First Language Acquisition
First Language Acquisition’ is a process whereby children from infancy through early school years acquire their first languages.
- Small babies: children babble and cry to send and receive vocal and non-vocal
- End of first year: children start to imitate words and speech sounds and use their first words.
- 18 months: Their vocabularies in terms of words increase and begin to use 2-word 3-word utterances (known as “telegraphic utterances”).
- 3 years: Children can comprehend an incredible quantity of linguistic input, they chatter and speak nonstop
- School age: Children start to internalize increasingly complex structures, expand their vocabulary and sharpen their communication skills and they also learn the social functions of their language.
Theories of FLA
There are Various theories and approaches that have been developed to study and analyze how do children acquire their mother tongue such as, behaviorism, innateness, the cognitive theory, and interactionist theory.
- The behaviorist theory:
claims that child language acquisition is governed by habit forming and reinforcement by imitation, repetition. BF Skinner (1957) suggests that children learn language first through imitating their caregivers (usually parents) and then modifying their use of language due to operant conditioning.
What is operant conditioning?
Operant conditioning is a way of learning that focuses on the reward (positive reinforcement) or punishment (negative reinforcement) of desired or undesired behaviour. He stated that a successful utterance is reinforced and an unsuccessful one is punished (ignored). For example, if a child says “want milk” and the parent gives the child some milk, the operant is reinforced and over repeated.
Limitation: The mistakes made by children reveal that Children are not simply imitating but actively working out the language.
- innateness
This theory was developed in America by Noam Chomsky as a result of the weaknesses in the behaviorist theory. He insisted that every human being is born into a society with a language acquisition device (LAD). Language acquisition device (LAD) is the language innate faculty which is responsible for language acquisition without any need for the social environment. This was later referred to as Universal Grammar (UG.
limitation: what if we isolate a child, would he/she speaks any language.
- The Cognitive theory
Suggests that the primary drives behind our actions are our thoughts and internal processes. Jean Piaget (1923) assumes that children are born with relatively little cognitive ability, but their minds develop and build new schemas (ideas and understanding of how the world works) as they age and experience the world around them. Eventually, they can apply language to their schemas through assimilation (fitting new information into what is already known) and accommodation (changing one's schemas to support new information).
Piaget believed that cognitive development had to come before language development because it would be impossible for children to express things that they don't yet understand. For example, a younger child with no sense of time couldn't express things in the future tense or speak hypothetically, no matter how much they are taught language.
Piaget proposed that this cognitive development could be split into four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.
Piaget's four stages of cognitive development:
First is the sensorimotor stage. This takes place from birth to around two years of age. At this stage, the child is developing sensory coordination and interacting with their environment by feeling and playing with things. Their use of language extends primarily to babbles and few spoken words.
The next stage is the pre-operational stage, which takes place from ages two to seven. At this stage, children are able to use language with a better grasp of grammatical structure, context, and syntax. Child thinking at this stage is still very egocentric (their understanding of the world is limited to how it affects them).
Next is the concrete operational stage. It takes place from ages seven to eleven. At this stage, children understand concepts such as time, numbers, and object properties and gain reasoning and logic, which allows them to rationalise their beliefs and speak in greater detail about their own thoughts and the world around them. They can also speak to others about their beliefs and understand how outcomes or viewpoints may differ.
Finally, we have the formal operational stage. This takes place from twelve years old to adulthood. At this stage, children can engage in higher reasoning and think and speak about the abstract, such as hypotheticals, morals, and political systems. Language is essentially unlimited, as there is no cognitive limit to one's understanding of the world at this stage.
- Interactionist theory (Jerome Bruner theory of language acquisition)
Jerome Bruner (1961) believed that children are born with an ability to develop language but they require regular interaction with their caregivers or teachers to learn and understand it to a level of full fluency. This idea is known as the Language Acquisition Support System (LASS). Caregivers tend to correct mistakes that children make when using language and also regularly teach them what objects are and what their purposes are. Bruner suggests that this helps to build the scaffolding that children will later rely on when further developing language.
A caregiver may also use child-directed speech (CDS), altering their own use of language to make it easier for a child to conceptualise language independently.
What is CDS and how does it aid language acquisition?
CDS or child-directed speech is commonly known as ‘baby talk’ in everyday life. It is when an adult changes their use of language when talking to a young child. This includes changes such as slower speech in a higher voice, more obvious intonations for different types of speech (i.e., questions, statements, orders), and very simple sentence structure. These strategies all simplify language to make it as easy as possible for the child to understand.
Bruner believed that CDS was adapted to make language more simple, accessible, and easy to understand. According to this theory, children cannot develop an understanding of the more complex parts of language alone. Thus, CDS acts as an infant-friendly introduction to language that can be built on throughout infancy, early childhood, and into school.
