Early Childhood Language Learning

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Chapter 1.
Language Learning in Early
Childhood
 Definitions of L1, L2, FL, TL
 Patterns and sequences in L1 development
 Theoretical approaches to first language
acauisition: Behaviorism, Innatism, and
Interactionism
 Childhood bilingualism

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Definitions of L1 & L2
 Definition of “first language” (L1):
 The language(s) that an individual learns first.
 Other terms for “first language”-
• Native language or mother tongue
 Definition of “second language” (L2):
 Any language other than the first language learned (in
a broader sense).
 A language learned after the first language in a context
where the language is used widely in the speech
community (in a narrower sense).
• e.g., For many people in Taiwan, their L1 is
Taiwanese and L2 is Mandarin.

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Definitions of FL & TL
 Definition of “foreign language” (FL)
 A second (or third, or fourth) language learned in a
context where the language is NOT widely used in the
speech community. This is often contrasted with
second language learning in a narrower sense.
e.g., English or Japanese is a foreign language for
people in Taiwan.
 Definition of “target language” (TL)
 A language which is being learned, where it is the first
language or a second, third language.
e.g., English is a target language for you now.

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Patterns in L1 Development
Characteristics of the language of children:
 Their language development shows a high degree of
similarity among children all over the world. There are
predicable patterns in the L1 development and their L1
developmental patterns are related to their cognitive
development (predictability).
 Their language reflects the word order of the language that
they are hearing. The combination of the words has a
meaning relationship (learning through imitation).
 Their language also shows they are able to apply the rules of
the language to make sentences which they have never
heard before (creativity).

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Before First Words -
 The earliest vocalizations
 Involuntary crying (when they feel hungry or
uncomfortable)
 Cooing and gurgling – showing satisfaction or
happiness
 “Babbling”
 Babies use sounds to reflect the characteristics of the
different language they are learning.

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First Words –
 Around 12 months (“one-word” stage):
 Babies begin to produce one or two recognizable words
(esp. content word); producing single-word sentences.
 By the age of 2 (“two-word” stage):
 1) at least 50 different words
 2) “telegraphic” sentences (no function words and
grammatical morphemes)
e.g., “Mommy juice”, “baby fall down”
 3) reflecting the order of the language
e.g., “kiss baby”, “baby kiss”
 4) creatively combining words
e.g., “more outside”, “all gone cookie”

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L1 Developmental Sequences
 Acquisition of Grammatical morphemes
 Acquisition of Negation (to deny, reject,
disagree with, and refuse something)
 Acquisition of Questions

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Acquisition of
Grammatical morphemes
Roger Brown’s study (1973):
- approximate order of acquiring grammatical
morphemes
 Present progressive –ing (running)
 Plural –s (books)
 Irregular past forms (went)
 Possessive -’s (daddy’s hat)
 Copula (am/is/are)
 Articles (a/an/the)
 Regular past –ed (walked)
 Third person singular simple present –s (he runs)
 Auxiliary ‘be’ (He is coming)

Acquisition of
Grammatical morphemes
e.g., “wug test” –
1) Here is a wug. Now there are two of them.
There are two ______.
2) John knows how to bod. Yesterday he did the
same thing. Yesterday, he_______.
 Through the tests, children demonstrate that they
know the rules for the formation of plural and
simple past in English.
 By generalizing these patterns to words they have
never heard before, they show that their language is
not just a list of memorized word pairs such as
‘book/books’ and ‘nod/nodded’.
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Acquisition of Negation
Lois Bloom’s study (1991) – four stages
 Stage 1: ‘no’ – e.g., “No go”. “No cookie.”
 Stage 2: subject + no – e.g., “Daddy no comb hair.”
 Stage 3: auxiliary or modal verbs (do/can) + not
(Yet no variations for different persons or tenses)
e.g., “I can’t do it “, “He don’t want it.”
 Stage 4: correct form of auxiliary verbs
(did/doesn’t/is/are) + not
e.g., He didn’t go. She doesn’t want it.
But sometimes double negatives are used
e.g., I don’t have no more candies.

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Acquisition of Questions
Lois Bloom’s study (1991):
Order of the occurrence of wh- question words
1. “What” - Whatsat? Whatsit?
2. “Where” and “who”
3. “Why” (emerging at the end of the 2nd year and
becomes a favorite at the age of 3 or 4)
4. “How” and “When” (yet children do not fully
understand the meaning of adults’ responses)
e.g., Child: When can we go outside?
Mother: In about 5 minutes.
Child: 1-2-3-4-5! Can we go now?

