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Summary Introducing Second Language Acquisition H2
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A summary of Chapter 2 from Introducing Second Language Aquisition
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Introducing Second Language Acquisition – Kirsten Hummel – SummaryChapter 2: First Language Acquisition
Infants appear to come into the world equipped to acquire the language they are exposed to in their
environment (prewired). It’s a reasonable explanation for the rapidity of development and
universality of stages that characterize L1 acquisition. According to Chomsky, children do not need to
be deliberately taught to speak, they simply begin to do so. Infants show a preference for the human
voice (mother’s voice in particular). This can be measured using high amplitude sucking (technique
used to study infant perceptual abilities; typically involves recording an infant’s sucking rate as a
measure of its attention to various stimuli; reliable from one to four months of age). Interactional
patterns characterize infant-caregiver communication (wait for responses, sounds become more
speech-like). Young children, unlike adults, can perceive sound differences which not occur in the
language of their environment (sound/auditory discrimination). This ability begins to disappear by
the ages of 10 to 12 months (distinction is not reinforced). Sound contrast perceptions are not
maintained if those contrasts are not used in the infant’s language environment. All babies go
through similar linguistic stages and reach linguistic milestones at similar ages (although individual
variation). First pre-linguistic stage is babbling (3-4 months; consonant-vowel sequence; bilabial stops
are more frequently used than liquids). Early phase of babbling is reduplicated babbling (babbling in
which consonant-vowel combinations are repeated). Later on, nonreduplicated babbling (babbling in
which young children vary the consonant-vowel sequences used) begins to predominate. Children
comprehend their first words between 7 and 10 months. At 1 year or age, children produce their first
recognizable word (first-word/holophrastic stage; single word for a full sentence). Assimilation and
substitution of sounds may be applied unconsciously by the child. Initial consonant cluster is
simplified by omission of one of the consonants. First words tend to name people and objects
common in the child’s universe (mainly nouns, verbs or action words). Overextension (a child’s use
of a word for objects or items that share a feature or property) and underextension (a child’s use of
a word with a narrower meaning than in the adult’s language) occur during the first 2 years. By 2.5
years of age, there is rarely any over- or underextension.
At 18 months old, children begin to put two words together (two-word stage). Sometimes children
go through a word spurt from this moment on (daily vocabulary growth); this is due to fast mapping
(ability to remember a word after limited exposure). After the two-word stage comes the telegraphic
stage (link together more than two words; no function words, but content words). Researchers have
developed a system to measure early linguistic development by calculating the average number of
morphemes (smallest meaning-bearing unit of language) per utterance, in short, the mean length of
utterance (MLU) (measurement used to calculate the development of children’s grammar; number
of morphemes divided by number of total utterances). Every child goes through similar stages and
tends to acquire forms in a similar order, but every child has his or her own unique rate of
development. Grammatical units are acquired in a similar order, but not at the same rate. Frequency
of the forms in the input (the language to which an individual is exposed in the environment) does
not affect their order of acquisition. Children are also able to generalize rules to items they have
never been exposed to. Moreover, they reorganize their growing grammatical knowledge in
systematic ways.
Nativism is a theoretical approach emphasizing the innate, possibly genetic, contributions to any
behaviour, while empiricism is a theoretical view that emphasizes the role of the environment and
experience over that of innate ideas or capacities.
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