Introduction

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to

perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. It involves the
picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive
vocabulary. However, learning a first language is something that every normal child
does successfully without much need for formal lessons.

Language development is a complex and unique human quality. But children

seem to acquire language at a very rapid rate with most children's speech being
relatively grammatical by age three (Crain & Lillo-Martin, 1999). Grammar, which is a
set of mental rules that characterize all of the sentences of a language, must be
mastered in order to learn a language. Most children in a linguistic community seem
to succeed in converging on a grammatical system equivalent to everyone else in the
community with few wrong turns, despite the complexity of the system.

By the time a child utters a first word, according to the Linguistic Society of
America, he or she has already spent many months playing around with the sounds
and intonations of language, but there is still no one point at which all children learn
to talk.

Lesson1. Stages of Language Acquisition of Children

Children acquire language in stages and different children reach various stages
at different times, although they have one thing in common and that is that typically
developing children learning the same language will follow an almost identical pattern
in the sequence of stages they go through (Demirezen, 1988).

The Stages Usually Consist of (Demirezen, 1988)

 cooing- 6 months- use phonemes from every language

 babbling- 9 months- selectively use phonemes from their native language
 one word utterances- 12 months- start using single words
 telegraphic speech- 2 years- multi-word utterances that lack in function
 normal speech- 5 years- almost normal developed speech

Lesson 2. Historical Theories and Models of Language Acquisition

In 1957 a piece of literature appeared that

would come to affect how we view language, human
behavior and language learning. B.F Skinner's Verbal
Behavior (1957) applied a functional analysis
approach to analyze language behavior in terms of
their nature cognitive Theory all occurrence in
response to environmental circumstances and the
effects they have on human interactions. Skinner's
behavior learning approach relies on the components
of classical conditioning, which involves
unconditioned and conditioned stimuli, and operant
conditioning but particularly the elements of
operational conditioning (Demirezen, 1988).

Behaviourist Theory B.F Skinner 1950

 Operational conditioning refers to a method of learning that occurs through
rewards and punishments for behavior. Behavior operates on the environment to
bring about favorable consequences or avoid adverse ones. These same ideas of
operant conditioning can also be applied to language acquisition because Skinner
believed that language could be treated like any other kind of cognitive behavior
(Demirezen, 1988).

According to the behaviorist theory, language learning is a process of habit

formation that involves a period of trial and error where the child tries and fails to
use correct language until it succeeds. Infants also have human role models in their
environment that provide the stimuli and rewards required for operant conditioning.
For example, if a child starts babblings, which resemble appropriate words, then his
or her babbling will be rewarded by a parent or loved one by positive reinforcement
such as a smile or clap. Since the babblings are rewarded, this reward reinforces
further articulations of the same sort into groupings of syllables and words in a
similar situation (Demirezen, 1988).

Children also utter words because they cause adults to give them the things
they want and they will only be given what they want once the adult has trained or
shaped the child through reinforcement and rewards speech close to that of adult
speech. Before long children will take on the imitation or modeling component of
Skinner's theory of language acquisition in which children learn to speak by copying
the utterances heard around them and by having their responses strengthened by
the repetitions, corrections and other reactions that adults provide. However, before a
child can begin to speak, they first start by listening to the sounds in their
environment for the first years of their life. Gradually, the child learns to associate
certain sounds with certain situations such as the sound of endearment a mother
produces when feeding her child. These sounds then become pleasurable for the
child on their own without being accompanied by food and eventually the child will
attempt to imitate these sounds to invite the attention of his mother or another adult.
If these sounds resemble that of adult language the mother will respond with reward
and the operant conditioning process begins (Cook, 1996, p. 20).

Cognitive Theory

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who was famous for his four stages of
cognitive development for children, which included the development of language.
However, children do not think like adults and so before they can begin to develop
language they must first actively construct their own understanding of the world
through their interactions with their environment. A child has to understand a
concept before he or she can acquire the particular language which expresses that
concept.

