Today our topic of discussion is – Empirical research on first language acquisition
Empirical research on first language acquisition
Studies on child language development paved the way to more specific and improved methods in the early twentieth century. Improved in the sense that, previously in this field only ‘baby biographies’ were done; where a child development scientist (almost always a male person) used to observe infant (or infants) and wrote elaborately all about their behaviours along with the researchers own impressions about the observation.
And these infants or subjects were named as ‘convenient sample’ as in most cases, they were the researcher’s own child or close relatives. In the year 1898 the first woman to study child development was Milicent Washburn Shinn. She received her Ph.D.
degree from University of California on “The Development of a Child’. Later she published her book as “The Biography of a Baby” (1900). Shinn started collecting data from her college days and ended up with a mass storage of data, thus her study was a kind of milestone in this area as it was the foremost form of a longitudinal study in the field of child language acquisition.
G.Stanley Hall (1846-1924) is known as the founder of the child study movement; he started his work along with his student Arnold Gesell (Koelsch, 2002). Stanley’s theories were based on evolution as he was heavily influenced by Charles Darwin.
He first started observing large groups, which later became a new gesture for future study. These two scientists had very different takes on children. Observing and measuring all areas including
motor, social behaviour, personality, interests, fears etc. Stanley thought of young children as savages. Thus, he did not find it necessary to use reasoning with them, instead he thought the necessity of discipline and controlling over them.
His approach was resulted in a normative approach defined as “using stages of development, matching ages to ability or skills and using the milestones approach” (Dryden et al, 2005, p.68). On the other hand, Amold believed in raising children in a permissive approach (where parents show lots of love towards their children but provide little discipline) where sensitivity and responding to a child’s cues should be incorporated.
Gesell wrote many books in this area and one of his books Infant Child in the Culture of Today: The Guidance of Development in Home and Nursery School became the first book for parents (Gesell et al., 1943).Starting from 1877 till 1930 the study of child language development was limited to *diary studies”; which was usually done by a parent by continuously recording a child’s (the observant) day by day development in a diary.
Along with the children’s other kind of development, most of the studies were on syntax. This method is still used in studying child language development, but the basic difference is, now it has been made specific and not only limited to writing in a diary.
The second period of study began with the advent of D. McCarthy’s book The Language Development of the Preschool Children (1943). Here research was done on large numbers of children across different ages.
This could be taken as the first systematic attempts to study development. Since 1957 there has been a marked change in the approach to child language studies. Instead of analyzing only utterances, attempts were made to understand the hidden rules behind production. Such studies were the beginning towards the linguistic analysis of child language studies. The reason behind the
sudden change in approach was due to the establishment of transformational grammar by Noam Chomsky. Psycholinguists working on ‘Cognitive and Developmental’ issues, think of language acquisition as one of the most fascinating features of human development that usually begins after birth and continues until school age.
Karmiloff and Karmiloff stated that, “from the six months of gestation onward, the fetus spends most of its working time processing the very special linguistic sounds, growing familiar with the unique qualities of its mother’s voice and of the language or languages that she speaks”(Karmiloff & Karmiloff, 2001, p.2).
They claimed that hearing system of the human fetus is adequately developed within the first twenty weeks of development, to process the sounds being filtered through the amniotic fluid. The voice of mother, conversations, heartbeats and other sounds about the environment fill their world. Thus linguists who deal with cognitive and psycholinguistics believe in the acquisition of human language beginning with the fetus.
Depending on different first language acquisition theories and assumptions, huge numbers of researches have been done on children’s first language acquisition. Among them some of the empirical research work that directly relates to several issues in child meaning acquisition process will be discussed here.
Curtin and Werker in their research focused on how early infant speech perception abilities influence the foundation of language development, including early word-object associations (Curtin & Werker, 2007).
They believe, early word learning is shaped from children’s primary speech perceptions which results in a growing lexicon and thus linguistic categories emerge from that. This whole process starts when the child becomes capable to sort out the speech sounds from non-speech sounds. Research proves that infants are more
interested in listening to speech sounds more than non-speech sounds as the latter tend to be complex in nature (Curtin, 2009); Even infants have biases and preferences for certain types of speech signal which at the end facilitate language acquisition.
