First Language Acqusition
Language acquisition is without doubt the greatest intellectual feat any
person is ever required to perform and what makes it more amazing is that it is
acquired at an age when we are notably incompetent at most other activities. By the time a child starts school, about 80% of the
structures of his/her native language and more than 90% of the sound system
have been mastered. Furthermore, this complex system is acquired by virtually
every human being regardless of intelligence, age, race, sex, class or other
variables. The purpose of this essay is to explore the ways children acquire
their first language and analyze Chomsky‘s theory as regards first language
acquisition.
All infants come
to the world with linguistic skills. Even though there is great variation as
regards at which children reach a given
milestone, first language acquisition follows the same stages:
Typical age
|
Stage
|
Characteristics
|
0 -6 months
|
cooing
|
During the period from
about 2-4 months, infants begin making "comfort sounds", typically
in response to pleasurable interaction with a caregiver.
At birth, the infant’s
vocal tract is in some ways more like that of an ape than that of an adult
human and babies start to experiment the sounds that may be produced with
their larynges
|
6- 8 months
|
babbling
|
Infants start to make extended sounds that are repeated
rhythmically.
Consonant+vowel sequences are often produced, such
as [bababa] or [nanana].
During this stage children learn how to move each muscle
and to produce each sound.
Both vocal play and babbling are produced more often
in interactions with caregivers, but infants will also produce them when they
are alone.
|
9-18 months
|
One stage- word
|
Children start to produce
isolated words which very often name objects, parts of the body,toys,animals,people,
etc belonging to their closest family environment.
|
18 months – 24 months
|
Two-word stage
|
Children produce "mini-sentences" with
simple semantic relations.
|
24 months- 30 months
|
Telegraphic stage
or early multiword stage
|
The child is still mostly understood by his/her
parents and caregivers.
The process is usually a somewhat gradual one, in
which the more telegraphic patterns alternate with adult or adult-like forms.
Over a year to a year and a half, sentences get
longer, grammatical elements are less often omitted and less often inserted
incorrectly, and multiple-clause sentences become commoner.
|
30 + months
|
Later multiword stage
|
Grammatical or functional structures emerge.
|
Analyzing the
above chart we can observe that children can really acquire first language very
quickly and effortlessly. There are many theories that try to explain how we
all acquire first language.
·
Nativist
position ( Chomsky)
·
Cognitive
position ( Piaget)
·
Behaviorist
position( Eric Lenneberg)
·
Pragmatical
– social position( Brunner)
Far from contradicting one another these
theories complementone another. However, the most defining characteristic of
first language acquisition is that it is universal, that is to say that it is
acquired regardless of any external factor. Regarding the stages, it has been
demonstrated that there is a natural order that applies both to first and
second language acquisition. That is to say that both systems (the system of
sounds and the system of meanings) follow the same process.
Chomsky’s Theory
Chomsky’s theory states that the brain of human beings is genetically predisposed for language. Just as we are made to
have two arms and are designed to walk, we are made to talk. His theory also
called universal grammar or generative grammar claims that human beings are
endowed with a language acquisition device (LAD) which contains the principles
and parameters of different languages. Whenever those parameters are triggered
by parents or caretakers’ motherese, children process that primary linguistic
data through their LAD. They acquire linguistic competence in the language (generative
grammar) as they are able to make hypothesis regarding how their parents’
language works. Children‘s minds are open to any human language. However, only
by experiencing positive or negative evidence through a series of parameters
that show how language works children will eventually develop a particular
language. The environment determines the way the parameters of universal
grammar are set, yielding different languages.UG cuts down the potentially
infinitive number of languages to the smaller number of possible human
languages by imposing strong restrictions on their syntactic form.
Conclusion
As a lot of people I used to think that first language was acquired
partly through imitation and positive reinforcement. However, after reading
about Chomsky’s theory I realize that language is a very complex system. It is
creative, so children produce sentences that they have never heard before and
thus it is unpredictable from the stimulus. Therefore, it is stimulus free and
not stimulus bound.
I also believe that first language depends a lot on the interaction and
stimulus provided by loving parents or caretakers. The fact that many children are brought up in
very poor social contexts determines poor vocabulary and poor social competence.
As a consequence of this fact, very often the process of learning during
primary school becomes slow.