First language acquisition

George Yule.

First language acquisition is the language that children acquire in their first years of life, children acquire language without overt instruction it is an innate predisposition in the children, even though this isn´t enough, we can say that this is called language faculty, the fact that every human being is endowed with language.

Basic requirements

-          Interactions with other language users, children must to hear language and that way reproduce language.

-          The exposure to the language.

-          The cultural transmission, which means that language is, acquired in particular language – using environment, it is not genetically transmitted.

-          The crucial requirement appears to be the opportunity to interact with others via language.

The acquisition schedule

At the same time that motor skills like walking, sitting, using the hands among others physical activities are developed children develop language, their mother tongue.

Language acquisition depends on the interplay with social factors in the child´s environment.

Children have a natural capacity to identify some aspects of linguistic input during their early years of life, this acquisition capacity need a constant exposure to the language where the children will be actively practicing language, and then prove it when they speak.

Some controversies

Language will vary from culture to culture, because of the milieu where the child is expose for the first time.

Noam Chomsky proposed that language development should be described as language growth, because language can be considered as an organ that develops just like another human organ.

Children´s speech as a whole single unit without considering morphology or syntax.

Caretaker speech

Children are helped by the adults that surround their environment on their language acquisition; this is given for the typical behavior of adults in the environment, adults that spend the most part of their time with children, the mother, father or grandparents, among others. The characteristic of caretaker speech is that is a simplified speech style adopted by the caretaker, who interacts with a child.

The caretaker speech is characterized by simple structures and a lot of repetition, if the child is indeed in this process of working out a system of putting words and sounds together, then the child will be internalized with language.

Language´ stages

Stages	Ages	Explanation
Pre-language stages	Three months to ten months By six months Around nine months Eleventh months	Cooing: the first recognizable sounds.  This are velar sounds  (k) and (g) and usually high vowels: (i) and (u) Babbling:  the child is able to produce a number of different vowels and consonants such as fricatives and nasals, sounds like mu and da. Babbling: Intonation patters Babbling: The infant child made use of vocalizations to express emotions and emphasis. A late babbling is characterized by imitations too.
The one word or holophrastic stage	Twelve and eighteen months	A single form or unit, function as a phrase or sentence. Production of single unit utterances.
The two-word stage	Eighteen to twenty months	The child´s vocabulary now is beyond fifty words. The combinations of words that the child forms, will be interpret in different ways by the caretaker, depending on the context of the situation. The child only intend communicate expression, but the caretaker is concerned with grammar. The child produce an utterance and receives a  feedback, which one means that the utterance worked.
Telegraphic speech	Two and three years old By the age of two and a half Three years old	This stage is characterized by strings of lexical morphemes in phrases such as cat drink milk. Child´s vocabulary is expanding rapidly. The child´s vocabulary resembles at the vocabulary of an adult.

The acquisition process

When the child is actively constructing forms in the process of acquisition of language, the child is being taught and tested, that way the child will have a better notion of language and develop it correctly.

The use of sounds and word combinations are important either  in the practice and interaction with the language.

Morphology (word – formation)

• Inflectional morphemes: -ing and –s
• Overgeneralization process: is the widespread application of grammatical forms.

-          Plurals: e.g. foot – foots or footses instead of feet.

-          The use of irregular plural

-          Possessive inflections

-          The use of past-tense morphemes ‘ed’ in the majority of verbs and words. E.g. go, goed, instead of went.

Syntax (word order)

Syntax is against the imitation because the child not only repeat utterances, the child has his own way of expressing things.

Formation of questions and negation:

Stages	Questions	Negation
1st stage	The use of rise intonation in Wh- questions.	The use of no or not is much more common.
2nd stage	Intonation rise continues. The use of Wh- questions is more constant, now there are complex expressions.	The use of no and not plus auxiliaries, like do and can, which are placed in front of the verb.
3rd stage	The inversion of subject and verb appears.	The use other auxiliary forms like didn´t and won´t, then a late acquisition of isn´t.

Semantics (the meaning of words)

The meaning of words is stuck and is difficult to know what the child really wants to express.

Overextension: when the child uses the name of an object for all the objects with the same characteristic, e.g. ball, for all rounded objects.

Hyponymy: the generalization of a term, to describe other terms.