Some research also shows that the basic psychoacoustic and cognitive abilities which are essential for speech perception come to children at or just before birth (Dehaene & Lambertz et al. 2002).
Lecanuet et al.
(1995) discussed on young infants’ amazing ability to discriminate different speech sounds such as the stop consonants and some vowel categories; Infants before the age of 6 months discriminate against a wide range of vowel and consonant contrasts in their native language as well as contrasts found in other languages.
Infants between 6 and 9 months develop knowledge of phonotactic regularities along with the identification of specific sound categories (Jusczyk et al, 1993), whereas phonotactic indicates to the language specific co-occurrences of speech sounds in different syllable positions. Gradually, these individual processes lead to acquire spoken words.
As, spoken words form continuous stream, infants distributes them in smaller segments and learn them. According to researchers this process of segmental learning starts between the age of 6 and 8 months (Bortfeld et al, 2005).
The process of learning words then is boosted up by infants growing interests on prosodic cues over segmental cues. Infants’ inbuilt magnificent ability with the help of already stored information helps them learn new meaningful words. By the end of their first year, infants learn what
information is important for word recognition; even knowledge gathered during this time peri od provides the basis for building a lexicon.
Though not an easy task, but with the help of stored forms, infants gradually enters the process of mapping words to meaning (Jusczyk et al.1999). Early word-object associative
learning occurs only when children hold on previous information on sound pattern of words and could link them to the concept. To test whether infants could use phonetic detail to direct word learning. Werker et al. (1998) outlined an associative learning task known as the ‘Switch Task”.
In which with the help of familiar word-object pairing infant’s ability to find phonetic similarities in words is tested. They found that at the age of 17 months, infants gradually succeeded in matching words phonetically, which led to the learning of words associated with objects.
The results of the studies mentioned above indicate that there are numbers of factors involved in early word learning. Issues such as whether the vowel or consonants will influence the outcomes or the successive amount of infants stored information about the sound sequences that make up the words and match the sequences to the meaning of the words- object learning process (Stoel & Gammon, 2011).
Researchers even show that though there might be few instances of infants failing to detect fine phonetic detail, they successfully learn meaningful words. The findings in this paper provide some basic information on the speech perception process during the first couple of years that influence several other first language acquisition issues in an infants’
life; but how their early language acquisition act in influence advance language developmental events is not clearly mentioned as the authors themselves have taken that as further research scopes. Clark (2003) in his work focused on exploring the process of adding words to children’s existing vocabulary and learning the word meanings carried out by them.
He talked about infants’ amazing abilities to pick up new words quite readily and adding more to the list sometimes just from a single exposure. Gradually single words are combined into longer utterances and comprehended rather quickly by accumulating a larger vocabulary and
surprisingly between the ages of one to two children learn to produce up to 600 words. Clark mentioned that children infer possible meanings of unfamiliar words from conversational flow, thus adults are their major source for early word acquisition (p.283). They watch others speaking, observe their contextual usage and try to follow the same procedures while communicating their intentions.
Mainly in this paper Clark discussed two approaches that explain the enormous field of lexicon or vocabulary acquisition of a language by the children. First approach assumes that children might start with an inbuilt constraints that might be assigned to possible meanings of firstly encountered specific words; Markman (1989) characterized three constraints- a) whole object constraint assumes that any unfamiliar word picks out a whole object (a cat, a bottle, etc.),
b) mutual exclusivity constraint assuming one single term applicable to each object type (‘Dog’ for all types of dogs); and c) taxonomic constraint assuming each term picking out a single category type( cat, swing etc.). Notably, these constraints limit possibilities in applying preliminary meanings of new words, but eventually they are overridden or discarded as they are not compatible with a vocabulary structure or not do not reflect how adults talk to children in practical life.
Adults use terms of objects when talking to children for actions, properties and relationships; they even take advantage of different viewpoints on objects and events. But the questions that arise from the acceptance of the first approach are how do children learn the meanings of words for actions, properties or relationships?
