语言学论文

语言学论文

Qingfei Zhang (Tiffany)

Class 2

The Study of Language

Mid-Paper

May. 12

The Analysis of First Language Acquisition

Language acquisition is the process by which humans

acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as

well as to produce and use words to communicate. The capacity

to acquire and use language is a key aspect that distinguishes

humans from other beings. For example, many animals are able

to communicate with each other by signaling to the things

around them, but this kind of communication lacks the

arbitrariness of human vocabularies. Other forms of animal

communication may utilize arbitrary sounds, but are unable to

combine those sounds in different ways to create completely

novel messages which can then be automatically understood by

another. Hockett called this design feature of human language

"productivity." It is crucial to the understanding of human

language acquisition that we are not limited to a finite set of

words, but, rather, must be able to understand and utilize a

complex system that allows for an infinite number of possible

messages. Therefore, I want to discuss the first language

acquisition here.

Firstly, we should consider about the Basic Requirements of

first language acquisition. What we need to know is that the

language a child learns is not genetically inherited, but is

required in a particular language-using environment. Then the child must also be physically capable of sending and receiving

sound signalsa and the child must be able to hear that language

being used. The crucial requirement appears to be the

opportunity to interact with others via language.

Next I’d like to talk about the stages of the acquisition.

1. Pre-speech: Much of importance goes on even before the

child utters his first word: infants learn to pay attention to speech,

pays attention to intonation and the rhythm of speech long

before they begin to speak.

Children learn to recognize the distinctive sounds, the

phonemes of the language they hear from birth long before they

are able to pronounce them. Infants can distinguish between /p/

and /b/ at three or four months. But children do not learn how

to use these sounds until much later-- around the second year or

later--as shown by the experiment with /pok/ and /bok/. The

same is true for rising and falling intonation, which only becomes

systematically funtional much later. Infants know the difference

between one language and another by recognition of

phonological patterns

2. One word (holophrastic) stage: Infants may utter their first

word as early as nine months: usually mama, dada. This stage is

characterized by the production of actual speech signs. Often the

words are simplified: "du" for duck, "ba" for bottle. Incorrect

pronunciations are systematic at this time.

The extra-linguistic context provides much of the speech

information. Rising and falling intonation may or may not be

used to distinguish questions from statements at the one-word

stage. Words left out if the contexts makes them obvious. At this

stage, utterances show no internal grammatical structure.

3. The two-word stage: By two and a half years most children speak in sentences of several words--but their grammar is far

from complete. This stage rapidly progresses into what has been

termed a fifth and final stage of language acquisition,

the All hell breaks loose stage. By six the child's grammar

approximates that of adults. Children learning any language

seem to encode the same limited set of meanings in their first

sentences: Sentences usually two words. Children can repeat

more complex sentences spoken by adults but cannot create

them until later (called prefabricated routines) not indicative of

the child's grammar.

At last, we need to pay attention to the acquisition process.

It contains morphology, syntax and semantics.

Morphology means that when a child is three years old, he

or she is going beyond telegraphic speech forms and

incorporating some of the inflectional morphems which indicate

the grammatical function of nouns and verbs used. For example,

young children learn the past tense of verbs individually, however,

when they are taught a "rule", such as adding -ed to form the

past tense, they begin to exhibit overgeneralization errors as a

result of learning these basic syntactical rules that do not apply

to all verbs. The child then need to relearn how to apply these

past tense rules to the irregular verbs they had previously done

correctly

While syntax means a language is not merely a matter of

associating words with concepts, but that a critical aspect of

language involves knowledge of how to put words together-