Part One: Introduction:

language acquisition: It refers to the child’s acquisition of his mother tongue, i.e. how the child comes to understand and speak the language of his community.

Children all over the world learn to speak at about the same time unless they are isolated during the critical acquisition years or unless they suffer from extreme external deficiency.

Part Two: Theories of Child Language Acquisition

1. A behaviourist view of language acquisition----B.F. Skinner

View: Traditional behaviourists view language as behaviour and believe that language learning is simply a matter of imitation and habit formation.

Steps: Children imitate the sounds and patterns------> people recognize and reinforce---- > children repeat the right sounds and patterns to get the reward (reinforcement)

Conclusion: imitation and practice are preliminary, discrimination and generalization are key to language development in this theory.-------regular and routine aspects of the language.

2. An Innatist View of Language Acquisition-------Noam Chomsky

View: Noam Chomsky claims that human beings are biologically programmed for language and that the language develops in the child just as other biological functions such as walking.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)----the innate ability, A hypothetical innate mechanism every normal human child is believed to be born with, which allow them to acquire language.

Steps: Children need access to the samples of a natural language----- > activate the LAD----- > match the innate knowledge of basic grammar system to that particular language.

Conclusion: When exposed to confusing information or when guidance or correction is not available, children, born with UG, can discover for themselves the underlying rules of the language system.------complex system.

3 An Interactionist View of Language Acquisition

View: language develops as a result of the complex interplay between the human characteristics of the child and the environment in which the child develops. The modified language which is suitable for the child’s capability is crucial in his language acquisition.

Motherese: (child directed speech [CDS]/ caretaker talk): A special speech to children used by adults, which is characterized with slow rate of speed, high pitch, rich intonation, shorter and simpler sentence structures etc, frequent repetition, paraphrasing and limited vocabulary. It is also called child directed speech，or caretaker talk.------now and here environment.

Conclusion: the modified language is very crucial. Only when conversations provide the right level of language that children are capable of processing, can they facilitate children’s language acquisition. -----the importance of environment.

Part Three: Cognitive Factor in Child Language Development

The cognitive factors related to language acquisition mainly in two ways:

1 Language development is dependent on both the concepts children from about the world and what they feel stimulated to communicate at the early and late stages of their language development.

   E.g. Children at the early stage can use two-word utterance, but may not use English perfect tense until at the age of four and a half.

   Conclusion: as children’s conceptual development lead to their language development, it is likely that their language development also help in the formation and enhancement of the concept.

2 The cognitive factors determine how the child makes sense of the linguistic system himself instead of what meaning the child perceive and expresses.

   E.g. the process of learning the negative form.

   Conclusion: In the course of acquiring the native language, children seem to look initially for a system which is rule-governed in a consistent way, then a system in which the clue to meaning are clearly displayed, and finally the one in which each item or distinction has a definite function in communicative meaning.

Part Four: Language Environment and the Critical Period Hypothesis

Two factors: the linguistic environment children are exposed to + the age they start to learn the language.

Environment:

A) In behaviourist view: Language plays a major role in providing both language models to be imitated and the necessary feedbacks among which the positive reinforcement encourages children’s efforts and facilitates the “correct” learning ,while the negative feedback discourages children to repeat the “mistakes”.

B) In innatist view: they emphasizes more on children’s internal processing of the language items to be learnt. The environment functions as a stimulus that triggers and activates the pre-equipped UG to process the materials provided by the linguistic environment around the children.

C) The interactionist view: They call for the quality of the language samples available in the linguistic environment, only when the language is modified and adjusted to the level of children’s comprehension, do they process and     internalize the language items.

Age:

Critical Period Hypothesis------Eric Lenneberg

Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH): The hypothesis that the time span between early childhood and puberty is the critical period for language acquisition, during which children can acquire language without formal instruction successfully and effortlessly.

Two versions: (A) Strong version----children will never be able to learn from subsequent exposure if they fail to acquire their first language before puberty.

            (B) Weak version------language learning will be more difficult and incomplete after puberty.

Part Five: Stages in Child Language Development

1. Phonological development

The child must pass each stage before he can proceed to the next one.

2. Vocabulary development

Adult can increase the amount of babbling by paying attention to the sounds, they can’t change the sounds baby makes. Vocabulary development goes hand-in-hand with the child’s environment.

A) under-extension: Use a word with less than its usual range of denotation. E.g, baby uses animal to refer to cat, but denies the bird belongs to an animal.

B) over-extension: Extension of the meaning of a word beyond its usual domain of application by young children. E.g, baby uses apple for all fruit.

3. Grammatical Development

A) around the age of two: two-word utterance------telegraphic speech.

telegraphic speech: Children’s early multiword speech that contains content words and lacks function words and inflectional morphemes.

content word: Words referring to things, quality, state or action, which have lexical meaning used alone.

function word: Words with little meaning on their own but show grammatical relationships in and between sentences.

B) two and a half: three-word utterance.

4. Pragmatic development

Pragmatics----How to speak to others in an appropriate manner: greetings, taboo words, the polite forms of address, various styles appropriate to different speech situations of his community.

taboo: Words known to speakers but avoided in some contexts of speech for reasons of religion, politeness etc.

1 Gender: by the age of three, E.g: Come to Daddy, there’s a good girl.

2 Politeness: At the age of three or four: E.g. remind children to say “Please”.

Part Six: Atypical Development

atypical development: Some acquisition of language may be delayed but follow the same rules of language development due to trauma or injury.

Examples: hearing impairment, mental retardation, autism, stuttering, aphasia, dyslexia, dysgraphia.