1. First language acquisition
Psycholinguistics
First language acquisition

2. A true story Like the story of Phineas Gage last week In groups:
We learn something when things go wrong
In groups:
Most people start to learn language when very young
Imagine of a situation where this does not happen
Describe the situation in a short English paragraph

3. Language acquisition: the critical period
Language cannot be effectively learned after brain lateralization is complete
This may be around puberty
Fromkin (Natalie’s book) says that Genie’s story proves the critical period hypothesis.
Yule makes the opposite claim
Genie had zero exposure to language until she was 13, but she did acquire some language
She learnt words, but very limited syntax
Dichotic experiments (??) showed that she had no left-hemisphere language facility
It is possible to use the right hemisphere for restricted language purposes.

4. 1L acquisition  learning
Language is like walking
Reading and writing are like riding a bike, or swimming
Many languages have no writing system
Some people never learn to read
Second language is usually taught

5. Nature vs nurture B F Skinner wrote Verbal Behavior in 1957
He said that babies are born with a brain which is more or less empty
They learn language (and everything else) from the environment
Many of Skinner’s ideas came from experiments with rats
Chomsky wrote a strong criticism to the book in a 1959 article
His argument is often called the Poverty of the Stimulus:
Language is extremely complex
Children could not learn language without an innate ability
They do not hear enough evidence from adult speakers

6. Poverty of the Stimulus (Chomsky’s argument)
There is an infinity of expressions in language
It has been proved (by formal logic) that if 1. is true, children would need negative evidence to acquire language. Positive evidence is not enough.
Children do not generally get negative evidence
Children do acquire language
Therefore: Language is not learned from “evidence”

7. The language acquisition device
New-born kids have a complex, innate LAD (a system which prepares them for language acquisition)
This contains the Principles of language
Children of any race or nationality can learn any language, through cultural transmission
They learn the details specific to their own language from their environment
That is, the Parameters relevant to their language

8. Correction and teaching
Do parents talk to children in a special way?
Does it make any difference?

9. Correction and teaching
Do parents talk to children in a special way?
Does it make any difference?
Neither seems to apply to language acquisition
Various examples in Yule
Caretaker speech (motherese)
Reduplication (and other baby talk)
Lots of questions
Pretending to be in a conversation (but only really one participant)
Reduced speed
Exaggerated intonation

10. Stages of LA: Cooing Cooing
Usually velar consonants and high vowels
[ku], [gi]
Roman Jakobson (1968) claimed sounds were acquired in order of frequency in all the world’s languages
And that the least frequent sounds are the first to be lost in aphasia
But his views are not widely accepted now

11. The next stage: babbling
This includes various vowels, as well as fricatives, nasals and even non-pulmonic sounds
Experiments show that babies
Can distinguish sounds (allophones) which adults cannot (like [r] and [l] for Japanese speakers
Do not respond to non-linguistic distinctions (eg sex of speaker)
Later babbling is language-specific
Sign language babbling in deaf babies (or with deaf parents)

12. Holophrastic stage
One word utterances appear to represent more complex structures
Child sees empty bed, says 姊姊
Overextension
球球 used to represent an apple, the moon, anything round
狗狗 means dogs, cats, horses, lions
Daddy to mean any man. Potentially embarrassing for mothers!
Kids always use the middle member in a hyponymy relation (dog, not animal or Cocker)
Never use colors in an overextension relation!

13. Melissa Bowerman’s findings
Others had assumed that overextension meant: one shared feature
An apple is a “ball” because it’s round
A speck of dirt is a “fly” because it’s tiny
A cat is a “dog”
because it has four legs, or is soft
But Bowerman discovered that “kick” could mean
Kicking a floor fan (first time; really kicking)
Moving a ball by bumping it with a toy
A moth fluttering over a table
Pushing her tummy against a mirror
Can you explain what Bowerman concluded?

14. Two-word stage Why is it difficult to do this kind of research?
The famous phrase Mummy sock, uttered by the daughter of researcher Lois Bloom
Picking up her mummy’s sock, and
When Mummy was putting baby’s sock on baby
Quite a lot of research has been done on the syntax of baby language!
Why is it difficult to do this kind of research?

15. Comprehension exceeds production
Babies may not distinguish “mouth” and “mouse” in their own pronunciation
But, they can point the two things out in pictures when they listen
Famous example
“Silly Daddy, not a guk, a guk!”
But, in experiments, one child pronounced
Puddle as [pʌgəl]
Puzzle as [pʌdəl]!

16. Telegraphic speech Andrew want ball Cat drink milk This shoe all wet
No inflectional morphology
No determiners
The Chinese equivalents of many of these utterances are OK
In Bulgarian, the articles (determiners the and a) are added to the noun as a suffix; they are acquired earlier than English articles)

17. Acquisition of morphology
I broke it
I breaked it
Why is 二 important?
Kids acquiring richly inflected languages (like Spanish, Italian) typically do so before 2.5 years