First Language Acquisition

1. First Language Acquisition Topics and Themes in Linguistics WS 2005/6, Campus Essen Raymond Hickey, English Linguistics

2. New insights from language acquisition Some distinctions to begin with... • First language acquisition is the term used to denote the learning of one's native tongue in the first few years of life. This acquisition is approximately the same with all children and is independent of intelligence of the individual child. It obviously has nothing to do with ethnic or social affiliation. Non-linguists who maintain that a certain child (and later a certain adult) has mastered his or her native language particularly well refer - usually unconsciously - to the presence of a large vocabulary and/or the ability to express oneself in a stylistically differentiated manner. Only with children who have a pathological impairment, such as deafness and/or dumbness, do we find that first language acquisition does not take place normally.

3. New insights from language acquisition • By acquisition linguists only mean the acquisition of the spoken language. The written language is only learned at school, that is at a later point in time (after the age of 5 or 6) when language acquisition has been largely completed. • The acquisition of one's native language has nothing to do with the distinction between standard language and dialect. The standard language is only a dialect which for historical reasons came to be used in society for the written form and which is generally preferred in school education.

4. New insights from language acquisition What can one learn? • A child can learn any language. However, this is in general the language of the parents, but this does not have to be the case. The language which the child is exposed to in the first years of life is that which is learned. • If more than one language is spoken in the environment of the child then the child learns these languages. Two languages are not rare, three or more are unusual, however. What is important for the child is that both languages are spoken to an equal extent in the environment - for instance by each of the parents - and that there are no major tensions in the relationship to the persons who speak these languages, otherwise the child will probably develop a general dislike of the language of this individual.

5. New insights from language acquisition • Second language acquisition refers to a further language which is acquired after the first, usually after primary school. The acquisition of a second language never reaches the degree of proficiency of the first. The reason for this is that children start too late, in fact they are usually teenagers before being exposed to the second language. After puberty one cannot learn a second language as well as a first one, no matter how much time one invests in this. In this connection linguists generally make the distinction between acquisition - for the first language - and learning - for the second language after childhood.

6. New insights from language acquisition Stages in language acquisition • For all languages one can maintain that there are certain stages in acquisition. In general it is clear that children begin with individual sounds and then move on to words, later to sentences of two and more words, increasing the complexity as their language evolves. It appears that children make 'mistakes' in the process. These are referred to technically as errors, that is they are systemic mistakes. They can be traced back to the fact that a child is at a certain stage of acquisition, for instance a child might say singed because he/she does not understand that there are so-called strong verbs which change the vowel of the stem, i.e. that the adult form is sang. A child might say sanged which shows that he/she has heard the form sang but not yet understood that it is a past tense form and thus he/she still forms the past according to the weak verb pattern.

7. New insights from language acquisition 0.0 - 0.3 Organic sounds, crying, cooing 0.4 - 0.5 Beginning of the babbling phase 0.10 – 1 The first comprehensible words. After this follow one-word, two-word and many-word sentences. The only word stages is known as the holophrastic stage; Telegraphic speech refers to speech with only nouns and verbs. 2.6 Inflection occurs, negation, interrogative and imperative sentences 3.0 A vocabulary of about 1000 words 5.0 The main syntactic rules have been acquired

8. New insights from language acquisition Unconscious knowledge • For the linguist the metaphor of the iceberg is very useful: nine tenths of language is under the surface. For instance, none of the present public would probably be in a position to list and describe the sentence structures of their native language. Nonetheless you use these hundreds of times each day in well-formed sentences. Perhaps a medical comparison might be helpful here: you use the muscles of your body constantly in order to move your limbs or to keep your balance while standing. You can do that without knowing how it works. But your central nervous system 'knows' how the muscles are innervated.

9. New insights from language acquisition One can recognise here that there are two types of knowledge: knowledge which one can express in words - e.g. the rules of chess - and unconscious knowledge which is activated without reflection, for instance, when speaking your native language. Such unconscious knowledge is based on the internalisation of language structures which we extracted from our environment as children. Input Language in our surroundings Action by child (i) extraction of structures (ii) storage in long term memory as unconscious knowledge

10. New insights from language acquisition Language as an instinct, as an innate faculty • An instinct is a tendency to do something which when triggered in childhood cannot be rejected, it is not a matter of conscious decision. For instance, there is no adult who crawls around on all fours, we cannot refuse to walk upright because this is an instinct. The development of an instinct takes place immediately after birth and is completed quickly.

11. New insights from language acquisition If one applies this view to language acquisition then one can maintain the following. 1) No child makes a conscious decision to learn a language. 2) No child has ever refused to learn the language spoken in his/her environment. 3) Acquisition is unconscious and can be compared with the unfolding of other instincts, for instance that of binaural hearing or telescopic vision. Linguists furthermore assume that we know what language is and how we are to react to it, i.e. by acquiring it. To put it simply: the language faculty is innate so that the child can immediately process the language he/she hears in the surroundings. The child must not wait for instructions from the parents before acquiring his/her native language.