For example, 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.
Essentially it is impossible for a young child to voice concepts that are unknown to
them; therefore, once a child learns about their environment, then they can map
language onto their prior experience. An infant's experience of a cat is that it meows,
is furry and eats from a bowl in the kitchen; hence they develop the concept of cat
first and then learn to map the word "kitty" onto that concept. Language is only one
of the many human mental or cognitive activities, and many cognitivists believe that
language emerges within the context of other general cognitive abilities like memory,
attention and problem solving because it is a part of their broader intellectual
development.
 Four stages of Piaget's cognitive development theory, each involving a
different aspect of language acquisition:

1. Sensory-Motor Period- (birth to 2 years), children are born with "action

schemas" to "assimilate" information about the world such as sucking or
grasping. During the sensory- motor period, children's language is
"egocentric" and they talk either for themselves or for the pleasure of
associating anyone who happens to be there with the activity of the
moment.
2. Pre-Operational Period- (2 years to 7), children's language makes rapid
progress and the development of their "mental schema" lets them quickly
"accommodate" new words and situations. Children's language becomes
"symbolic" allowing them to talk beyond the "here and now" and to talk
about things such as the past, future and feelings. Egocentrism- Involves
"animism" which refers to young children's tendency to consider
everything, including inanimate objects, as being alive. Language is
considered egocentric because they see things purely from their own
perspective.
3. Operational Period- (7 to 11 years) and (11 years to adulthood) Piaget
divides this period into two parts: the period of concrete operations and the
period of formal operations. Language at this stage reveals the movement
of their thinking from immature to mature and from illogical to logical.
They are also able to "de-center" or view things from a perspective other
than their own. It is at this point that children's language becomes
"socialized" and includes things such as questions.

Social Interactionist Theory

Vygotsky's social interaction theory incorporates nurture arguments in that

children can be influenced by their environment answers, commands and
criticisms.as well as the language input children receive from their care-givers.
Although the theories of Skinner, Chomsky and Piaget are all very different and very
important in their own contexts, they don't necessarily take into account the fact that
children don't encounter language in isolation. The child is a little linguist analyzing
language from randomly encountered adult utterances. The interaction theory
proposes that language exists for the purpose of communication and can only be
learned in the context of interaction with adults and older children. It stresses the
importance of the environment and culture in which the language is being learned
during early childhood development because this social interaction is what first
provides the child with the means of making sense of their own behavior and how
they think about the surrounding world.

According to Williamson (2008, p. 82), children can eventually use their own
internal speech to direct their own behavior in much the same way that their parents'
speech once directed their behavior. Speech to infants is marked by a slower rate,
exaggerated intonation, high frequency, repetition, simple syntax and concrete
vocabulary. This tailored articulation used by care-givers to young children to
maximize phonemic contrasts and pronunciation of correct forms is known as child-
directed speech (CDS).

Vygotsky also developed the concepts of private speech which is when children
must speak to themselves in a self-guiding and directing way- initially out loud and
later internally and the zone of proximal development which refers to the tasks a
child is unable to complete alone but is able to complete with the assistance of an
adult. The attention and time that a mother spends talking about topics that the
child is already focused on highly correlates with early vocabulary size. In the early
stages of a child`s life this is usually done through motherese or ``baby talk`` which
may allow children to ``bootstrap`` their progress in language acquisition (Williamson,
2008, p. 27).

Usage-Based Theory

The usage-based theory of language suggests that children initially build up

their language through very concrete constructions based around individual words or
frames on the basis of the speech they hear and use. Basically this means, according
to Tomasello theory, that children learn language from their language experiences
and a language structure emerges from language use. The usage-based theory takes
constructions, which are direct form meaning pairings, to be the basic units of
grammar and believe that children learn constructions by first mastering specific
instances before going on to generalize and use the constructions productively with
other lexical items. Constructions gradually become more general and more abstract
during the third and fourth years of life and grammar emerges as the speakers of a
language create linguistic constructions out of recurring sequences of symbols
(Tomasello, 2003, p. 57).

Tomasello (2003:60) also emphasizes the effects of frequency of use on

cognitive representations, as patterns that are repeated for communicative reasons
seem to become automated and conventionalized. Research by Saxton (2010)
indicates that the more often a linguistic form occurs in the input, the more often it is
experienced by the child and the stronger the child's representation of it becomes. It
will then be activated more easily when used on subsequent occasions. Therefore the
child's mental representation is reinforced or increasingly entrenched and the more
deeply entrenched a structure is, the more likely it becomes that this will form the
basis of the child's speech output. Usage-based linguistics holds that language use
shapes entrenchment through frequency repetitions of usage, but there are separable
effects of token frequency and type frequency (Doughty & Long, 2003).

