.2.1 "Why mama and papa?“
Jakobson's order for phoneme acquisition
• in babbling, children produce all kinds of sounds and sound combinations; many children produce imitations after babbling
• but around age 2, children narrow their sound repertory and begin to produce sounds of their language in fixed order
order reflects an attempt to create the clearest possible set of distinctions at any given point, within the given physiological limits
• this order of acquisition also reveals parallel between different languages• most salient distinction is between Vowels (V) and Consonants (C)
Vowels are characteristically open and resonant: • the prototypical V is a
Consonants are characteristically closed and obstruent:
• stops are prototypical Cs• the prototypical stop is p
the prototypical syllable is CV: maximizing the C-V distinction, a child's first syllable should be pa given children's tendency to reduplication, a child's first real word should be papa
the first division within the class of Cs is that between oral and nasal; the nasal counterpart of bilabial p is m
maximizing the p-m distinction and reduplicating,
the child's second word should be mama
(actually initial nasals often appear first, because of the association with sucking; and mama is often first word recorded, because of the centrality of mother for the child)
major divisions within the class of Vs are those between front and back, high and low, spread and open; the vowel most distinct from a along all these parameters is i
again maximizing the a-i distinction (and reduplicating), the child's next words should be pipi and mimi
extending the pattern of Vs, always seeking to maximize distinctness, the child should move to a triplet:
a
u i
after the Cs p and m , the child usually acquires t , then the third voiceless stop k and so on: p m t k
child moves on to ever larger patterns with increasing numbers of distinctive features
only when child controls the individual consonants can they occur together in 2-consonant clusters:
• then word-initial clusters like pl- and st- precede final clusters like -lp and –st• later come initial 3-consonant clusters like spr- and str-• and then word-final 3-consonant clusters like -rst and -sks
of course, kids don't learn sounds in isolation, but only in words and syntactic structures
5.2.2 Order of acquisition for syntax
at first, kids produce:• one-word utterances with holistic meaning• two-word utterances with no fixed word order• three-word utterances without inflections,• prepositions or other markers
then they begin to acquire syntax
Brown's (1973) order of acquisition for syntax:
1. present progressive girl playing 2. prepositions ball in water 3. plural toys, dishes 4. irregular past tense went, told 5. possessive Ann's toys 6. articles a dog, the dog 7. regular past tense jumped, hugged, wanted
8. regular 3rd person she goes, talks, watches 9. irregular 3rd person she does, has10. auxiliary be: I am, you are, she is11. contracted auxiliary I'm, you're, she's
order of acquisition as reflecting general learning strategies and stages of development (Piaget) or as evidence of innate language acquisition device (Chomsky)
5.3 Piaget
language as product of intelligence, not behaviorist learningrational origin of language presupposes fixed nucleus,
i.e. structures common to all human languageslike subject-predicate, hierarchical organizationbut no specific language-learning device (despite Chomsky)
Piaget assumes child language development reflects species development; no innateness assumption is necessary, given sensorimotor intelligence in human development
language as a special case of general symbolic behavior
developmentally, each stage prepares for the next, but each new stage requires a reorganization
e.g. infant recognizes caregiver as separate from continuum
caregiver as recurrent/stable entity
self as separate
self as entity like caregiver
e.g. kid recognizes human sound separate from continuum
language sound as separate from babbling
discrete word as separate from continuum
discrete word as recurrent/stable entity
word + word as unit
hierarchy within word + word unit etc
Piagetian stages in general cognitive development
1. Sensory-motor stage (birth to 2 years)• child notices objects as separate from self and
permanent• manipulates objects as chief contact with
environment
2. Preoperational thought
2a. Stage of symbolic thought (age 2-4)• symbolic play, pretending and language
acquisition• child recognizes social nature of language.
2b. Stage of intuitive thought (age 4-7)• child begins to think in language, but thinking is
still egocentric and centered on one relationship at a time
3. Stage of concrete operations (age 7-11)• child can vary two or more relationships
independently solves conservation problem by compensation
4. Stage of formal operations (age 11-15)• hypothesis formation and testing. rational
consideration of the form of an argument, e.g.
All three-legged snakes are purple.
I am hiding a three-legged snake.
What color is it?