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Language and the Brain

Unit 3
Applied Linguistics
M.Ed. 2
nd
Semester
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First Language Acquisition
One of the most impressive and fascinating
aspects of human development, an amazing
feat indeed.


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First Language Acquisition
How do children accomplish the task of language
learning?
What enables a child not only to learn words, but to put
them together in meaningful sentences?
What pushes children to go on developing complex
grammatical language even though their early simple
communication is successful for most purposes?
Does child language develop similarly around the world?
How do bilingual children acquire more than one
language (simultaneously/around the same time)?
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First Language Acquisition
The first three years

Developmental sequences

Empirical studies capable of very fine
auditory discrimination pa and ba

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First Language Acquisition
The first three years
High degree of similarity in the early
language of children all over the world
Developmental sequences
The earliest vocalizations involuntary crying
Cooing and gurgling little control over the
sounds they make, but can hear subtle differences
between the sounds of human languages
Empirical studies capable of very fine
auditory discrimination pa and ba

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First Language Acquisition
The first three years
By the end of their first year
understand quite a few frequently repeated
words in the language or languages spoken
around them
And respond to them
Might run to the kitchen when someone says
juice/cookies
Might wave, when some one says good bye
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First Language Acquisition
The first three years
By the age of two
reliably produce at least 50 different words (some
might produce more)

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First Language Acquisition
The first three years
Around the same time
may utter telegraphic chunks such as - Mummy
hungry/ go out
It reflects their ability that they can creatively combine
words

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Developmental sequences or stages
Related to childrens cognitive development
E.g. cant/dont use time adverbials in their speech
need the understanding of time
Reflects the gradual acquisition of the
linguistic elements
E.g. children can distinguish between singular and
plural long before they reliably add plural endings
to nouns
Learning irregular plural might take even more
time
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Developmental sequences or stages
Grammatical Morphemes
Roger Brown and his colleagues, one of best-
known studies
A longitudinal study of the Lg.
development of 3 children (Adam, Eve &
Sarah)
Found 14 grammatical morphemes were
acquired in a similar sequence
http://quizlet.com/13630979/roger-browns-14-
grammatical-morphemes-flash-cards/


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Developmental sequences or stages
Grammatical Morphemes
Some of the morphemes they studied:
Present progressive ing (Mommy running)
Plural s (bookS)
Irregular past forms (baby went)
Possessive s (Daddys hat)
Copula (Mommy is happy)
Articles the and a
Regular past ed
Third person singular simple present s
Auxiliary be (he is coming)
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Developmental sequences or stages
Grammatical Morphemes
Found the evidence for the developmental
sequence or Order of Acquisition.
Mastered the bottom of the list had also mastered
those at the top
But, not reverse was not true.

But, the learning rate was not similar
Eve mastered all morphemes before she was 2.5
Sarah and Adam still working on them when 3.5-4



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Developmental sequences or stages
Grammatical Morphemes
Many hypotheses have been formed
Researchers have studied
the frequency with which the morphemes occur in
parents speech;
the cognitive complexity and
the difficulty pronouncing them
Procedures have been developed to explore
childrens knowledge of grammar knowledge
Wug Test (Jean Berko Gleason, 1958).
Video
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Developmental sequences or stages
Negation
Learn the functions of negation quite early (at
the single word stage)
Comment on the disappearance of objects; refuse
a suggestions; reject an assertion
Lois Bloom (1991), longitudinal studies
However, might take some time to use them in
sentences
Negation development stages

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Developmental sequences or stages
Questions
Learning to ask questions learning complex
language system
Remarkable consistence in learning to form
questions in English
Bloom (1991) - predictable order in which the
wh-words emerge
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What (first) -Where/who (soon)-Why (2nd year/their
favorite for next 2 years) how & when
Developmental sequences or stages
Questions
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Stage 1
Cookie? Mommy book?
Stage 2
You like this? I have
some?
Stage 3
Can I go? Are you
happy?

Stage 4
Are you going to play with
me?
Stage 5
Are these your boots?
Why the teddy bear cant
go outside
Stage 6
produce correct
sentences

Developmental sequences or stages
Questions
single words questions & two three word sentences with
rising intonation
Ask questions using the word order of the declarative
sentences
Realize, the structure of questions is different and
produce questions
Form questions by subject-auxiliary inversion; can also
add do in questions
wh/-and yes/no questions are formed but might have
difficulties with negative questions
Produce correctly form all questions




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The pre-school years
Learn vocabulary at a high rate
Develop their ability to use language in a
widening social environment
Can use language in a greater variety of
situations
Begin to talk on the telephone sensibly
Begin to develop metalinguistic awareness
They spend 200,000 hours or more learning
the language (Lightbown & Spada, 2013)