12. New insights from language acquisition The decline in the ability to learn language In general one can maintain that after puberty the ability to acquire a language - in the technical sense of learning with native speaker competence - drops off radically and is never gained again. There are two major hypotheses about why this should be the case. The hypotheses may well be related to each other. 1) Due to the lateralisation of the brain - shortly before puberty - the brain loses flexibility and receptiveness, at least for unconscious learning. By lateralisation one means the fixing of functions of the brain to one half only. 2) With sexual maturity at puberty strong hormonal changes take place with humans. These lead to a reduction of the playful element which is typical of children. The spontaneous behaviour of children decreases drastically with the onset of puberty. A certain rigidity is characteristic of adults vis a vis children and this also affects the ability to learn languages.

13. New insights from language acquisition What do we know at the end of the day? Now we can view the stages of native language acquisition in more detail. 1) Children hear fragments of language in their environment. They then abstract the underlying structures behind what they hear. 2) Children then internalise the structure they gained - for instance the structures of sentences - and later on they use these when they wish to form new sentences without considering whether they have heard an actual sentence before or not. This process is called sentence generation in linguistics.

14. New insights from language acquisition The internalised native language is the competence of a human being and is the basis for linguistic intuitions, for instance supplying native speakers with the ability to judge the production of their language by others. This language is then used in daily communication. Here we are dealing with performance, with the use of language. That this use succeeds so well despite occasional slips - when we are tired or nervous - is testimony to the extraordinary achievement of language acquisition in early childhood.

15. Contrasting features of first and second language acquisition FLA SLA no conscious choice choice made by learner very rapid relatively slow no instruction instruction is usual high competence reached competence attained varies greatly Possible reasons for differences between FLA and SLA SLA occurs against the background of FLA (interference hypothesis) FLA takes place before puberty (adulthood) FLA takes place before lateralisation of brain (just before puberty)

16. Language pathology • Language impairment can result from a number of causes all of which mean that individuals suffer a reduction – from slight to severe – in language performance. Common reasons for such impairment are the following. • 1) Injury to the head, typically in an accident • 2) The growth of a tumour in the brain • 3) A stroke resulting from an interruption of blood supply to a part of the brain, e.g. due to a clot or a bursting vessel. • 4) Severe loss of brain tissue with Alzheimer’s disease

17. The shrinkage of the brain with Alzheimer’s disease typically affects the hippocampus which is why loss of memory is an obvious symptom. Language impairment is not always present but an increased occurrence of anomia (difficulty in finding words or in remembering names of people or places) can be observed. Alzheimer’s disease is progressive and invariable leads to death, typically within 5 to 15 years. Note that the other brain disease which can affect older people, Parkinson’s disease, does not stem from a loss of brain tissue but results from the degeneration of the basal ganglia (nerve cells at the base of the brain) with the attendant deficiency of dopamine, a neuortransmitter in this area.

18. Injury to the head from an external source is most common as a result of an accident, which in today’s world is most commonly a traffic accent. The most benign type of injury leads to concussion which may lead to a temporary loss of consciousness after which the individual may suffer from nausea and headache. The lasting effects of concussion usually affect memory, in some cases leading to loss (amnesia). The language faculty is not usually affected in such cases. When injury to the head has been more severe, particularly to the left side of the head, language and other functions can be seriously impaired. Because of the wide range of injury from external sources, individual speech therapy is necessary after initial recovery.

19. The general term for linguistic impairment is aphasia, lit. ‘lack of speech’, though other terms such as dysphasia ‘disorder of speech’ have been suggested as a cover term. Aphasiac disorders typically involve damage to some part of the brain as outlined above. Typically they involve either the speech production (Broca) or speech understanding (Wernicke) areas in the brain or perhaps the arcuate fasciculus or the supplementarymotorarea (see section The structure of the brain above). • When discussing aphasia, scholars use the modifier fluent for any kind of language impairment in which the motoric aspect of speech production is not affected. Where this is the case, the term non-fluent aphasia is used.

20. Broca aphasiacs, those suffering from motor aphasia, have typical disturbances in their speech. It is slow and difficult, such speakers seem not to manage grammatical rules, though their vocabulary is normally intact. The type of aphasia where speakers show a lack or confusion of grammatical words by e.g. omitting formatives and often inflectional endings is termed agrammatism. • Speakers with disturbances in the Wernicke area, those suffering from sensory aphasia, can speak normally though what they say often makes little sense. Their sentences are semantically incongruous.

21. Further types of language impairment • dementia A decline in cognitive ability due to brain damage or as a result of old age (senile dementia). This usually entails a general decline in language performance which can be labelled global aphasia. • dyslexiaA condition in which individuals often fail to connect the written and the spoken word. Such persons have difficulty with reading and spelling, irrespective of their level of education. The diagnosis of dyslexia is problematic as it occurs to varying degrees and it is notoriously difficult to determine when it is pathological. Also called alexia or word blindness (an inability to recognise words from their written form). Dyslexia may be an acquired condition with individuals who were previously literate. • dysgraphiaDifficulties with writing after damage to the brain. The equivalent to dyslexia in writing.