ONDOKUZ MAYIS UNIVERSITY

THE INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

THE DEPARTMENT OF ENFLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION

INE 615: PSYCHOLINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE TEACHING

Psychological Process in Language Teaching

BY

ELIF GUVENDI YALCIN

SUBMITTED TO:

Assit. Prof. Mufit SENEL

Feb. 28, 2012

Samsun

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Theories of First Language Acquisition

1.1 Cognitive Theory

1.2 Behaviorist/ Learning Theory

1.3 Innateness or Mentalism

1.4 Motherese or Input

Chapter 2: Stages in Child Language Acquisition

2.1 Pre-language stages

2.2 The one-word or holophrastic stage

2.3 The two-word stage

2.4 The acquisition process

Chapter 3: Is L2 Acquisition the Same as L1 Acquisition?

Conclusion

References

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INTRODUCTION

Every aspect of language is extremely complex. Yet very young children- before the

age of five- already know most of the intricate system we have been calling the grammar of a

language. Before they can add 2+2, children conjoining sentences, asking questions, using

appropriate pronouns, negating sentences, forming relative clauses, and using syntactic,

phonological, morphological, and semantic rules of the grammar. The study of the grammars

of human languages has revealed a great deal about language acquisition, about what a child

does and does not do when learning a language. First, it is obvious that children do not learn a

language by storing all the words and all the sentences in some giant mental dictionary. The

list of words is finite, but no dictionary can hold all the sentences, which are finite in number.

Rather they learn to construct and understand sentences, most of which they have never

produced or heard before. (Fromkin: 2003, 340)

Children must therefore construct the rules that permit them use their language

creatively. No one teaches them these rules. Their parents are no more aware of the

phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules than are the children. Even if you

remember your early years, do you remember anyone telling you to form a sentence by

adding a verb phrase to a noun phrase, or to add (s) or (z) to form plurals? Children seem to

act like efficient linguists equipped with a perfect theory of language, and they use this theory

to construct the grammar of the language they hear.

The acquisition of language appears simple enough for any human child to achieve

within the first three years of life. Psycholinguistic theories have tried to explain the cognitive

mechanisms underlying language acquisition and the question has been raised of whether

there is a continuous development from early to later stages of language use or whether young

children process language in a fundamentally differently way from adults. In this paper, I am

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going to analyze theories of first language acquisition as well as the stages of it. Also the

question of L2 acquisition the same as L1 acquisition will be discussed.

Chapter 1: Theories of First Language Acquisition Theories

According to Fromkin although there are theoretical approaches to child language acquisition

none can fully explain the phenomenon of child language acquisition. Therefore, at the one

pole, there are scholars who claim that language acquisition/production is a learned behavior

which is not different from general learning system and that parents teach language to their

children. At the other pole, there are scholars who assume that language is innate, that there

are universal principles which govern language acquisition which are prewired at birth. There

are many dimensions in language acquisition theories which are derived from these two poles.

-Nature or Nurture

Is language innate in the sense that it is encoded on the genes of human beings or is it

learned/taught through interaction with the environment?

-Continuity or Discontinuity?

Is language development continuous without any transitions and stages or does it occur in

discernable stages?

-Universal competence or Individual variation?

Do all normal speakers of a language share the same linguistic knowledge? Does individual

knowledge vary greatly? Do all the children acquire language in the same way or is each child

unique in language acquisition?

-Structure or Function?

Should researchers who study language concentrate on the grammar of the language or the

ways children use it in various situations?

-Autonomy or Dependency?

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Is language a separate faculty of human mind which works according to its own principles or

is it a subordinate part of general human cognition?

-Rules or Associations?

Is a child who is acquiring a language internalizing a set of abstract cognitive principles or is

s/he learning language as a set of connections? (Neurophysiological markers of early

language acquisition: from syllables to sentences: 2)

1. 1 Cognitive theory

Jean Piaget views language acquisition within the context of the child's

broader intellectual development. A child first becomes aware of a

concept, such as relative size, and only afterward do they acquire the

words and patterns to convey that concept. Simple ideas are expressed

earlier than more complex ones even if they are grammatically more

complicated. There is a consistent order of mastery of the most common

function morphemes in a language. Example from English: first-- -ing,

then in and on, then the plural -s, last are the forms of the verb to

be. There seems to be conditioned by logical complexity: plural is simple,

while forms of the verb to be require sensitivity to both number and

tense.