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The school years
Expand and grow
ability to use language to understand others and to
express their own meanings
Ability to read
Boosts metalinguistic awareness
Understand that language has form as well as
meaning
Reinforces the understanding that a word is separate
from what it represents
Grow vocabulary at an astonishing level

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Explaining L1
The behaviourist perspectives
Children imitated language of people around
them (Skinner, 1957)
Positive reinforcement
The quality and quantity of the input and
consistency of the reinforcement shapes
the childs Lg. behaviour
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Explaining L1
The behaviourist perspectives
Mother: Maybe we need to take you to the
doctor.
Randall: Why? So he can doc my little bump?
(Randall, 36 months; learning the patterns)

Father: Id like to propose a toast.
David: Id like to propose a bread
(David, 5 years; Focus on meaning)


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Explaining L1
The behaviourist perspectives
Randall (a 2 yrs 9 months; asking questions)
Are dogs can wiggle their tails?
Are those are my boots?
Are this is hot?

Randy (3 yrs, 5 months; looking for a towel)
You took all the towels away because I cant
dry my hands.
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Explaining L1
The innatist perspectives
All human languages are based on some
innate universal principles
Children-biologically programmed for
language; language development similar to
the development of other biological functions
Children born with a specific innate ability
to discover for themselves the underlying
rules of a language system on the basis of
samples of natural language they are expose
to.
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Explaining L1
The interactionist/developmental perspectives
The relationship between the innate learning
ability of children and the environment they
develop in
What children need to know is essentially
available in the language they are exposed to
Piaget & Vygotsky ZPD
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Second Language Acquisition
Has a rich history that extends over a half
century
Investigates the human capacity to learn
additional languages during late childhood,
adolescence, or adulthood in the case of
monolinguals

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Second Language Acquisition: Issues
Sheds light on four overarching issues:
How humans learn a second language (L2) after
they learn first
How L2 learning is different from learning the first
language or mother tongue
Factors that affect the attainment in L2 learning
Factors that affect in attaining advanced language
and literacy competencies s

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Second Language Acquisition:
Commonalities with other fields
Shares its interest in explaining human
language development with two other fields
Bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA)
Examines language development among infants and
children when they grow up surrounded by two or more
languages from birth (De Houwer, 2009)
First Language Acquisition (FLA)
Also known as child language acquisition, investigates
how infants and children learn their first language when
they grow up surrounded by one language only (Clarke,
2003)

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Second Language Acquisition:
Differences in focus
But, exist differences in their focus
BFLA infants and toddlers are investigated at the
critical point in their life, when discovering human
languages
SLA relatively matured users of at least one
language, and be learning a second language,
their existing language competencies will influence
their learning of the language that is being added
to their repertoire
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Second Language Acquisition:
Differences in focus
FLA- infants and toddlers must develop socially
and conceptually in tandem with developing
linguistically
SLA expects the adults, adolescents and children
to bring to the task already relatively sophisticated
and increasingly fine-tuned social and conceptual
structures
BFLA and FLA assume naturalistic conditions
of language learning
SLA- investigates language learning in any
possible context
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Historical Perspectives
One of the most discussed topic since time
memorial
Emerged as a formal research community in
1960s
Influenced by the developments in the field
of FLA

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Historical Perspectives
The awakening of SLA: Interlanguage
Seminal papers by Pit Corder (1967) and Larry
Selinker (1972)
They questioned (at an empirical level) the
practice of CA, which compared L1 and L2 to
find answer to acquisition
Argued researchers must turn for evidence to the
actual language produced by learners as they try to
communicate in L2
Errors not to be pre-empted but as objects of study
that hold great value for understanding SLA
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Historical Perspectives
The awakening of SLA: Interlanguage
Then learners
as active and rational agents who engaged in the
discovery of underlying L2 rules
Recognized
they formed hypotheses about the language,
tested them, and employed a number of cognitive
and social strategies to regulate their learning
Interlanguage investigation heightened
during 1970s and 1980s with focus on
cognitive and psycholinguistics

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Historical Perspectives
Development during 1990s
Krashens Monitor Model (1985) the first SLA
theory
The core ingredient of additional language learning is
meaningful, comprehensible input
The processes of language acquisition are implicit and
subconscious and conscious effort may only be helpful
in monitoring performance
Adults have affective inhibitions in learning the
additional languages
But, criticized for not being empirically
substantiated

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Historical Perspectives
Development during 1990s
Monitor Model (Krashen, 1985)
L2 learning is a complex cognitive process,
requires experience aided by attention,
memory and the development of declarative
knowledge (McLaughlin, 1987)
Abstract knowledge of Universal Grammar
and specific knowledge of a given L1 (White,
1989)

