Summary_PLLT_chapter 2
Chapter 2. First language acquisition
Intro) Direct comparisons between first and second language acquisition must be treated with caution. There are dozens of salient differences between L1 and L2 learning. The most obvious difference, in the case of adult SLA, is the tremendous cognitive and affective contrast between adults and children.
Theories of first language acquisition
*Characteristics of First language acquisition
- Comprehend an amazing quantity of linguistic input.
- Fluency, creativity, complex structures, expand their vocabulary, and sharpen communicative skills.
- At school age, children not only learn what to say but what not to say as they become more aware of the situated functions of their language.
* Two hypotheses
(1) Children come into this world with very specific innate knowledge, predispositions, and biological timetables.
(2) Children learn to function in a language chiefly through interaction and discourse.
The first (behavioral) position is set in contrast to the second (nativist) and third (functional) positions.
- Behavioral approaches
: explains such exchanges as the result of an emitted or stimulated “response” (utterance) that is immediately rewarded (reinforced), thereby encouraging (stimulating) further linguistic attempts from the child.
: The model works for comprehension as well as production, although correct comprehension is not, strictly speaking, publicly observable. One must observe context and nonverbal behavior to confirm comprehension. Its view claims that a child demonstrates comprehension of an utterance by responding appropriately to it, and then upon reinforcement of that appropriate response, internalizes (or learns) linguistic meanings.
*B.F. Skinner’s classic, Verbal Behavior (1957) - One of the earliest attempts to construct a behavioral model of language acquisition, Skinner’s theory of verbal behavior was an extension of his general theory of learning by operant conditioning.
Operant conditioning : conditioning in which the organism (in this case, a human being) emits a response, or operant (a sentence or utterance), without necessarily observable stimuli; that operant is maintained (learned) by reinforcement (for example, a positive verbal or nonverbal response from another person). *According to Skinner, verbal behavior, like other behavior, is controlled by its consequences. When consequences are rewarding, behavior is maintained and is increased in strength and perhaps frequency. When consequences are punished, or when there is total lack of reinforcement, the behavior is weakened.
e.g) if a child says, “want milk” and a parent gives the child some milk, the operant is reinforced and, over repeated instances, is conditioned.
2) Challenges to behavioral approaches
*Mediation theories (to protect ‘Behavioral approaches’): accounted for by the claim that the linguistic stimulus (a word or sentence) elicits a “mediating” response that is covert and invisible, acting within the learner. This approach fell short of accounting for the abstract nature of language, for the child’s creativity, and for the interactive nature of language acquisition.
3) The Nativist Approach
*LAD (Language acquisition device), which means metaphorical “little black box”
1. The ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment
2. The ability to organize linguistic data into various classes that can later be refined
3. Knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that other kinds are not
4. The ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing linguistic system to construct the simplest possible system out of the available linguistic input
*Practical contributions of nativist theories
: the child’s language at any stage is systematic in that the child is constantly forming hypotheses that are continually revised, reshaped, or sometimes abandoned.
*Hypothetical grammars, which Nativist studies of child language acquisition were free to construct.
: Borrowing one tenet of structural and behavioral paradigms, they approached the data with few preconceived notions about what the child’s language ought to be, and probed the data for internally consistent systems.
*The first rule of the generative grammar of the child was described
: Sentence -> pivot word + open word
4) Challenges to Nativist Approaches
* Parallel distributed processing (PDP) model
: a sentence – which has phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic, discourse, sociolinguistic, and strategic properties – is not “generated” by a series of rules. Sentences are the result of the simultaneous interconnection of a multitude of brain cells.
*Connectionism
: Neurons in the brain are said to form multiple connections, each of the 100 billion nerve cells in the brain may be linked to thousands of its counterparts. In this approach, experience leads to learning by strengthening particular connections
* Emergentism
: in recent years, a further development of connectionist models of language acquisition is seen in a position that hearkens back to the spirit of behavioral approaches. It represents a more cautious approach to a theory of language acquisition than was evident in the early nativist claims, some arguments notwithstanding.
* ‘The Nativist Approaches’ has made several important contributions to our understanding of the L1 acquisition process:
1. Freedom from the restrictions of the “scientific method” to explore the unseen, unobservable, underlying, abstract linguistic structures being developed in the child
2. The construction of a number of potential properties of Universal Grammar, through which we can better understand not just language acquisition but the nature of human languages in general
3. Systematic description of the child’s linguistic repertoire as either rule-governed, or operation out of parallel distributed processing capacities, or the result of experiential establishment of connections
5) Functional approaches (Recent)
* Two emphasis
(1) Researchers began to see that language was just one manifestation of the cognitive and affective ability to deal with the world, with others, and with the self.
(2) Moreover, the generative rules that were proposed under the nativist framework were abstract, formal, explicit, and quite logical, yet they dealt specifically with the forms of language and not with the deeper functional levels of meaning constructed from social interaction.
* Cognition and language development
-Lois Bloom concluded that children learn underlying structures, and not superficial word order. Thus, depending on the social context, “Mommy sock” could mean a number of different things to a child.
-According to Jean Piaget, what children learn about language is determined by what they already know about the world.
-Gleitman and Wanner noted in their review of the state of the art in child language research at that time, “children appear to approach language learning equipped with conceptual interpretive abilities for categorizing the world.”
- Dan Slobin demonstrated that in all languages, semantic learning depends on cognitive development and that sequences of development are determined more by semantic complexity than by structural complexity.
* Social interaction and language development
-It has become quite clear that language development is intertwined, not just with cognition and memory, but also with social and functional acquisition. The linguist can no longer deal with abstract, formal rules without dealing with all the minutiae of day-to-day performance that were previously set aside in a search for systematicity.
Reference)
- Brown, H. D.(2014). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (6th Edition), Pearson (지정도서)
- 고려대학교 교육대학원 영어교육 전공 영어교과교육론 서원화 교수님 (2022년 가을학기)