Pros and cons of his theory: Clearly there is some link between

cognitive development and language acquisition; Piaget's theory helps

explain the order in which certain aspects of language are acquired.

But his theory does not explain why language emerges in the first

place. Apes also develop cognitively in much the same way as young

children in the first few years of life, but language acquisition doesn't

follow naturally from their development. Bees develop the cognitive

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ability to respond to many shades of color, but bees never develop any

communication signals based on shades of color. (Clark, 2003: 142-143)

1.2 Behaviorist/ Learning Theory

As the name implies behaviorism focused on people’s behaviors,

which are directly observable, rather than on the mental systems

underlying these behaviors. Language was viewed as a kind of verbal

behavior and it was proposed that children learn language through

imitation, reinforcement and similar processes.

Imitation: Children learn by imitating and repeating what they hear.

Positive reinforcement and corrections also play a major role in Language

acquisition. Children do imitate adults. Repetition of new words and

phrases is a basic feature of children's speech. This is the behaviorist view

popular in the 40's and 50's, but challenged, since imitation alone cannot

possibly account for all language acquisition. Even when children are

trying to imitate what they hear, they are unable to produce sentences

that they would not spontaneously produce.

Reinforcement:

Child: Nobody don’t like me

Mother: No, say “Nobody likes me”

Child: Nobody don’t like me.

(Dialogue repeated eight times)

Mother: Now listen carefully, say “Nobody likes me”

Child: Oh, nobody don’t likes me

Another proposal is that children learn to produce correct (grammatical)

sentences because they are positively reinforced when they say

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something right, and negatively reinforced when they say something

wrong. One kind of reinforcement is correction of “ bad grammar” and

reward for “ good grammar.”

Even if syntactic correction occurred more often it actually does, it

would not explain how or what children learn from such adult responses,

or how children discover and construct the correct rules. In fact, attempts

to correct a child’s language are doomed to failure. Children do not know

what they are doing wrong and are unable to make corrections even they

are pointed out. (Ingram, 1989: 64-65)

1.3 Innateness or Mentalism

This theory we will discuss involves the belief in the innateness of certain

linguistic features. This theory is connected with the writings of Noam

Chomsky, although the theory has been around for hundreds of years.

Children are born with an innate capacity for learning human language.

Humans are destined to speak. Children discover the grammar of their

language based on their own inborn grammar. Certain aspects of

language structure seem to be preordained by the cognitive structure of

the human mind.

Noam Chomsky believes that children are born with an inherited

ability to learn any human language. He claims that certain linguistic

structures which children use so accurately must be already imprinted on

the child’s mind. Chomsky believes that every child has a ‘language

acquisition device’ or LAD which encodes the major principles of a

language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain. Children

have then only to learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures

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from the LAD to form sentences. Chomsky points out that a child could not

possibly learn a language through imitation alone because the language

spoken around them is highly irregular – adult’s speech is often broken up

and even sometimes ungrammatical. Chomsky’s theory applies to all

languages as they all contain nouns, verbs, consonants and vowels and

children appear to be ‘hard-wired’ to acquire the grammar. Every

language is extremely complex, often with subtle distinctions which even

native speakers are unaware of. However, all children, regardless of their

intellectual ability, become fluent in their native language within five or six

years.

Evidence to support Chomsky’s theory

• Children learning to speak never make grammatical errors such as

getting their subjects, verbs and objects in the wrong order.

• If an adult deliberately said a grammatically incorrect sentence, the

child would notice.

• Children often say things that are ungrammatical such as ‘mama

ball’, which they cannot have learnt passively.

• Mistakes such as ‘I drawed’ instead of ‘I drew’ show they are not

learning through imitation alone.

• Chomsky used the sentence ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’,

which is grammatical although it doesn’t make sense, to prove his

theory: he said it shows that sentences can be grammatical without

having any meaning, that we can tell the difference between a

grammatical and an ungrammatical sentence without ever having

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 heard the sentence before, and that we can produce and understand

brand new sentences that no one has ever said before.