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Lois Bloom’s study (1991):
Six stages of children’s question-making
 Stage 1: using single words or single two- or three-word
sentences with rising intonation
(“Mommy book?” “Where’s Daddy?”)
 Stage 2: using the word order of the declarative sentence
(“You like this?” “Why you catch it?”)
 Stage 3: “fronting” - putting a verb at the beginning of a
sentence
(“Is the teddy is tired?” “Do I can have a cookie?”)

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Lois Bloom’s study (1991) – six stages (II)
 Stage 4: subject-auxiliary inversion in yes/no questions
but not in wh-questions
(“Do you like ice cream?” “Where I can draw?”)
 Stage 5: subject-auxiliary inversion in wh-questions, but
not in negative wh-questions
(“Why can he go out?” “Why he can’t go out?”)
 Stage 6: overgeneralizing the inverted form in
embedded questions
(“I don’t know why can’t he go out.”)

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 By the age of 4:
 Most children are able to ask questions, give
commands, report real events, and create stories about
imaginary ones with correct word order and
grammatical markers most of the time.
 They have mastered the basic structures of the
language or languages spoken to them in these early
years.
 They begin to acquire less frequent and more complex
linguistic structures such as passives and relative
clauses.
 They begin to develop ability to use language in a
widening social environment.

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Development of
Metalinguistic Awareness
 Metalinguistic awareness refers to the ability to treat
language as an object, separate from the meaning it
conveys.
 A dramatic development in metalinguistic awareness
occurs when children begin to learn to read. They see
words represented by letters on a page and start to
discover that words and sentences have multiple
meaning.
e.g., “drink the chair” (5 year-olds’ reaction: silly)
“cake the eat” (5 year-olds’ reaction: wrong)
“Why is caterpillar longer than train?” (a riddle)

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Development of Vocabulary
 One of the most impressive language developments in the early
school years is the astonishing growth of vocabulary.
 Vocabulary grows at a rate between several hundred and more
than a thousand words a year, depending mainly on how much
and how widely children read.
 Vocabulary growth required for school success is likely to come
from both reading for assignments and reading for pleasure.
Reading a variety of text types is an essential part of vocabulary
growth.
 Reading reinforces the understanding that language has form as
well as meaning and a “word” is separate from the thing it
represents.
 Another important development in the school years is the
acquisition of different language registers.

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Theoretical Approaches to
L1 Acquisition
 Behaviorism: Say what I say
 Innatism: It’s all in your mind
 Interactionist/Developmental
perspectives: Learning from inside and
out

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Behaviorism: Say what I say
 Skinner: language behavior is the production of correct
responses to stimuli through reinforcement.
 Language learning is the result of 1) imitation (word-for-word
repetition), 2) practice (repetitive manipulation of
form), 3) feedback on success (positive reinforcement),
and 4) habit formation.
 The quality and quantity of the language that the child
hears, as well as the consistency of the reinforcement
offered by others in the environment, would shape the
child’s language behavior.
(*Do the activity on p. 10 – imitation and practice)

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 Children’s imitations are not random:
Their imitation is selective and based on what they are
currently learning. They choose to imitate something they
have already begun to understand, rather than simply
imitating what is available in the environment.
(see example on p. 11, Peter’s & Cindy’s case)
 Children’s practice of new language forms
 The way they practice new forms is very similar to the
way foreign language students do substitution drills.
 Their practice of language forms is also selective and
reflects what they would like to learn. They are often in
charge of the conversation with adults.
(see example on p. 12, Kathryn’s case)

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 However, children do use language creatively, not just repeat what
they have heard. (see examples on pp. 13-14)
 Patterns in language
• Mother: Maybe we need to take you to the doctor.
Randall (36 months): Why? So he can doc my little bump?”
(showing the understanding of the suffix ‘er/or’)
• Son: I putted the plates on the table!
Mother: You mean, I put the plates on the table.
Son: No, I putted them on all by myself.
(showing the understanding of using ‘ed’ to make the past
tense for a verb” and the focus on the meaning, not form)
 Unfamiliar formulas
• Father: I’d like to propose a toast.
Child: I’d like to propose a piece of bread.
• Mother: I love you to pieces.
Child: I love you three pieces.

