Today our topic of discussion is – Different areas in child language acquisition
Different areas in child language acquisition
During the stages of language development, four vital linguistic abilities are developed as well. They are the phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic fields. A brief discussion on the developments of these linguistic features will be provided below-
Phonological development
A child is exposed to a variety of environmental noises during the first few months of age, from which they must separate speech sounds from
non-speech sounds. But this is not the only specialty about infants’ speech perception; surprisingly infants display the ability to hear the differences between the speech events and sort them into categories (Kuhl et al., 2005).
Newborns possess this amazing capability to respond differently to human voices than to other sounds within two months of birth; they can even recognize the voice of their mothers to the voices of other women and perceive speech sounds as speech categories (De Casper & Fifer, 1980), Eimas et al.
(1971) showed that English learning infants paid more attention to differences near the /p/ and /b/ boundary than to differences of equal sized differences within the /b/ category or within the /p/ category; they used a computer generated breathability continuum in between /b/ and /p/.
Their measurement, monitoring infant sucking- rate, has become a major experimental method for studying the perception of infant speech. Few more similar experiments led to children developing the ability to distinguish between certain speech sounds such as [p] and [b] at the same age (first few months) (Abott & Burkitt, 2015).
To succeed in such tests children had to successfully recognize that the differences between speech sounds were linguistically significant and used to distinguish between words in their language.
The first recognized sounds of babies are the basic biological sounds such as crying and screaming that can be expressed as food urges or discontents. Moreover, breathing. cating, swallowing, sucking, coughing and burping all have their characteristic sounds (Crystal, 1997).
With time (between age 2.5 to 5 months) baby produces more sounds other than these such as cooing and laughing. After that, the child begins to play with different sounds in order to find the correct intelligible sounds at the ages between 5 and 9 months. This time period is defined as “Vocal Play’.
Children begin to develop the necessary articulatory movements needed to make distinctions in speech even before they master the phonemic contrasts of their language. This stage is generally known as babbling which begins at around three or four months of age.
From about six months of age or so the babblings of children gradually becomes more similar to the sound pattern of the language they are acquiring (first sign of manifestation is voice pitch). Babbling increases in frequency until it reaches the age of about twelve months when children begin to produce their first understandable words.
By the time children have acquired fifty words or so they begin to adopt rather regular patterns of pronunciation. The last pit stop before the production of ‘proper speech’ is a babble.
Morphological development
Children’s acquisition of inflectional morphology has been studied in a variety of languages, with most of the data coming from longitudinal records of children’s speech. Brown and his colleagues published several papers that studied the morphological development of young children.
They focused more on inflectional development which on their perspectives were influential in the field of language acquisition. Brown referred to inflections, prepositions etc. as grammatical morphemes and characterized some linguistic features of grammatical morphemes (Brown, 1973).
He analyzed the morphological development by figuring a child’s Mean Length of Utterance (MLU); MLU typically corresponds closely to their age. Brown analyzed by breaking down each word produced by the child into morphemes and around 50 to 100 sample utterances are analyzed to come to any conclusion about the child’s overall production.
He described five stages of language development on the basis of MLU. Between twelve months to twenty months of age, children usually begin to say their first words, and systematic morphological modulations of these words are occurs within the first year of interaction (Clark, 2001).
Their more complex, meaningful expression includes grammatical expressions such as inflections (prefixes, suffixes), prepositions, postpositions as they move towards a more complex expression of their meanings, they add grammatical morphemes like inflections (prefixes, suffixes), prepositions, postpositions, and clitics. For example, on nouns they start adding morphemes to make distinctions such as gender, number, and case; verbs, markers are added for aspect, tense, gender, number, and person.
In any particular language for some specific reasons (like acquisition of meaning distinctions, the effect of language typology etc.) children might take several years to have mastery on such paradigms. According to Clark (2001), word is the major domain of morphological acquisition, where inflectional affixes are added to words or stems to form new words; in addition some meanings are assigned to each one of them.