And since when do they start dropping earlier constraints to accommodate to the new circumstances? Thus the second and alternative approach assumes that children adopt almost the same pragmatic assumptions about communication as the adults (p.285)
That is, from the very beginning children start with some fundamental factors of language communication exchange such as joint attention, physical co-presence, conversational co-presence (Tomasello, 1995). When adults talk to each other these factors are taken for granted by them, but with children these factors should be taken seriously as children must learn how to connect with to the spoken words and the events being spoken of,
they also need to learn the words to world and world to the words mappings in order to assign meanings. If children are not attending the conversation, there is no point in giving input, thus in adult child exchanges joint attention is a must accompanied by physical co- presence. Moreover, very young children observe both contrast and conventionality in a language like adults, thus for certain meaning specific words should be used from the very beginning.
These pragmatic factors influence meaning acquisition of new terms. Conventionality leads children to seek appropriate terms to express the proper meanings. They follow adults to get the proper usage and pronunciation of words and to get words for the world around them.
Heibeck and Markman (1987) focused on ‘fast mapping, the process of uptaking a new word on how it was used for the first time by the adults. As children’s fast mapping stems from observations of actual uses, their early meanings typically overlap to a considerable extent with the target adult meanings.
Early limited resource makes children over-extend some of their first words (e.g. dog for all four legged mammals, basketball to any round object). But as per research, children who make such overextensions in production do not make them in comprehension (Thompson & Chapman, 1977). Over extension vanishes as soon as they learn appropriate words for different areas of the original over
extension. In this paper the author also discussed the role of context and syntactic frames in children’s first meaning acquisition. Putting meaning together is another important issue to consider for researching child meaning acquisition. Clark discussed how children start to join two words together to make meaning (like “more milk, “ball there’) between age 1; 2 and 2; 0.
According to L. Bloom these meanings are context based (1971). But as soon as children start adding inflections on nouns and verbs as well as other grammatical morphemes, their early word combinations become clearer. Gradually they learn to use function words and parts of speech information (distinguishing proper nouns, count nouns etc.).
Clark added how increased vocabulary make children be organized into semantic domains; for example comprise all their words for animals and their babies along with some super ordinate terms like ‘animal’ (gradually classified to mammals or others); their first term for fruit (apple or orange) may be overextended to a range of other small round objects like ball, grapes,
doorknob etc. But interestingly, children who make such over-extensions in production do not do the same in comprehension (Thompson and Chapman, 1977). Very soon their over extension process replaces by communicative strategy where they stretch resources to look for words they lack for.
This process of over-extension vanish as soon children acquire (even by asking innumerable “what’s that?” questions) the appropriate words in different areas of the original over extension. Besides, new words are most of the time offered to the children by the adults through the use of specific syntactic frames (like, this/that is a… or what is this/that?) (Clark & Wong, 2002).
Usually by the age 2:0 most of the children can combine two word utterances with the words they already know but these utterances bear contextual meanings. Gradually by the use
of inflectional verbs and nouns and other grammatical morphemes, children’s early word combinations become clearer. With the help of increased vocabulary, semantic domains can be organized. Some domains take years to acquire, but positively many domains become interconnected by the shared common terminologies. Eventually they acquire lexical meanings, but part by part.
Clark (2003) concluded by emphasizing the children’s way of meaning mapping with the help of physical presence and joint attention with the adults. Moreover, communicating factors like gaze, gestures are must for children to express desired meanings.
Added to that is the importance of the role of semantic domains that enable children to learn about words and their uses in context. Thus, it is the major responsibility of adults to provide children with added information on objects, actions, properties or relations and of course the contexts in use.
Empirical research on first language acquisition in Bangladesh In
Bangladesh perspective, child meaning acquisition process or in a broader sense, child language acquisition has never been an area of much interest. A few research articles has been published more on the overall language development of children and in some cases emphasizing areas like stages of development, child directed speech, morphosyntactic or lexical development.
