1. A born actor?

2. Age and Acquisition
Instructor: Dr. Chinfen Chen

3. Age and Acquisition L1 L2 Child A B C D Adult E F G H
learning L2
Child A B C D
Adult E F G H
Logical comparison: A — C C — G
Rare cases: B,E,F
Implication: D,H

4. Age and Acquisition Linguistic Considerations
Bilingualism:
1. Coordinate bilinguals: two meaning systems. One
for the first language, one for the second
language.
2. Compound bilinguals: one meaning system from
which both languages operate.
e.g. 法語：pain(麵包） 英語： bread(麵包）
 3. Code switching: a change from one language to
another one. e.g. I like to eat 臭豆腐.
4. Bilingual children are more facile at concept
formation and have a greater mental flexibility.
(see Reynolds 1991; Schinke-Llano 1989)

5. Age and Acquisition Linguistic Considerations
Interference Between First and Second Languages
In a child’s case :
Hansen-Bede(1975) examining a 3-year-old
English-speaking child moving to Pakistan -Urdu
The child’s acquisition did not appear to show L1 interference and, except for negation, showed similar strategies and rules for both L1and L2
similar linguistic structures: possession, gender, word order, verb forms, questions, except for negation.

6. Age and Acquisition Linguistic Considerations
Interference in Adults
More cognitively secure, more solid foundation of L1
→more interference, however, may be more readily used to bridge gaps between L1and L2 by generalization
The first language can be a facilitating factor, not just an interfering factor.
Order of Acquisition
The acquisition order of eleven English morphemes
L1 acquisition-Roger Brown(1973)
L2 learning- Dulay and Burt (1976)
Children learning a second language use a creative construction process, just as they do in their first language.

7. Age and Acquisition Linguistic Considerations
Order of Acquisition
Thomas Scovel(1999:1)
Dispelling "The younger, the better“ myth
--fueled by media hype and junk science
--the only potential advantage : accent
--on at least several planes –literacy, vocabulary,
pragmatics, schematic knowledge, and even
syntax – adults have been shown to be
superior learners.

8. Age and Acquisition Issues in L1 Acquisition Revisited
1.competence and performance
2.comprehension and production
3.Nature or nurture
4.Universals
5.systematicity and variability

9. Age and Acquisition Issues in L1 Acquisition Revisited
6.Language and thought
7.imitation
8.Practice
9.Input
10.Discourse

10. Age and Acquisition Issues in L1 Acquisition Revisited

11. Age and Acquisition Children might have some secrets of success in
language learning:
-not monitoring themselves too much
-not analyzing grammar
-not being too worried about their egos
- shedding inhibitions
-not letting the native language interfere much

12. Age and Acquisition Questions for discussion:
Do you think it is worthwhile to teach children a second/foreign language in the classroom? If so, how might approaches and methods differ between a class of children and a class of adults?
Do you think you might have some advantages over children in learning a foreign language? Speculate on what those advantages might be.

13. Thank you for your listening!

14. Competence and Performance
Competence: one’s underlying knowledge of the system of a language—its rules of grammar, its vocabulary…
Performance: all the actual production (speaking, writing) or the comprehension (listening, reading) of linguistic events.

15. e.g., The ball that’s in the sandbox is red.
Comprehension and Production
A child may understand a sentence with an embedded relative in it but not be able to produce one. W.R. Miller(1963)
e.g., The ball that’s in the sandbox
is red.

16. Nature or Nurture
Nature: A child is born with an innate knowledge of a language. This innate property (the LAD or UG) is universal in all human beings.
Nurture: the behavoristic notion that language is a set of habits that can be acquired by a process of conditioning.

17. Universals
A claim that language is universally acquired in the same manner, and the deep structure of language at its deepest level may be common to all languages.
The universal linguistic categories under investigation.
word order
morphological marking tone
agreement
reduced reference nouns and noun classes
verbs and verb classes
predication
negation
question formation

18. Systematicity and Variability
One assumption of current research on child language is the systematicity of the process of acquisition. Eversince Berko’s(1958)
In the midst of all this systematicity, there is an equally remarkable amount of variability in the process of learning! (perceiving regular and irregular verbs)

19. Language and Thought
Piaget(1972)that language is dependent upon and springs from cognitive development.
Vygotsky(1962,1978) claimed that social interaction, through language, is a prerequisite to cognitive development.
Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development is the distance between a child’s actual cognitive capacity and the level of potential development.(1978)

20. Language and Thought
Language helps to shape thinking and thinking helps to shape language. What happens to this interdependence when a second language is required?
The second language teacher needs to be acutely aware of cultural thought patterns that may be as interfering as the linguistic patterns themselves.

21. Imitation
While children are good deep-structure imitators (centering on meaning, not surface features), adults can fare much better in imitating surface structure (by rote mechanisms) if they are explicitly directed to do so .
Sometimes the ability to center on surface distinctions is a distracting factor, at other times it is helpful.
Implication: meaningful contexts for language learning are necessary; second language learners ought not to become too preoccupied with form lest they lose sight of the function and purpose of language. u

22. Practice
Most cognitive psychologists agree that the frequency of stimuli and the number of times spent practicing a form are not highly important in learning an item. What is important is meaningfulness.
Contextualized, appropriate, meaningful communication in the second language seems to be the best possible practice the L2 learner could engage in.

23. Input
Input is as important to the second language learner as it is to the first language learner
Input should foster meaningful communicative use of the language in appropriate contexts.
Teacher input might do well to be as deliberate, but meaningful , in their communications with students as parental input is to the child.

24. Discourse
As we search for better ways of teaching communicative competence to second language learners, research on the acquisition of discourse becomes more and more important.
Issues: communicative competence, language functions, functional syllabuses, discourse analysis, pragmatics, styles and registers, nonverbal communication.

25. Age and Acquisition The critical period hypothesis
Neurological considerations
The significance of accent
Cognitive considerations
Affective considerations
Linguistic considerations
Issues in first language acquisition revisited