Angol alkalmazott nyelvszet (SMALAN2120, SMALAN3121) Scovel: Psycholinguistics

Thomas

Unit 2 Acquisition: when I was a child, I spoke as a child

Terms and Definitions:

Developmental psycholinguistics: The examination of how infants and children aquire the ability to comprehend and speak their mother tongue. Cooing: In contrast to crying, infants at this early age of oral production express coos of contentment which are precursors to babbling. Babbling: Strings of consonant-vowel syllable clusters produced by infants. Emerging during the second six months of a babys life, this stage of language production is the first indication that an infant is actually learning sounds in its mother tongue. Marginal babbling: An infants initial attempts to produce syllables, usually beginning at the age of about six months. Canonical babbling: The repetitions of syllables by infants beginning at about eight months of age which first shows that they are acquiring distinct features of the mother tongue. Iconic: One-to-one relationships between signs and their referents. (to speak in a deep voice) Symbolic: Signs which have a random and arbitrary relationship with their references. Segmental phonemes: Vowels and consonants: sounds which are relatively easy to divide into individual units of sound. Suprasegmental: Features of speech beyond the individual sound such as pitch, stress, rhythm, and intonation. Holophrastic term used to describe one word sentences using by small children but also found in adult speech. (Milk? Here!) Idiomorphs: Words small children invent in their initial attempts to acquire a language (wa wa for cat) Creative construction: Concerns the tendency of young children acquiring their mother tongue to come up with overgeneralizations about the language which they have never been exposed to.
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Angol alkalmazott nyelvszet (SMALAN2120, SMALAN3121) Scovel: Psycholinguistics

Thomas

Critical period: Hypothetically, approx. the first ten years of life. Some linguists believe that certain aspects of language acquisition can never be fully acquired if they have not been learned during this time. Egocentric speech: A term used by Piaget and others to characterise the way the language of young children appears both to reflect and shape their early thinking. Innateness: The theory that ascribes a major part of language learning to genetically packaged knowledge which is then triggered, after birth, by exposure to large amount of linguistic input. Language Acquisition Device (LAD) According to Chomsky, the innate mental mechanism designed uniquely for the acquisition of language. Universal Grammar (UG): An abstract set of rules and principles which govern the syntax of all languages and which many linguists believe to be innately specified in all humans. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) The average number of morphemes an infant produce in its utterances. Researchers use this as a measure of the complexity of a childs early speech production. Transformational Generative (TG) grammar: Chomskys model of grammar which posits a set of grammatical rules, or transformations, which operate on phrase structures to generate all and only the sentences of a language. Stage: Irrespective of their rate of language acquisition, all children appear to progress through the sane stages or sequences of development. Pivot: Word used by young children either to begin or end a two-word utterance (Milk allgone). Rate: The amount of time it takes children to learn a specific sound, structure, or specified number of words. Language acquisition rates vary a great deal among very young children. Tuning: Making minor revisions in a hypothesis to accommodate new data (a child who believes that all past-tense forms end with ed creates a word wented after hearing went used to indicate past time). Phrase structure rules: The syntactic skeleton of a sentence which specifies all the major constituents which be accounted for in that particular utterance (noun phrase, verb phrase).

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Angol alkalmazott nyelvszet (SMALAN2120, SMALAN3121) Scovel: Psycholinguistics

Thomas

Summary of unit 2 Humans first efforts at speech are not words but cries. Crying of a baby is the first communicative sign. Crying is not only communicative; it is also a direct precursor to language and speech. In the first few months it is a kind of language without speech to express discomfort. During the first few weeks of a childs life, crying is largely an autonomic response to noxious stimuli, triggered by the autonomic nervous system as a primary reflex. Crying trains babies to time their breathing patterns so that eventually they learn how to play their lungs like bagpipes (quick inhalations slow exhalations). This skill of timed breating is crucial for successful speech communication for the rest of his life. Crying is completely iconic; there is a link between the physical sound and its communicative intent. But in the first two months crying becomes more differentiated and more symbolic. It is not related to the childs discomfort only, but to its needs, mostly to elicit attention. After several weeks of extensive interaction with its caretaker, the child starts to coo (gurgling sounds to express satisfaction). Cooing is succeeded by a babbling stage at about six months of age. It is a kind of vocal play. First, marginal babbling emerges, followed by canonical babbling around the age of eight months. Children seem to play with all sorts of segments at this age and only later they produce segmental phonemes (individual consonants and vowels that make up their native tongue). Suprasegmental sounds (pitch, rhythm or stress which accompany the syllables we produce) are learned at this age. The lack of suprasegmental accuracy in the babbling is often the first overt signal of a childs deafness. The first words appear at about the age of one. Children start to use idiomorphs, words they invent when they first catch on to the magical notion that certain sounds have a unique reference. These first words tent to be those which refer to everyday objects and can be manipulated by the child. This is the time when they start using egocentric speech because they want to talk about what surrounds them; they are the centre of their universe (By the age of six an average child has a recognition vocabulary of about 14,000 words). With the advance of vocabulary the child starts to use single words as skeletal sentences. This is the so called holophrastic stage, when they actually use intonation, gesture, and contextual

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Angol alkalmazott nyelvszet (SMALAN2120, SMALAN3121) Scovel: Psycholinguistics

Thomas

clues as they communicate. This is the bridge which transports the child from the land of cries, names and words into the world of phrases, clauses and sentences. Even at an earlier age, a childs acquisition of syntax displays a definite understanding of universal properties of human language. Children progress through different stages of grammatical development, measured largely by the average number of words occurring per utterance. All children begin to create sentences after the holophrastic stage, first with two words, and subsequently with more. Even with a two-word stage, children demonstrate a surprising amount of grammatical precocity. They do not randomly rotate words between first and second position. Certain words (pivots) tend to be used initially or finally, and others can be used to fill in the slot either after or before these so called pivots. The childs output can be symbolized by a simple set of phrase structure rules. He has a simple set of rules which generate a large number of diverse utterances. Young humans very rapidly acquire the notion that words do not combine randomly but follow a systematic pattern of permissible sequences. This is an evidence for innateness. Each human possess a LAD or UG. Children from about two are prone to come up with all kinds of words and expressions they never heard in their environment. They overgeneralize some grammatical rules and double tense some irregular verbs (tuning). This process of creative construction is another example of the relative autonomy of the childs developing linguistic system. They are remarkably sensitive to the inherent grammatical characteristics of their mother tongue. First language acquisition occurs in stages. The rate of language learning may be different among children but there is always a critical period for first language learning which is biologically determined. There are universal stages of language learning. All children proceed systematically through the same learning stages for any particular linguistic structure. In English, there are three stages in WH question formulation and negatives: For questions: Stage 1 WH word but no auxiliary verb, Stage 2 WH word and auxiliary verb after subject and Stage 3 WH word and auxiliary verb before subject. For negatives: Stage 1 NO at the start of the sentence, Stage 2 NO inside the sentence but no auxiliary or BE verb and Stage 3 NO with abbreviation of auxiliary or BE verb. Children do not skip over any of them; no child goes from stage 1 to stage 3 without at least some examples of stage 2. Similar stages and staging is found in adult second language
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Angol alkalmazott nyelvszet (SMALAN2120, SMALAN3121) Scovel: Psycholinguistics

Thomas

learning. Learners differ in their rate of language acquisition but not in the stages which they progress. The process of language acquisition is a common psychological challenge for both the young, maturing child and the older experienced adult.

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