However, the inflection domain may go beyond the word level as inflections also mark grammatical relationship through agreement within or across phrases (for example, numbers). Although children appear to begin with inflections as modulations of the word meaning,
at the end of the day attention is required to both lexical meaning and syntax, as they need to learn which words belong to which paradigms that use regular or irregular plurals (Clark,2001). The acquisition of word-formation is also challenging in the sense that, some languages rely almost exclusively on compounding to form new words,
while others rely primarily on derivation. Moreover, many other languages rely on some mix of the two. Consequently, derivation may include both affixation and zero- derived forms, and certain affixes commonly appearing in compounds too.
Thus, the extent to which language typology affects the learning process as language ranges range from analytic to synthetic or even agglutinative, is one issue to mark for acquisition. Moreover,
when children learn inflections, they also learn word paradigms; that is, whether a noun takes the regular plural or two or three distinct regular plurals. An irregular form and paradigmatic learning helps them serve a purpose like plural formation.
We can conclude on the child morphological acquisition by the impression that both inflection and word formation needs to be completed as they construct new forms to carry new meanings.
Syntactic Development.
In Linguistics, “Syntax’ means the study of the rules that govern the combination of words to form sentences. As mentioned before, Brown (1973) provided a framework within which the normal development of expressive language is usually understood in terms of morphology and syntax. Though he built it up for English spoken children, but is used all over the world to analyze child’s spoken language when they perform structurally.
According to Brown, children enter into syntactic ‘stage 1′ after acquiring 50-60 words within 15 to 30 months age; where they can say short phrases like “that car’ (that is a car) or ‘birdie go (the bird flew away) etc. Between 26 to 36 months syntactic ‘stage 2’ starts where present progressive tense (-ing verb), use of ‘in’ and ‘on’ emerge.
Plural ‘-s’ is also found in their language use. Continued conversation with adults with easy to imitate sentences helps children develop their language skills. In ‘stage 3’ (age 36 to 42 months). children begin to use irregular past tense (me fell down) and possessives (dadda’s book).
Copulas or linking words between subject and predicate (I am tall) also emerge at this stage. Brown’s ‘stage 4 is very effective for the first language learners as grammatical components such as articles, regular past tense, third person regular tense (puppy needs it) or even present tense appear in their everyday speech. Final or “stage 5′ allows children to use third person
irregulars (he does, she has), contractible copulas (they’re here, she’s ready) and uncontractible auxiliaries (are they swimming?). Age group of this level is in between 42 to 52 months. In his framework Brown tried to give a clear conception of early language learners’ syntactic development which is actually related to child’s morphological development too (Bowen, 1998).
In addition to categorizing languages in phrases and sentences, there are several types of techniques that can be used when dividing a language into smaller units. But the innate thought is that, as the child develops and grows older, the language improves and connects the right forms of words to each other in order to produce the intended expression.
This can be done through a system referred to by Yule (1996) as the traditional categories that divide sentences into different boxes, such as voice, number, gender, tense and person. Yule further discussed some techniques that help to observe the process of acquisition of categories.
Semantic development
Unlike the acquisition of syntax and phonology, the semantic dimension of language acquisition continues throughout life. Although children’s meaningful language production is waiting for the first words, even before that there is a relationship between babbling and meaning. Relations between ‘babbling’ and ‘meaning’ were usually studied at the age of twelve months (Blake & Fink, 1987).
The acquisition of semantic perception and production is the base for understanding word meaning and it starts to appear in infants throughout the first twelve months and successfully continues thereafter.
Thus the first twelve months are considered to be the preparatory period for discovery and linguistic creation in the field of semantics and are marked by creativity and abstract construction (Lust, 2006). Though, this time period, however, has already prepared children
the momentous acquisition of the first words, such as the acquisition of syntax and phonology.
Universally, children creatively confront the acquisition of meaning of words and sentences, which might be distorted in child’s early productions, in their early word meanings.
It does, however, indicate the child’s linguistic competence. For example, ‘lexical innovation’ is an early process of semantic acquisition; it persists in both adolescence and adulthood.
Lexical innovation happens when speakers cannot find words for every possible concept that they might want to talk about.
It has resulted out in constantly renewing the already existing vocabulary stock by accepting the newly coined meanings that are used (Clark, 1982). There are two types of lexical gaps that are needed to be filled through lexical innovations; among them ‘momentary gap’ is usually built up by the children.