 Question formation
• Are dogs can wiggle their tails?
• Are those are my boots?
• Are this is hot?
 Order of events
• You took all the towels away because I can’t dry my
hands.
Imitation and practice alone cannot explain some of
the forms created by children. Children appear to pick
out patterns and then generalize or overgeneralize
them to new contexts. They create new forms or new
uses of words.

Innatism: It’s all in your mind
 Chomsky’s viewpoints:
 Children are biologically programmed for language and
language develops in the child in just the same way
that other biological functions develop.
 The environment makes only a basic contribution, that
is, the availability of people who speak to the child.
Therefore, the child’s biological endowment (LAD) will
do the rest.
 Children are born with a specific innate ability to
discover for themselves the underlying rules of a
language system on the basis of the samples of a
natural language they are exposed to.

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 Chomsky argues that behaviorism cannot provide sufficient
explanations for children’s language acquisition for the
following reasons:
1. Children come to know more about the structure of
their language than they could be expected to learn on
the basis of the samples of language they hear.
2. The language children are exposed to includes false
starts, incomplete sentences and slips of the tongue,
and yet they learn to distinguish between grammatical
and ungrammatical sentences.
3. Children are by no means systematically corrected or
instructed on language by parents.

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 LAD (an imaginary “black box” existing
somewhere in the brain):
 LAD contains the principles which are universal to all
human languages (i.e.. Universal Grammar – UG).
 For the LAD to work, children need access only to
samples of a natural language, which serve as a trigger
to activate the device.
 Once the LAD is activated, children are able to discover
the structure of the language to be learned by matching
the innate knowledge of basic grammatical principles
(UG) to the structures of the particular language in the
environment.

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 Evidence used to support Chomsky’s innatist position:
1. Virtually all children successfully learn their native language at
a time in life when they would not be expected to learn
anything else so complicated (i.e. biologically programmed).
2. Language is separate from other aspects of cognitive
developments (e.g., creativity and social grace) and may be
located in a different “module" of the brain.
3. The language children are exposed to does not contain
examples of all the linguistic rules and patterns.
4. Animals cannot learn to manipulate a symbol system as
complicated as the natural language of a 3- or 4-year-old
child.
5. Children acquire grammatical rules without getting explicit
instruction. Therefore, children’s acquisition of grammatical
rules is probably guided by principle of an innate UG which
could apply to all languages.

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 The biological basis for the innatist
position:
 The Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) –
Lenneberg: There is a specific and limited
time period (i.e., “critical period”) for the
LAD to work successfully.
The best evidence for the CPH is that
virtually every child learns language on a
similar schedule in spite of different
environments.

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 Three case studies of abnormal language
development - evidence of the CPH
(Read the case studies on pp. 19-21).
1.Victor – a boy of about 12 years old (1799)
2.Genie – a girl of 13 years old (1970)
3.Deaf signers (native signers, early learners,
vs. late learners)

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Interactionist/developmental
Perspectives:
Learning from inside and out
 Problems of Innatism:
 The innatists placed too much emphasis on the
“final state” (i.e. the linguistic competence of adult
native speakers), but not enough on the
developmental aspects of language acquisition.
 Language acquisition is an example of children’s
ability to learn from experience. What children
need to know is essentially available in the
language they are exposed to.

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Interactionist/developmental
Perspectives:
Learning from inside and out
 This position views that language develops as a result of
the interplay between the innate learning ability of
children and the environment in which they develop.
 Developmental psychologists attribute more importance to
the environment than the innatists, though they also
recognize a powerful learning mechanism in the human
brain.
 They see language acquisition as similar to and influenced
by the acquisition of other kinds of skill and knowledge,
rather than as something that is largely independent of
the child’s experience and cognitive development.

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The Interactionist Position
 Piaget: Language is dependent upon and springs from
cognitive development. That is, children’s cognitive
development determines their language development.
(e.g., the use of words as “bigger” or “more” depends on
children’s understanding of the concepts they represent.)
 He argued that the developing cognitive understanding is
built on the interaction between the child and the things
which can be observed, touched, and manipulated.
 For him, language was one of a number of symbol
systems developed in childhood, rather than a separate
module of the mind. Language can be used to represent
knowledge that children have acquired through physical
interaction with the environment.

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 Vygotsky: sociocultural theory of human mental
processing. He argued that language develops primarily
from social interaction.
 Zone of proximal development (ZPD): a level that a child is
able to do when there is support from interaction with a
more advanced interlocutor. That is, a supportive interactive
environment enables children to advance to a higher level of
knowledge and performance than s/he would be able to do
independently.
 He observed the importance of conversations which children
have with adults and with other children and saw in these
conversations the origins of both language and thought.

