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Dwi Nurul Susanti (1175947)

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Muhlisin Ali (1176767)
Yustika Diana Sari (1177647)

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EACQUISITIONLANGUAGEACQUISITI

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
1. Language
Language is the communication system that is used to all of people
for communication domain.
2. Acquisition
Acquisition is the act in getting soething especially a skill and
knowledge.
3. Language Acquisition
The act of getting language that requires meaningful interaction in
the target language in from of natural communication.
a. Childrens Language Acquisition
The way children learn language follows a specific pattern
and is inherently systemic in nature. It is clear that children must be
exposed to language and be able to interact with others, but how
that exposure and interaction occur is extremely variable. Even
though young children are not formally taught language, language
acquisition is part of the overall development of children
physically, socially, and cognitively. There is strong evidence that
children may never acquire a language if they have not been
exposed to a language before they reach the age of 6 or 7.
Children between the ages of 2 and 6 acquire language so
rapidly that by 6 they are competent language users. The
mechanism of childrens language acquisition constitutes the

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inquiry of language acquisition studies conducted by linguistics as

well as developmental psycholinguistics.
The role of innate set of rules about language acquisition.
Two arguments are purposed in favor of the significance of
Universal Grammar (UG) in childrens language acquisition. First,
children only exposed to very little correctly formed grammar, abd
secondly, children not simply copy the language they hear around
them, rather than they deduce from it.
RESEARCH METHOD IN THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
DEVELOPMENT
1. Diaries and Parental Report

The systematic study of childrens language is relatively new.

Early modern studies, some carried out as early as the 18th century,
focused primaly on what children said, usually based on
observation of the authors own children, which were kept in diary
form.

Diaries remain a valuable way to trace the development of

language in individual children. Although diaries studies can be
valuable adjunct to other research on childrens language, by
themselves, diaries can be misleading, they tend to focus on what
is unusual or interesting rather than on what is daily and ordinary.

2. Observational Data

Spurred dramatic changes in linguistic theory during the 1960s,

developmental psycholinguistics began to collect tape-recorded
conversations and conduct experimental research based on
childrens ability to produce and comprehend specific structures in
English. One of the most important early studies conducted by
Roger Brown at Harvard University during the 1960s, examine the
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language the development of three children know as Adam, Eve,

abd Sarah. These studis fostered our earliest understanding of how
children acquire basic sentence structures in English.

3. Interviews

To

study

metalinguistic

development,

however,

interview

techniques areuseful. One might ask a child about his or her

favorite word, etc. Very young children are unable to distinguish
the word from is deferent.

THE CHILDS LEXICON

1. Background of Childs Lexicon
Lexical development has long been of interst to linguist and
psychologist who have at various time focused on vocabulary acquisition
pattern, the content of early lexicon, and on the adult

grammatical

categories of the word used by the language learning child. McCharty

(1954) pioneered this interest by focusing on vocabulary development in
children. Only recently has the focus shifted the examining the child lexicon
in terms of the childs apparent conceptual knowledge and to relating lexical
development to other aspect of language acquisition, notably syntactic
development (Bloom 1973, Nelson 1973, and Greenfield & Smith 1976).
One recent study by Goldin-Meadow and Seligmen & Gelman
(1976) has examined early lexical development by focusing the relationship
between receptive and productive language in the 2-year-old. They found
that the 2-year-old children understood more words, both nouns and verbs,
and then they could produce when tested on their knowledge of 100 words
to be representative of vocabulary of 2-year-old children. The discrepancy
between comprehension and production was greater for verbs than for nouns
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and the discrepancy for both decreased as production increased, leading the
investigator to conclude that comprehension and production vocabularies
are out of alignment during the early stage of language acquisition but the
move of alignment around two years of age (Goldin-Meadow et.al 1976).
Other expert (Kucera & Francis), emphasize that Two lexical
characteristics that have emerged as relevant predictors of spoken word
processing are word frequency and neighborhood density. Word frequency
is the number of times a word occurs in the language. For example, sit is an
infrequent word occurring only 67 times in a written sample of 1 million.
words. In contrast, these is a frequent word occurring 1,573 times in a
written sample of 1 million words. The next section is about neighborhood
density. Word usually has similar form of called as similarity neighborhood.
In mental lexicon, the similarity is based on phonological similarity. It can
be include differ word from one phoneme, substitution, deletion, or even
addition (Luce & Pisoni, 1998). For example, neighbors of these include
word such as those, tease, and ease. The number of neighbors defined as
neighborhood density. For example, these has 9 neighbors.