Evidence against Chomsky’s theory

• Critics of Chomsky’s theory say that although it is clear that children don’t learn

language through imitation alone, this does not prove that they must have an LAD –

language learning could merely be through general learning and understanding

abilities and interactions with other people.

Yet no one has been able to explain how quickly and perfectly all

children acquire their native language. Every language is extremely

complex, full of subtle distinctions that speakers are not even aware of.

Nevertheless, children master their native language in 5 or 6 years

regardless of their other talents and general intellectual ability.

Acquisition must certainly be more than mere imitation; it also doesn't

seem to depend on levels of general intelligence, since even a severely

retarded child will acquire a native language without special training.

Some innate feature of the mind must be responsible for the universally

rapid and natural acquisition of language by any young child exposed to

speech.

Today Chomsky believes that the universal properties are

constraints, rules that dictate what cannot be in any language rather than

structures which are universal. Some of these apparently universal

constraints include the observation that forms a question by reciting words

backwards; the subject of a subordinate clause never governs the verb in

the main clause, etc. It is assumed that something about the structure of

our brain causes languages to be somewhat limited in how they can differ

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syntactically. This built in limitation aids the child in acquiring the

language by narrowing down the possible patterns to a few. (Fromkin 2003:

350-351)

1.4 Motherese or Input

More recent studies show that language spoken around child is not as

full of random errors, not as fragmented or randomly pidginized as one

might believe. It has been found that mothers use a special register of

language, dubbed motherese, to talk to their children. Motherese, just

like other social registers, is highly structured; it is not random and

irregular as Chomsky would have us all believe. There is a set correlation

between motherese and adult language and the characteristic of

motherese differ across cultures:

Pragmatic features: sentences are shorter (4 or fewer words), speed

slower, use of more clarificational features than in speech between adults,

more questions, attempts at getting feedback from the child.

Grammatical elements found in motherese are even more diverse, but

each language group has its own structured set: expressive element

(intonation), lip rounding (Latvian palatalizes consonants), reduplication:

choo-choo, use of special words, especially for toys, bodily functions:

bunny, kaka, poo-poo. Use of special morphemes, like English y/ie:

doggy, kitty, ducky, (Berber suffix: sh/sht, Russian -ik, ichiko, itsa). Such

'baby' morphemes often are used in speech between adults to make

hypochoristics. Some languages apparently lack any special

grammatical or lexical markers for motherese: Samoan, Maya.

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 There is also a social register called fatherese: It is more demanding

of information, using more direct questions and a wider vocabulary than

motherese. There is also otherese. Older children and neighbors also

talk to infants and very small children using special baby talk. The special

social registers that developed from the need to speak to small children

have developed into forms that are specific to each language.

Chapter 2: Stages in Child Language Acquisition

2.1 Pre-language stages

The pre-linguistic sounds of the very early stages of child language acquisition are simply called

cooing’ and ‘babbling’. The period from about three months to ten months is usually

characterized by three stages of sound production in the infant’s developing repertoire. The first

recognizable sounds are described as cooing, with velar consonants such as (k] and [g] usually

present, as well as high vowels such as [i] and [uJ. These can normally be heard by the time the

child is three months old, although many of the child’s vocal sounds are very different from those

which occur in the speech of mom and dad. By six months, the child is usually able to sit up and

can produce a number of different vowels and consonants such as fricatives and nasals. The sound

production at this stage is described as babbling and may contain syllable-type sounds such as

mu and da. In the later babbling stage, around nine months, there are recognizable intonation

patterns to the consonant and vowel combinations being produced. As children begin to pull

themselves ‘standing position through the tenth and eleventh months, they are capable of using

their vocalizations to express emotions and emphasis.

2.2 The one-word or holophrastic stage

Between twelve and eighteen months, children begin to produce a variety of recognizable

single unit utterances. This period, traditionally called the 'one-word stage', is characterized

by speech in which single terms are uttered for everyday objects such as ‘cat and cup'.. other

forms such as /Ʌ / may occur in circumstances which suggest that the child is producing a

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version of what is that, so the label 'one-word' may be misleading. Some terms like

holophrastic or 'single-unit' or 'single-form' may be more accurate.