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 How Piaget’s view differs from Vygotsky’s:
 Piaget hypothesized that language developed as a
symbol system to express knowledge acquired
through interaction with the physical world.
 Vygotsky hypothesized that thought was
essentially internalized speech, and speech
emerged in social interaction.

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 Language socialization framework: observed from
childrearing patterns (parent-child interaction)
 Child-directed Speech (modified language interaction):
 Phonological modification: a slower rate of delivery,
higher pitch, more varied intonation
 Syntactical modification: shorter, simpler sentence
patterns, frequent repetition, and paraphrase.
 Limited conversation topics: e.g., the ‘here and now’
and topics related to the child’s experiences.
 More important than modification is the conversational
give-and-take.

 The interaction between a language-learning child and
an interlocutor who responds in some way to the child
is important (Jim’s case).
 Exposure to impersonal sources of language such as
television or radio alone are not sufficient for children
to learn the structure of a particular language.
 One-on-one interaction gives children access to
language that is adjusted to their level of
comprehension.
 Once children have acquired some language, however,
television can be a source of language and cultural
information.
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Connectionism
 Though both innatism and connectionism look at the
cognitive aspect of language acquisition, yet they differ
in the following:
• Connectionists hypothesize that language acquisition
dose not require a separate “module of the mind” but
can be explained in terms of learning in general.
• Connectionists argue that what children need to know
is essentially available in the language they are
exposed to. They attribute greater importance to the
role of the environment than to any innate knowledge
in the learner.

Connectionism
 Connectionism views language as a complex system of
units which become interconnected in the mind as they
are encountered together. The more often units are
heard or seen together, the more likely it is that the
presence of one will lead to the activation of the other.
 Language acquisition is not just a process of
associating words with elements of external reality. It is
also a process of associating words and phrases with
the other words and phrases that occur with them, or
words with grammatical morphemes that occur with
them.
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 Watch the video clip “Baby Talk” from the Interactionist
position. Read the following questions first:
1. According to Bruner, in what ways do children learn syntax,
semantics, and pragmatics?
2. Why do many researchers think Chomsky’s innatism is not sufficient?
3. According to Berko-Gleason, how do parents or caretakers help
children with their verbal development?
4. What is the purpose for parents to play the ‘thank-you’ game with
children?
5. Interactionists stress that language use is not only referential but it
can be used for social purposes. Can you give examples for these two
types of purposes?
6. Why is it too simplistic to think children either memorize or analyze
things they hear and then they produce language? What example did
Berko-Gleason give to support her points?
7. How do children learn ‘routinized’ phrases?

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Childhood bilingualism
 “Simultaneous bilinguals”
 Children who learn more than one language
from birth.
 “Sequential bilinguals”
 Children who begin to learn a second
language after they have acquired the first
language.

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 Is it difficult for children to cope with 2 language?
1. There is little support for the myth that learning more than
one language in early childhood slows down the child’s
linguistic development or interferes with cognitive and
academic development.
2. Bilingualism can have positive effects on abilities that are
related to academic success, such as metalinguistic
awareness.
3. The learning of languages for bilingual children is more
related to the circumstances in which each language is
learned than to any limitation in the human capacity to
learn more than one language.

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 Language attrition for bilinguals -
“Subtractive bilingualism” (Lambert, 1987)
 When children are “submerged” in a second language
for long periods in early schooling, they may begin to
lose their native language (L1) before they have
developed an age-appropriate mastery of the L2.
 It can have negative consequences for children’s self-esteem.
 In some cases, children continue to be caught between
two languages; not having mastered the L2, but not
having continued to develop the L1.

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 Solution for “subtractive bilingualism”:
to strive for “additive bilingualism”
 Parents should continue speaking the L1 to their
children to maintain the home language, while the L2
is being learned at school.
 Maintaining the family language also creates
opportunities for the children to continue both
cognitive and affective development in a language
they understand easily while they are still learning the
L2.

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Summary
 Each of the three theoretical approaches explains
a different aspect of first language acquisition.
1. Behaviorists (learning through imitation, practice,
reinforcement, habit-formation) – the acquisition of
vocabulary and grammatical morphemes.
2. Innatists (LAD/UG/CPH) – the acquisition of
complex grammar (structure of the language).
3. Interactionists (social interaction) – the acquisition
of how form and meaning are related, how
communicative functions are carried out, and how
language is used appropriately.

Early Childhood Language Learning

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