语言学概论第十章Language Acquisition

1、,Chapter 10 Language acquisition,名字。,Definition:,Language acquisition-refers to the childs acquisition of his mother tongue, i.e. how the child comes to understand and speak the language of his community.,it refers to first language not second language acquision,Children all over the world learn to

2、speak at about the same time unless they suffer from extreme external deficiency. How do children accomplish this? What enable children to learn words and string them together into meaningful sentence? What facilitate children to develop the grammatical system of their language? What help them to ac

3、hieve the communicative competence using the language to express their various needs?,Discussion!,differences between the term of acquisition and learning,语言习得：通常指在自然的语言环境中，通过旨在沟通意义的言语交际活动，不自觉地，自然地掌握或获得第一语言。典型的例子是儿童习得第一语言。 语言学习：通常指在学校环境下，有专门的教师指导，严格按照教学大纲和课本，通过讲解，练习，记忆等活动，有计划，有系统，有意识地对语言规则的掌握。典型的例子是

4、成人在学校学习第二语言。 example: Mathematics？ the subject Mathematics is learned, not acquired.,Three main theories of child language acquisition,the behaviorist view 行为主义理论 the innatist view 语法积极天生主义理论 the interactionist view 互动主义理论,the focus of their debate is whether the innate ability or the language envir

5、onment plays a crucial role in the process of a childs language acquisition.,Three main different theories concerning how language is learned,Behaviorist view,Innatist view,Interactionist view,the behaviorist（行为主义论）,proposed by B.F.Skinners(斯金纳) Traditional behaviorists view language as behavior and

6、 believe that language learning is simply a matter of imitation and habit formation. Imitation Recognition Reinforcement (gradually, habit-forming),A behaviorist view of language acquisition,Children do not imitate adults speech in much the same way as parrots do, they imitate words selectively and

7、according to their own understanding of the words or patterns, which is based on what the children have already known instead of what is “available” in the environment. Sometimes children are very much in charge of the conversation and activities with adults, children seem to pick out patterns and g

8、eneralize them to new contexts. They create new forms or new uses of words, until they finally figure out how the forms are used by adults.,advantages,although the behaviorist view is under challenge and criticism because of its inadequacy, but it seems to be reasonable in some degree. for example,

9、childrens learning of a language needs immitation and reinforcememt; its necessary to form certain habit in order to master a language.,disadvantages,it fails to explain how children acquire more complex grammatical structures of the language. Examples: a. Johnis mother loves himi,j. b. * Hei loves

10、Johnis mother. c. Hisi, mother loves Johni. The inadequacy of behaviorist view lies in the fact that children do not imitate adults language in much the same way as parrots do.,the innatist view（语法天生主义论）,proposed by Chomsky According to the innatist view of language acquisition, human beings are bio

11、logically programmed for language.,An innatist view of language acquisition,1st: All children virtually learn their native language which is so complicated at almost the same time. 2nd: Children successfully master the basic structure of their language or dialect in various conditions. 3rd: The lang

12、uage children exposed to may not contain examples of all the information which they eventually know.,According to the innatist view of language acquisition, human beings are biologically programmed for language and that the language develops in the child just as other biological functions such as wa

13、lking.,LAD-language acquisition deviceLAD 语言习得机制,Chomsky referred to the innate language ability as language acquisition device (LAD). The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a postulated “organ” of the brain that is supposed to function as a inborn device for language acquisition.,Language Acquisi

14、tion Device (LAD),According to Chomsky, there are aspects of linguistic organization that are basic to the human brain and that make it possible for children to acquire linguistic competence in all its complexity with little instruction from family or friends. He argues that LAD probably consists of

15、 three elements: a hypothesis-maker, linguistic universal, and an evaluation procedure.,UG普遍语法,Later Chomsky refers to this innate endowment天资 as Universal Grammar. Universal Grammar includes a set of principles which can be used to explain child language acquisition. UG is an endowment that all chi

16、ldren are born with. If children are pre-equipped with UG, then what they have to learn is the way in which their own language makes use of these principles.,An innatist view of language acquisition,TG(Transformational-Generative )grammar sees language as a system of innate rules. A native speaker p

17、ossesses a linguistic competence, or a language acquisition device. Although Chomsky does not intend to make his model a representation of performance, i.e., the language actually used in communication, applied linguistics find TG grammar useful in certain aspects. This view serves as an answer to t

18、he logical problem of language acquisition that the behaviorist view fails to recognize.,Logical Problem of Language Acquisition逻辑问题,The logical problem refers to the fact that children come to know more about their language than what they could reasonably be expected to learn from their living envi

19、ronment. so,when exposed to confsing information or when guidance or correction is not avalable, children can discover for themselves the ultimate rules of the language system.,examplesJohn saw himself.Himself saw John.(the reflexive pronoun must follow the noun it refers to)looking at himself bores

20、 John.John said that Fred liked himself.John said that Fred lke himself.(the closest noun phrase uaually be the antecedent )John promised Bill to wash himself.,Merit Their research results showed that the native signers outperform both the early signers and the later signers and were highly consiste

21、nt in their use of grammatical forms.,Critical period Hypothesis (CPH),10.5 Stages in child language development,1st: Phonological development Children are born with an ability to discriminate and produce sounds and the acquisition of sounds is universal across all culture and languages, the sequenc

22、e in which the sounds are acquired works like a system of pre-requisites, i.e., the child must pass each stage before he can proceed to the next one.,2nd: Vocabulary development,Children do not learn the meaning of a word “all at once”, when a child learns a new word, he may well under-extend or ove

23、r-extend it. 1) Under-extension (birds are not animals) 2) Over-extension (the extension of categories or analogies, of family resemblances) 3) Lexical Contrast (children have conventional words for things, they use conventional words for something else when a proper word is available, then they con

24、trast it with other words.) 4) Prototype theory (children may begin a word with a prototype and extend its features later.),3rd: Grammatical development,1) Telegraphic speech(content words, lacking of function element, no syntactic or morphological markers, i.e. no use of inflections for number, per

25、son or tense, etc, around the age of 2. their noun+noun can be equal to a number of different grammatical relations which will be expressed later by other syntactic devices. e.g., Mommy sock) 2) Sentences of three main elements (the grasp of principles for sentence formation, e.g., daddy kick ball.)

26、,Grammatical development,As children learn vocabulary they are also learning morpho-syntax rules or grammar. Children acquire their first morphemes in a predictable order, which is to a large extent determined by the linguistic complexity rather than the frequency of input. Childrens learning of que

27、stion construction: 1. using a question intonation: a rising pitch at the end of the sentence. 2. children merely “take on” a question word in front of the sentence without changing the word order or inserting do. 3. until they have acquired the auxiliary word that they can use questions correctly.,

28、Grammatical development,While children are increasing their mastery of grammatical morphemes ,they are also increasing their ability to carry out transformation of the basic sentence structure so as to produce more complex utterances. This grammatical development is partly a matter of growing competence (in the sense of underlying knowledge) and partly a matter of increasing performance capacity. Some subtle grammatical distinctions may not be mastered much before the age of ten.,4