2. Before 5 five years, the child has already knows
most of the intricate language system.
Children controls: -Conjoining sentences
-asking questions
-using pronouns
-negate sentences
-forming relative clauses
-inflecting verbs and nouns.
3. Some considerations
No one teaches the gramar rules to the
children.
Their parents are not aware about
morphology, syntatic and semantic rules.
4. How do learners acquire a Second Language?
Making use of existing knowledge of the
native language
Using general learning strategies
Taking into account universal properties of
language to internalize knowledge of the
second language
5. Mechanism of Language Acquisition
Theories influenced by behaviorisim (1950)
Observable rather tan mental system
Language
Learning in
children
Imitation
Reinforcement
Analogy
6. Chomsky repplied:
“Language is a complex cognitive system that
could not be acquired by behaviorist principles”
Children are not simply imitating adults speech
7. Do children learn by analogy?
Children put words together to form phrases by
analogy, by hearing a sentence and using it as a
model to form other sentences.
Connectionism (computer model) relies on
behaviourism
Repeated exposure
8. Do children learn through structured
input?
“motherese” Special way to speak to
infants.
Noam Chomsky:
Children always learn gramma
It is not relevant the enviroment, the child is
always going to learn the language and we do
not know why.
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9. Children construct gramma
Language acquisitoin is a creative process.
Children have a capacity for creating new and
infinitive sentences.
Lingusitics believe that children have an innate
template for language. (UG Universal Gramma )
The innateness hypothesis
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10. Universal stages in Language Acquisiton
Babbling stage (around six months)
Acquisition of first words (first year of life)
Put words together into sentences
(after one year)
11. The acquisiton of Phonology
Early stage includes the consonants: (b, m, d, k) due to
its frequency
First, the child recognize the sound of vowels.
First year: children figure out the sounds of targe
language
Second year: children learn how the sounds are used
Children early pronunciations are not haphazard.
12. The acquisiton of Word meaning
Intuitive way:
The children look at an object, the mother say a
word, and the child makes a connection
between the sound and the object. However,
there is a underextenstion case, in which a
lexical item is generalized.
13. The acquisiton of Morphology
Children acquired rules, although they
overgeneralize them.
Error by children point out that children do not
learn langugage by imitation.
Morphological rules emerged quite early .