Optimality Theory

Optimality Theory (OT) was originally proposed by Prince and Smolensky

(1993) and has subsequently been further developed by other researchers. OT
suggests that the observed forms of language arise from the interaction between
conflicting constraints and like other models of linguistics, contain an input and an
output and a relation between the two. A constraint is a structural requirement that
may be either satisfied or violated by an output form and a surface form. A constraint
is considered optimal if it incurs the least serious violations of a set of constraints,
taking into account their hierarchical ranking. In optimality theory, the essence of
both language learning in general (learnability) and language acquisition (actual
development children go through) entails the rankings of constraints from an initial
state of the grammar to the language specific ranking of the target grammar
(McCarthy, 2004:36). OT is a development of generative grammar, a theory sharing
the quest for universal principles such as universal grammar but differs from the
theory proposed by Chomsky because optimality theory believes that these universal
constraints are violable (Kager, 1999). Languages are able to differ in their ranking of
constraints by giving priorities to some constraints over others. Language acquisition
can be described as the process of adjusting the ranking of these constraints that are
considered universal:

According to Archangeli & Langendoen (1997, p. 35) these constraints include

constraints governing aspects of phonology, such as syllabification constraints,
constraints governing morphology and constraints that determine the correct
syntactic properties of a language. There is also one family of constraints whose
properties cut across all sub disciplinary domains, called the faithfulness
constraints, which say that input and output are identical. Faithfulness is the
general requirement for linguistic forms to be realized as close as possible to their
lexical "basic forms" and violations of faithfulness lead to differences between input
and output. Another term coined by the optimality theory is markedness, which
refers to the continuum that language-universal and language-specific properties rest
on, with completely unmarked properties being those found in virtually all languages
and extremely marked properties being found quite rarely. However markedness
embodies universality in a "soft" sense, with violations of universality existing
between languages.

Native Language Magnet Model

Young children learn their mother tongue rapidly and effortlessly, following
similar developmental paths regardless of culture. How infants accomplish this task
has become the focus of debate especially for Patricia Kuhl (2005)who has developed
the Native Language Magnet Model to help explain how infants at birth can hear all
the phonetic distinctions used in the world's languages.

According to Kuhl (2005, p. 46), to acquire a language, infants have to discover

which phonetic distinctions which will be utilized in the language of their culture and
do so by discriminating among virtually all the phonetic units of the world's
languages. During the first year of life, prior to the acquisition of word meaning,
infants begin to perceive speech by forming perceptual maps of the speech they hear
in their environment. Her research focused on the mechanism underlying the
development transition from an infant’s universal phonetic capacity to native
phonetic discrimination. They used ERP brain measure of infants' native and non-
native speech perception in infancy to predict language in the 2nd and 3rd years of
life. Although we still remain capable of discriminating non-native phonetic contrasts
as we age, it is at a reduced level when compared with native contrasts. The idea that
more than selection is involved in the development of phonetic perception has been
clearly demonstrated by experimental findings showing that native language phonetic
perception shows a significant improvement between 6 and 12 months of age.

Previous studies had shown native language improvement after 12 months of

age and before adulthood, but newer studies such as Kuhl's and colleagues had gone
beyond selection in explaining developmental change in infants' perception of speech.
The Native Language Magnet Model (NLM) proposed by Kuhl (1994, 2000) focuses on
infants' native phonetic categories and how they could be structured through
ambient language experience. The NLM specified three phases in development:

Phase 1- infants are capable of differentiating all the sounds of human speech
and abilities are derived from their general auditory processing mechanisms rather
than from a speech-specific mechanism

Phase 2- infants' sensitivity to the distributional properties of linguistic input

produces phonetic representations. Experience accumulates and the representations
most often activated begin to function as perceptual magnets for other members of
the category.
 Phase 3- The perception termed perceptual magnet effect produces facilitation
in native and a reduction in foreign language phonetic abilities.

Recently Kuhl's (2005) research has initiated the revision of the NLM and
expanded the model to include native language neural commitment, which explains
effects of language experience on the brain. Native language neural commitment
describes the brain's early coding of language and how it affects our subsequent
abilities to learn the phonetic scheme of a new language. This is due to the fact that
initial language exposure causes physical changes in neural tissue that reflects the
statistical perceptual properties of language input (Kuhl, 2005, p. 48). The neural
networks then become committed to the patterns of native language speech. Another
finding by Kuhl (2008, p. 78) that has expanded the Native Language Magnet Model
has been the research indicating that both native and non-native performances at 7
months of age predicted future language abilities but in opposite directions. Better
native phonetic perception at 7 months of age predicted accelerated language
development at between 14 and 30 months whereas better non-native performance at
7 months predicted slower language development at 14 and 30 months.

Results supported the view that the ability to discriminate non-native phonetic
contrasts reflects the degree to which the brain remains in the initial state, open and
uncommitted to native language speech patterns.