FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION (BROWN)

First Language Acquisition

Theories of first Language Acquisition

First Year children make specific attempts to imitate words and speech sounds they heard around them.

18 month they begin to appear in two-word and three-word sentences.

Two years age they can comprehend more sophisticated language and their production repertoire is mushrooming.

Three years age they can comprehend and amazing quantify of linguistics input

This fluency and creativity continues into school age as children internalize increasingly complex structures, expand their vocabulary, and sharpen communicative skills.

Behavioral Approaches:

Language is a fundamental part of total human behavior and behavioral psychologists examined it as such and sought to formulate consistent theories of first language acquisition.

This envolve aspect of linguistics behavior, the publicity observable responses and the relationships or association between those responses and events in the world surrounding them.

Skinner´s theory of verbal behavior was an extension of his general theory of learning by OPERANT CONDITIONING.

This theory refers to conditioning in which the organism (in this case, a human being) emits a response, or operant (a sentence or utterance) without necessarily observable stimuli; that operant is maintained (learned) by reinforcement.

The Nativist Approach

The term Nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that language acquisition is innately determined, that we are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic perception of language around us, resulting in the construction of an internalized system of language.

Language Acquisition device (LAD) is :

1.       The ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment

2.       The ability to organize linguistic data into various classes that can later be refined.

3.       Knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that other kinds are not.

4.       The ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing linguistics system so as to construct the simple possible system out of the available linguistics input.

Universal Grammar: this is a theory that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural humans language have. Noam Chomsky suggests that rules of grammar are hard –wider into the brain without being taught.

Challenges to Natives Approaches:

·         PDP: Parallel distributed processing is a model, based on the notion that information is processed simultaneously at several levels of attention.

·         Cognition and Language Development

·         Social Interaction and language Development

Behaviorist	natives	Functional
·         Tabula rasa ·         Stimuli: linguistics ·         Responses ·         Conditioning ·         Reinforcement ·	·         Innate ·         predispositions(LAD/UG) ·         systematic rule-governed acquisition ·         creative construction ·         “pivot” grammar ·         Parallel distributed processing	·         Constructivist ·         Social interaction ·         Cognition language ·         Functions of language ·         discourse

Issues in first language Acquisition

Competence: is in your mine

Performance: is observable and concrete manifestation or realization of competence.

Comprehension is listening and Reading. It could be competence

Production: is speaking and Writing.  It could be performance.

 Practice and Frequency

Practice is in the early stages of the child because he has to practice some words. Repetition and association are his keys like the operant conditioning.

Frecuency is when a child received some stimulates like sound constantly  

 

Input: The process of comprehending language (listening and reading).This is very important because is the way like people receive the language,

Discourse: Is a way like people express their ideas because in this aspect people show and do relationships between rules and sentences.