Like adults, children may experience momentary gaps when they find difficulties retrieving a known word form and fills it up with new words made on the spot. Clark used examples from his data collected from a three and a four year old child, which are- ‘sleeper’ (used in lieu of bed) and ‘pourer’ (used instead of a cup).
Chronic lexical gap happens when there isn’t any word conventionally used to express the particular meaning. Children sometimes fill themselves but unlike the adults do as they don’t have sufficient adult vocabularies. For example, ‘plant man’, ‘needle’ ‘tool man’ are used instead of words like ‘gardener’, ‘mend” or ‘mechanic’
. Children may experience momentary gaps like adults when they face difficulties retrieving known word form. In such cases, they might create new words on the spot. Clark added two examples from his observational data-use of the words “sleeper” and pourer” (instead of bed and cup). These momentary forms are often corrected when the right words come through.
Children exhibit two specific types of acquisition features during their holophrastic or single word stage (when they have a vocabulary of 50 words or a few more); first, overextension tends to overuse their rather small vocabulary referring to more objects than justified. For example, the word dog can be over extended to all the four legged animals around them.
This can be applied judging from similarities of form, sound and size (sometimes also texture); ball for more round objects, scissors for all metal objects etc. In children’s semantic acquisition level, over extension is a common strategy and later on narrowing down the use of words form there is general.
However, over-extension does not mean that the child not able to differentiate an apple from other round objects when he is asked to present. In this regard, Yule (1996) mentioned that over extension does not need to affect speech comprehension.
Secondly, under-extension, a common feature of child’s expressive language. When the child uses a word with a narrower meaning than that of an adult, it is under-extension, An example is the use of the word cat for the family pet only, not using it for other cats. Over-extension occurs more often than under-extension and is the main semantic error made of young children (when a child has a vocabulary of 50 words, it is estimated that about a third of these are likely to be over-extended).
Another remarkable aspect of semantics is the way in which lexical meanings are affected by the use of hyponymy. Yule defines this concept as “When the meaning of one form is included in the meaning of another […] and some typical example pairs are daffodil flower, dog-animal, poodle – dog, carrot – vegetable” (Yule 1996:119). He added that children usually use the middle level in a hyponymous set,
like from the set ‘animal-dog- poodle’ they will choose a dog. But, the worthiest selection through rational thinking would have been the most general term ‘animal’, then why do children pick up the middle level? A possible answer to this question could be the use by parents of the ‘middle level’ rather the use of flowers or other lexical item such as a plant or Tulip (Yule, 1996).
Antonymous relations (separating words of opposite meaning) are also important for semantic acquisition, as these functions are needed in later stages of language development, somewhere after age five (Yule, 1996). For example, if they had to answer more or less questions.
Another common phenomenon is over generalization. It means implying the newly acquired language feature too broadly and to considerable extent. The rule of adding -s or -ed to create plural is sometimes over-generalized. For example, children might use ‘foots’, ‘mans’ after they acquire the knowledge of using-s to words like cats, girls or creating past tense like ‘goed’, ‘gived’, ‘drinked’ etc.
David Crystal (2003) added another irregular feature ‘mismatch’ in children’s semantic acquisition. According to him using a completely different word to mean something else is mismatching. The use of ‘tractor’ to mean ‘telephone’ is an example of semantic mismatch (Crystal, 2003).
In addition, semantic analysis of children focuses on what can be characterized by word, phrase or sentence rather than what can be associated with them (Yule, 1996). For example, ‘needle’ can be described as a thin, sharp, steel instrument and it can also be connected to pain which is personal association.
Usually children are not qualitatively different from adults in word acquisition methods. Though not solely concrete in perception and reasoning, they are capable of semantic displacement and categorical thought too (Lust, 2006). They are involved in creative theory construction and word meanings are created
through computation and pragmatic reference. Moreover they are creative and systematic in their indirect environment use too. In her opinion, abstract and complex linguistic computation takes place in the acquisition of language by children. Language and non- linguistic cognition are essentially independent in their language development, but they share continuous relationship (Lust, 2006).
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