英语语言学课件16FirstLanguageAcquisition

1、Chapter 16,First Language Acquisition,Basic requirements,interact with other language users in order to bring the “language faculty” into operation a particular language-using environment physically capable of sending and receiving sound signals in a language American Sign Language for deaf infants,

2、The Acquisition Schedule,All normal children ,regardless of culture, develop language at roughly the same time, along much the same schedule. The language acquisition schedule has the same basis as the biologically determined development of motor skills. The biological schedule is tied to the matura

3、tion of the infants brain and the lateralization process,the biological/acquisition capacity to cope with constant linguistic input work out the regularities in a particular language and then apply them,Some controversies,The early environment of a child differs considerably from one culture to the

4、next The issue of “innateness”: Noam Chomsky The linguistic production of young children,Caretaker speech,the characteristically simplified speech style adopted by someone who spends a lot of time interacting with a young child Features of “motherese” -frequent questions, often using exaggerated int

5、onation -baby-talk: simplified words or alternative forms with repeated simple sounds -simple sentence structure and a lot of repetition,Pre-language stages,Cooing stage: -3 months old -with velar consonants and high vowel present Babbling stage: -6 months old -contains syllable-type sounds,Pre-lang

6、uage stages,Later babbling stage: -around 9 months old -recognizable intonation patterns to consonant and vowel combination Late babbling stage -10 and 11 months old -using vocalization to express emotions and emphasis,The one-word or holophrastic stage,between 12-18 months produces a variety of rec

7、ognizable single unit utterances single terms for everyday objects such as “cookie”, “milk”. a single form functioning as a phrase or sentence,The two-word stage,Around 18 to 20 months occurrence of two separate words A variety of combinations such as baby chair, mommy eat Communication is taking pl

8、ace By the age of two, the child is able to produce 200 or 400 distinct words,Telegraphic stage,multi-word utterances strings of lexical morphemes omission of function morphemes Children follow the same principle of economy as sending a telegraph The words they use and the order in which they use th

9、em convey the relevant information; function morphemes would be redundant,The acquisition process,Children actively construct, from what is said to them, possible ways of using the language. Their linguistic production, then, is mostly a matter of trying out constructions and testing whether they wo

10、rk or not,Morphology,The order of regular appearance of the inflectional morphemes -the ing form -the plurals with s form -the possessive s -the different forms of to be -irregular past tense forms -regular past tense forms -regular s markers on the third person,Throughout this sequence, individual

11、children may produce good forms one day and odd forms the next. Overgeneralization -foots and mans -boyses and footses -goed and comed,Syntax,The formation of questions Stage 1: adding wh-form to the beginning or simply using rising intonation Stage 2: more complex expressions, but the rising tone r

12、emains Stage 3: the required inversion of subject and verb, but the wh- forms do not always undergo the required version,The formation of negatives Stage 1: no or not stuck on the beginning of any expression Stage 2: dont and cant used and with no and not, begin to be place in the front of the verb

13、rather than at the beginning of the sentence Stage 3: the incorporation of other auxiliary forms such as didnt and wont,Semantics,Overextension: the process of overextending the meaning of a word on the basis of similarities of shape, sound and size, and to a lesser extent, of movement and texture In term of hyponymy, the child first uses the middle level term such as animal-dog-poodle,Antonymous relations are acquired