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Historical Perspectives
Development during 1990s
Further development
A cognitive interactionist prism (Larsen-Freeman
and Long, 1991)
Examining L2 acquisition as the sum contribution of
learner-internal factors, e.g. attention and memory, ad
external factors, such as instructions and environment
A formal linguistic SLA prism (Hawkins, 2001;
White, 1989)
Influenced by Chomsky, UG and literacy in learner L1
guided the construction of mental L2 grammars

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Historical Perspectives
Socioculturalism and emergentism
Sociocultural theory, propounded by Lev
Vygotsky, led in by James Lantolf (Lantolf,
1994)
Usage-based, emergentist family of theories
in cognitive science, initiated by Nick Ellis
(1996) and Dinae Larsen-Freeman (1997)
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Historical Perspectives
Socioculturalism and emergentism
Sociocultural theory
Mind is social, language learning can be investigated
holistically in the process of social action and
interaction
language learning through private speech(audible
speech to the self) social speech (betn expert and
novices) and inner sppech (inaudible speech for self-
regulation)
Zone of proximal development (an important
construct) simialr to i+1 (above the current
competencies) learning possible through context-
sensitive collaboration
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Historical Perspectives
Socioculturalism and emergentism
Usage-based, emergentist family of theories
Investigation of learner internal and learner-
external factors, their interaction and the effect
they exert
How the linguistic data in the environment are
used for noticing, negotiation for meaning,
negative feedback

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Historical Perspectives
SLA after the social turn
Language learning is viewed from sociocultural
perspectives e.g.
Grammar and language redefined as social in
systemic functional linguistics for SLA
Interaction social in conversation in analysis
Learning social in language socialization
Sense of self social in identity theory
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Area of focus
Age
Crosslinguistic influences
Impact of environment and cognition
Variability in L2 learning across individuals
The role of instruction in SLA
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Age
Age: effect of an early or a late start
Starting age affect the eventual attainment
but success is in the eye of the beholder
A researcher empirically, begin L2 learning by naturalistic immersion
very early in life tend to have high attainment than others
L2 learning after adolescence higher variability in their levels of
linguistic attainment
Late starters functional abilities less proficient than the functional
abilities of others who begin learning at an early age
Debated topic
In FL context, the quantity and quality of the ambient input matters
Comparison is made between people grown up with single language monolingual
and multilingual competencies different


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Crosslinguistic influences
How previously known languages, particularly the mother
tongue, influence the process of learning an additional
language
Learners rely (strategically and unknowingly) on their first
language and other languages they know
Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008) (in their research Crosslinguistic
influence in language and cognition)
negative transfer slows down the pace
Positive transfer accelerates learning
Similarities in a given language pair can often lead to greater learning
difficulties than differences do

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Environment and Cognition
SLA has focused on human interactions and the discourse
strategies the opportunities that accrue to learning

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Variability in L2 Learning
Different individual and external factors affect
L2 learning and final attainment
Age
Aptitude
Motivation

So, L2 learning not universal
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The role of Instruction
A vital factor
The better the instruction, higher the chances
of better attainment
Immersion class
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Developmental sequence in L2
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How are L2 learners
different from
L1 learners???
Developmental sequence in L2

Meisel, Clahsen and Pienemann (1981)
identified developmental sequences in the
acquisition of German by speakers of several
Romance languages who had little or no
instruction
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Developmental sequence in L2

Pienemann (1988) found that the interlanguage
of English speakers whose only exposure to
German was in university classes in Australia
were similar to those of the uninstructed
learners


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Developmental sequence in L2

Learners who receive instruction exhibit similar
developmental sequence and error patterns to
that of who do not receive it
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Developmental sequence in L2
Grammatical morphemes

Obligatory contexts to analyze learner speech
the places in a sentence where the morpheme is
necessary to make the sentence grammatically
correct
Yesterday I play basketball for two hours

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Developmental sequence in L2
Grammatical morphemes
How to analyze???

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Count the No. of obligatory contexts for
each morpheme
Count the No. of correctly supplied
morpheme for each context
Divide the No. of correctly supplied
morpheme by the total No. of obligatory
contexts

Developmental sequence in L2
Grammatical morphemes
Analyze the accuracy order:

I visit my uncle yesterday after three month.
We watched football for two hours.
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Developmental sequence in L2
Grammatical morphemes
ing (progressive
plural copula)
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auxiliary
(progressive as in
He is going )
article
irregular past
Regular past ed
3
rd
person singular s
Possessive s

Krashens (1982) summary of L2 grammatical
morpheme acquisition order
Reference
Ortega, L. (2011). Second language acquisition. In.
Simpson, J. Routledge Handbook of Applied
Linguistics. London: Routledge
Ortega, L. (2009). Second language acquisition.
London: Hodder Publishing.
http://www.speech-language-
therapy.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=
article&id=33:brown&catid=2:uncategorised&Itemid
=117
Lightbown, P. M. & Spada, N. (2013). How languages
are learned (4
th
ed). Oxford: OUP.
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