2.3 The two-word stage

Depending on what one counts as an occurrence of two separate words, this stage can begin

around eighteen to twenty months, as the child’s vocabulary moves beyond fifty distinct words.

By the time the child is two years old, a variety of combinations, similar to baby chair, mommy

eat, cat bad, will have appeared. The adult interpretation of such combinations is, of course, very

much tied to the context of their utterance.

Telegraphic speech

Between two and three years old, the child will begin producing a large number of utterances

which could be classified as multiple-word utterances. The salient feature of these utterances

ceases to be the number of words, but that variation in word-forms which begins to appear.

The telegraphic speech is a stage which is characterized by strings of lexical morphemes in

phrases such as cat drink milk. The child has clearly developed some sentence-building

capacity by this stage and can order the forms correctly. By the age of two and a half, the

child's vocabulary is expanding rapidly and the child is actually initiating more talks. By the

age of three, the vocabulary has grown to hundreds of words and pronunciation has become

closer to the form of the adult language, so that even visitors have to admit that the little

creature can talk.

2.4 The acquisition process

As the linguistic repertoire of the child increases, it is often assumed that the child is, in some

sense, being ‘taught’ the language. This view seems to underestimate what the child actually does.

For the vast majority of children, no one provides any instruction on how to speak the language..

A much more realistic view would have children actively constructing, from what is said to them,

possible ways of using the language. The child’s linguistic production, then, is mostly a matter of

trying out constructions and testing whether they work or not. It is simply not possible that the

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child is acquiring the language through a process of consistently imitating adult speech. Of course,

the child can be heard to repeat versions of what adults say and are in the process of adopting a lot

of vocabulary from their speech. However, adults simply do not produce many of the types of

expressions which turn up in children’s speech.

Morphology

By the time the child is three years old, he or she is going beyond telegraphic speech forms and

incorporating some of the inflectional morphemes which indicate the grammatical function of the

nouns and verbs used. The first to appear is usually the -ing form in expressions such as cat

sitting and mommy reading book. Then comes the marking of regular plurals with the -s form, as

in boys and cats. The acquisition of this form is often accompanied by a process of over

generalization. The child over generalizes the apparent rule of adding -s to form plurals and will

talk about foot and mans. When the alternative pronunciation of the plural morpheme used in

houses (i.e. ending [-az) comes into use, it too is given an over generalized application and forms

such as boyses or footses can appear. At the same time as this overgeneralization is taking place,

some children also begin using irregular plurals such as men quite appropriately for a while, but

then try out the general rule on the forms, producing expressions like some mens and two fees, or

even two feetses

The use of the possessive inflection - occurs in expressions such as girls dog and Mummys book

and the different forms of the verb to be’, such as are and was, turn up. The appearance of forms

such as was and, at about the same time, went and came should be noted. These are irregular past-

tens forms which one would not expect to appear before the more regular forms.

Syntax

Similar evidence against ‘imitation’ as the basis of a child’s speech production has been found in

studies of the syntactic structures used by children .One two-year-old child, specifically asked to

repeat what she heard, would listen to an adult say forms such as the ow/who eats candy runs fast,

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and then repeat them in the form owl eat candy and he run fast. It is clear that the child

understands what the adult is saying. She just has her own way of expressing it.

Questions

In forming questions, the first stage has two procedures. Simply add a wh- form (where, who) to

the beginning of the expression or utter the expression with arise in intonation towards the end.

In the second stage, more complex expressions can be formed, but the rising intonation strategy

continues to be used. It is noticeable that more wh forms come into use, as in these examples:

What book name? Why you smiling?

You want eat? See my doggie?

In the third stage, the required inversion of subject and verb in English questions has appeared,

but the wh- forms do not always undergo the required inversion. In fact, children entering school

may still prefer to form wh- questions (especially in negatives) without the type of inversion fond

in adult speech. Examples are:

Can I have a piece? Did l caught it?

Will you help me? How that opened?

What did you do? Why kitty can’t stand up?

Negatives

In the case of negatives, Stages seems to have a simple strategy which that no or not should be

stuck on the beginning of any expression. Examples are: no mitten, not a teddy bear, no fall no sit

there. In the second stage, the additional negative forms don’t and can ‘t are used and with no and

not , begin to be placed in front of the verb rather than at the beginning of the sentence. Some

examples are:

He no bite you There no squirrels.