2. Children Lexicon before First Word

Late in the first year, the child actually begins to demonstrate
intentions and express them in paralinguistic ways that include gesture,
consistent word-like sounds, proto declarative and proto imperative.
Children can understand many words long before they produce the first
word. Usually, a child produces one-word utterances roughly by the age of
10 to 11 months. The gap between comprehension and production is
lexically great at this stage: a child may be able to understand about one
hundred words when it starts to produce the first word. The majority of the
children's early lexical items are names of individuals and objects in their
environment, such as \Mama" and \car". Some action verbs, which refer to
actions that frequently take place around the children or related to them
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(e.g., \give", \hit", \drink" and \eat"), and a few adjectives (e.g., \big" and
\good") are also in the lexicon. Abstract words come into the lexicon much
later.
3. First Word
At the age of 16-18 months, the single word utterances seem to show
some semantic categories (e.g., agent, action and object), but have a very
vague mapping to adult meaning, for example, a short utterance \cup" may
mean \a cup is there", \I see a cup" or\I want the cup". By the age of about
18 months, children start to produce two-word utterances, or more precisely,
two-word phrases. The children also undergo a \word-spurt" or \naming
explosion" at this stage. The number of words in a child's lexicon increases
rapidly in this period of language development. There is also evidence that
the emergence of phrases in the child speech correlates to the word-spurt. A
correlation between word learning and initial syntactic development is
observed. For example, young children are sensitive to syntactic information
(e.g., part of speech) when inferring a new word's meaning. They tend to
guess that a verb-like new word refers to an action, a countable noun to a
physical object or an individual, and a mass noun to a kind of substance or a
piece of non-individual entity.
Next, children start to produce telegraphic speech. The term
\telegraphic speech" is specically used in the study of child language
development to refer to children's short utterances that lack grammatical
inections and functional (or closed-class) words and/or morphemes, like
determiners (e.g., the), prepositions (e.g., of) and sufixes (e.g., -s and -ed).
Such utterances sound like telegrams using as few words as possible to
convey essential meanings. Children tend to use telegraphic forms even
when they are trying to imitate adults' full sentences. Omission of subject is
a frequent phenomenon in children's tele-graphic speech. Closed-class
morphemes are observed to have a relatively fixed order to show up in
children's speech, e.g., in English, the morpheme -ing" (as in (is) talking")
for present progressive shows up earlier than third-person singular -s" (as in
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talks). The order (or tendency) of acquisition of a few frequent grammatical

morphemes in English is: the present progressive -ing" appears first, then
the regular plural -s, possessive -s, irregular past tense forms and regular
forms . It is noted that semantic complexity and phonological salience have
a certain inuence on the emergence order of these morphemes.

4. Model of Way Processing

The lexical variables of word frequency and neighborhood density
and the phonological variable of phonotactic probability reportedly
influence adults perception and production. This influence may be
accounted for by a two representation model of word processing (e.g., Gupta
& MacWhinney, 1997; Luce et al., 2000). This model may potentially
provide insights into the complex interaction between the lexicon and
phonology in development, but the characteristics of the model and its
success in capturing spoken word processing by adults will first be
considered.
The two types of representations in the model are lexical and
phonological. The lexical representation corresponds to a word as a whole
unit. In contrast, the phonological representation corresponds to the
individual sounds or sound sequences. The structure of the lexical
representation may influence perception and production by adults. Likewise,
the characteristics of the phonological representation may play a role in
adult

spoken

word

processing.

Interactions

between

lexical

and

phonological representations may also occur in adult word recognition and

production. Each of these issues will be considered in turn.

5. Lexical representation
Hearing or thinking about a word vide external activation to a lexical
representation. For a word to be recognized or produced, the activation of its
representation must reach a set activation threshold. Representation can
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differ from one another in their resting threshold. When lexical

representation is frequently activated for recognition or production, the
resting threshold supposedly increases. Heavier rectangles represent higher
resting threshold; lighter rectangles represent lower resting thresholds. The
implication of this difference in resting threshold for perception or
production.
6. First and second language acquisition in early childhood
The way children learn language follows a specific pattern and is
inherently systemic in nature. There is strong evidence that children may
never acquire a language if they have not been exposed to a language before
they reach the age of 6 or 7. Children between the ages of 2 and 6 acquire
language so rapidly. By the time children are of school-age, they have an
amazing language ability; it is seemingly effortless acquisition. Children are
actively engaging in communication as they are learning to communicate.
Virtually every child develops linguistic and communicative competence,
and it is learned naturally and in context, not arranged in an easy to difficult
sequence. Childrens language growth comes from their direct experience.
As their language understanding grows, children can relate to ever more
expanding situations. Children use language metaphorically that is a
powerful tool for understanding the world around them. Children are
constantly modifying their speech depending on their audience. Language
development is a gradual process and reflects a childs cognitive capacities.
Children expand their development of language by relating what they
already know to what they encounter. Play is a way for children to extend
their language abilities. The central role of language is the way we
communicate with other people and with ourselves. Childrens development
is a creative process that only needs a rich environment to thrive.

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Answer the questions below!

1. How do children acquire language?
2. What is difference between children and teenagers language
acquisitions?
3. How important method is in the study of language development?
4. Are there any differences between lexical representation and
phonological representation? Explain!
5. What is the focus of Mc Chartys interest in lexical
development?

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