The Social Science Encyclopedia, Second Edition
first language acquisition
When infants acquire a first language, they learn one of the most complex skills of their lives and they attain adult levels of skill in many domains by the age of 5 or 6. How do they learn a system that requires mastery of the sound system, a huge vocabulary, grammatical rules, meanings, and rules for usage, as well as articulatory skill, auditory discrimination, memory storage, recognition, and retrieval? What may be innate and what learned in this complex task has long intrigued psychologists, linguists and philosophers (Bloom 1993). In their efforts to answer this question, researchers have kept records of how children advance from babbling, to words, to complex utterances. Since the 1960s, they have paid increased attention to the acquisition of different languages (Slobin 1985; 1991) and to the stages children go through.
Children hear language all around them. Adults display for them the syntactic structures and also demonstrate how words partition conceptual spaces (Slobin 1985; 1991). Adults offer essential information about the conventions of the language being acquired, and often direct children’s attention by repeating, rewording, and re-casting child utterances into conventional forms.
When children start to produce words (anywhere from 12 to 18 months), they usually use just one at a time. But soon they begin to combine two or more, moving from utterances like Raisin to More raisin to Me want raisin (Brown 1973). Their early nouns pick out objects, often in such roles as agent, patient, or location. They mark what is ‘given’ and what ‘new’ in the conversation, and also grammatical relations like Subject-of and Direct-Object-of.
To do this, children need to learn how to modulate the meanings of nouns and verbs. In English, they can add a plural -s ending to nouns, for example, and mark limited duration (-ing) or past (-ed), on verbs. In more highly inflected languages, they may learn case and gender endings for nouns and adjectives, and verb endings to mark tense, aspect, person and number. Such inflections show which pieces of an utterance belong together and, for instance, which noun agrees with the verb. To learn inflections, children must identify stems and endings in words, and the meanings of each, together with any variants in form. For example, the plural of cat in English is pronounced [kats] (with an ‘s’) while the plural of dog is [dogz] (with a ‘z’). Learning variants takes time. In addition, some common words are irregular. Compare regular cat/cats or dog/dogs with mouse/mice, child/children or sheep/sheep; or regular jump/jumped or look/looked with go/went, sit/sat or bring/brought. Children are pattern makers; they regularize irregulars to produce plurals like foots and mans, and past tense verbs like comed, buyed and hitted, before learning the irregular forms (Bloom 1993; Brown 1973; Clark 1993).
Most children produce word combinations and inflections by age 2–2 1/2. In the next few months, they elaborate their utterances: they add demonstratives, articles and quantifiers (that, the, some); adjectives (stuck, wet); auxiliary and modal verbs (do, be, can, will). They add adverbs and prepositional phrases (there, in the cupboard; loudly, in a hurry); adverbial clauses (They were tired WHEN THEY GOT HOME); relative clauses (the boy WHO WAS WATCHING THEM); and complements (They wanted TO RUNAWAY, She said THAT SHE WAS COMING) (Bloom 1993). But acquiring syntax takes time. Many early elaborations omit the appropriate conjunctions (before, while) and complementizers (that, to), or contain the wrong one for the meaning intended.
Acquisition of vocabulary is a major ingredient in language. Children learn words very rapidly, moving from a vocabulary of 100–400 words at age 2 to around 14,000 by age 6. By the time they are adults, they may have up to 50,000 at their disposal. During acquisition, children identify word-forms and map meanings on to them (Bloom 1993; Clark 1993). They analyse complex words into their component parts (pram-pusher>pram+push+er; blackness>black+ ness), and use these, when needed, to coin words with new meanings (to scale for adult ‘weigh’, sander for one who grinds pepper, or far-see-er for ‘telescope’). Such coinages emerge from about age 2 onwards to fill gaps in the child’s current vocabulary (Clark 1993).
Words work only if they are recognized, and children try hard to produce recognizable forms. While their earliest words may bear little resemblance to adult forms ([ga] for squirrel), by age 3, much of what children say is readily understood. But to get words right, children need to listen and store what they hear, hone their articulatory skills and identify the relevant sounds in each word attempted. When they produce words, they must match adult versions (stored in memory), moving closer with practice, for example, from simple consonant-vowel combinations (e.g. [do] for dog), to adding final consonants (e.g. [dog]), and mastering consonant clusters (e.g. from [kai] to [krai], for cry) (Ferguson et al. 1992).
Learning the structure of a language is only one side of acquisition. Children must also learn how to use language appropriately. They need to know how to make requests and what counts as polite (Andersen 1990). By age 4, many children distinguish among Give me some cake, Can I have some cake?, Could I have some cake please?, and That cake looks very good, doesn’t it? As their knowledge of form and meaning expands, they also try out other language skills such as story-telling (Berman and Slobin 1994).
Finally, children seem to learn two languages just as easily as one (McLaughlin 1984). But the point at which they start on the second makes a difference. The earlier they start, the more acquisition of the second looks like acquisition of the first. How well a second language is learned also depends on the social value it carries in the community.
Eve V.Clark
Stanford University
References
Andersen, E.S. (1990) Speaking with Style: The Sociolinguistic Skills of Children, London.
Berman, R.A. and Slobin, D.I. (1994) Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study, Hillsdale, NJ.
Bloom, P. (ed.) (1993) Language Acquisition: Core Readings, Hemel Hempstead .
Brown, R.W. (1973) A First Language: The Early Stages, Cambridge, MA.
Clark, E.V. (1993) The Lexicon in Acquisition, Cambridge, UK.
Ferguson, C.A., Menn, L. and Stoel-Gammon, C. (eds) (1992) Phonological Development: Theories, Research, Implications, Timonium, MD.
McLaughlin, B. (1984) Second-language Acquisition in Childhood, 2 vols, Hillsdale, NJ.
Slobin, D.I. (ed.) (1985; 1991) The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, 3 vols, Hillsdale, NJ.
See also: developmental psychology; language; learning.
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