You can’t dance l don’t know.

Semantics

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This process is called overextension and the most common pattern is for the child to overextend

the meaning of a word on the basis of similarities of shape, sound and size, and, to a lesser extent,

of movement and texture. Thus, the word ball is extended to all kinds of round objects, including

a lampshade, a doorknob and the moon. Or, a tick-tock is initially used for a watch, but can also

be used for a bathroom scale with a round dial. On the basis of size, presumably, the word fly was

first used for the insect, and then came to be used for specks of dirt and even crumbs of bread.

Apparently due to similarities of texture, the expression size was first used by one child for

scissors, and then came to be used for all metal objects. The semantic development in a child’s

use of words is usually a process of overextension initially, followed by a gradual process of

narrowing down the application of each term as more words are learned. Although overextension

has been well documented in children’s speech production, it isn’t necessarily used in speech

comprehension. One two- year-old child, in speaking, used apple to refer to a number of other

round objects like tomatoes and balls, but had no difficulty picking out the apple, when asked,

from a set of such round objects.

Chapter 3: Is L2 Acquisition the Same as L1 Acquisition?

With some exception, adults do not simply “pick up” a second language. It usually

requires conscious attention, if not intense study and memorization, to become proficient in a

second language. Again with the exception of some remarkable individuals, adult second

language learners do not often achieve native like grammatical competence in the L2, especially

with respect to pronunciation. They generally have an accent and they may make syntactic or

morphological errors that are unlike the errors of children acquiring their first language. For

example, L2ers often make word order errors, especially early in their development, as well as

morphological errors in grammatical gender and case. L2 errors may fossilize so that no amount

of teaching or correction can undo them.

Unlike L1 acquisition, which is uniformly successful across children and languages, adults

vary considerably in their ability to acquire an L2 completely. Some people are very talented

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language learners. Success may depend on range factors, including age, talent, motivation, and

whether you are in the country where the language is spoken or sitting in a classroom five

mornings a week with no further contact with native speakers. For all these reasons, many people,

including many linguists who study L2 acquisition, believe that second language acquisition is

something different from first language acquisition. This hypothesis is referred to as the

fundamental difference hypothesis. (Ellis, 1997: 51-52)

CONCLUSION

All the theories are probably correct to a degree; each describes particular facets of a

complex phenomenon. Cognitive development is an essential prerequisite for linguistic

development. But language acquisition doesn't occur spontaneously because of cognitive

development. In addition to this, repetition, imitation, structured input are all a part of

language acquisition. Greater exposure to language might speed language acquisition up but

is not essential. All children exposed to language, regardless of environmental factors and

differences in intelligence, are able to acquire very complex grammars at a very early age.

Something innate to the child--the LAD--allows for such rapid and successful language

acquisition by children.

All of the above studies have revealed a few universally accepted facts about child

language acquisition. First of all, child language acquisition is a natural consequence of

human society. All children exposed to language acquire it naturally without deliberate

efforts of teaching or learning. Secondly, the outcome of first language acquisition will be the

same regardless of individual differences in intelligence. Two children with quite different

intellectual abilities will both acquire a highly complex native language by age six. Thirdly,

although the basic ability to acquire language is innate to the child, no specific structural

property of language has yet been proven to be innate. Therefore, any infant is equally

capable of acquiring any language. Infants born of different racial stocks will acquire the

same form of language if raised in the same linguistic environment. There is no such a thing

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as a Russian language gene or a Swahili language gene. An infant born of Russian parents

and adopted into an American family will acquire the same form of English as his step

brothers and sisters.

REFERENCES

Ellis, Rod. 1997. Second Language Acquisition. Oxford University Press

Friederici,Angela D. Neurophysiological markers of early language acquisition: from

syllables to sentences. Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol.9 No.10 October 2005. Available
from: http://www.ii.metu.edu.tr/~hohenberger/development/literature/Friederici_2005.pdf

Fromkin, Victoria. Rodman, Robert. Hyams, Nina. An Introduction to Language: Seventh

Edition: 2003

Clark, Eve V. 2003. First Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press

Ingram, David. 1989. First Language Acquisition: method, description, and explanation.

Cambridge University Press

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