However, the above mentioned systematic study of child language acquisition or even the primary diary studies have not followed specifically in exploring the vast area of child language development. But a few research works is shedding light on a small number of specific areas of child language acquisition in Bangladesh perspective.
They could be taken as a pioneer in Bangla perspective and at the same time influencing for this
research as well, I have included works that are relevant to child meaning acquisition process in Bangla as well as Bangladesh perspective briefly in the next segment.
Author Afia Dil tried to characterize and classify “Baby Talk’ in ‘Bengali Baby Talk’ (1971) as an indicator of social roles like, age, kinship and sex.
She mentioned in her paper the work of many previous researchers like, Charles F. Ferguson (1977), Otto Jesperson (1922) or by Edward Sapir (1921) on baby talk; which were done on the basis of field work and observation on different cultures. In this paper she referred ‘Standard colloquial Bengali of Dacca” as Bengali and referred to baby talk as ‘adult’s talk to baby’.
She agreed with Jakobson’s view on accepting baby talk as the medium of closer communication between the adults and young children. She believes on baby talk originating from the viewpoints of adult on shaping a communicating line between them and the children; and babies do not have any role played in baby talk construction.
How Bengali spoken adults speak up baby talks and how it constructs pre-language structures in babies was also discussed in this paper. Grammar and phonological features of baby talk like the use of specific lexical items, the presence of relatively few sound and permissible sound patterns is discussed with relevant examples taken from Bengali speakers are also presented here with much importance.
Target of this paper was to explore baby talk, which from the author’s point of view accelerates children’s language acquisition process. Her attempt to use baby talk in revealing a cultural pattern also makes this paper a pioneer in this field in its own right.
Another paper on child language development was published in 2008 by G. Ara, titled “Shishur Bhasha Arjon: Prothom Atharo Mash’ (Child Language Acquisition: First 18 Months), where author focused only on describing children’s language acquisition only of the first eighteen months of life. From her personal experience she specified some linguistic
as well as physical developmental features that occurs to a child; like when he laughs at his mother, pronounces the front or back vowels with specific length etc. Besides, his primary language development along with phonological changes and stages of first word utterances has also been discussed here.
What is worth mentioning about this paper is the author’s attempt in producing a clear sketch of a child’s primary meaning acquisition process by describing a child’s month wise (0 to 18) process of meaning making. She said that at month 8 child starts using meaningful words like calling parents by looking at them or looking for a crow with the sound [ka] etc.
But this is not their first attempt at making sounds, until now they created many phonological patterns which could not serve as words because of lack of meanings. But literally they served communicational purpose with their caregivers.
At this age a child uses only the content words, no function or abstract words of his language is found in his language use. Meaningful simple three word sentences can be heard sometimes. They can get meaning change from intonation changes of words.
According to the author even a few systematic sound changes are also found in a child’s use of language within these 18 months. A brief idea of how a child acquires meaning from individual sounds to simple structured sentences can be gathered from this paper as though it does not give much to the study of child meaning acquisition.
Only a partial view of child’s overall language development at the primary level can be understood from this attempt of work. Another work in this regard has been done by S. Nasrin (2008) entitled First Language Acquisition: Grammar in the Speech of a Two-Year Old Bangladeshi Child.
Here, researcher tried to present a brief sketch of a two year old child’s grammatical representation found in her everyday speech. Researcher included issues like phonological, morphological errors and syntactic relations. This paper in a sense creates controversy by trying to present
data on the basis of only a couple of days’ observation and taking the findings as regularities. Moreover an unstructured mixture of traditional grammar and applying partial linguistic perspective of analysis is presented in this paper. Moreover, grammar acquisition is a very important and crucial role player in early language acquisition study (like in the speech of two years old).
If the above studies (that have been done in Bengali perspectives) have been observed, we can see that semantic acquisition has not drawn expected attention. This research is thus significant for trying to present a descriptive analysis of the Bengali children’s meaning acquisition process from linguistic perspectives and it is a primary work.
Moreover, as meaning development is a vital part of children’s cognitive development process, the findings of this study will also be important to psycholinguists, language therapists and researchers interested in applied linguistics.
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