The nature of language learning
Much of your own L1 acquisition was completed before you ever came to school, and this development normally takes place without any conscious effort. By the age of six months an infant has produced all of the vowel sounds and most of the consonant sounds of any language in the world, including some that do not occur in the language(s) their parents speak. If children hear English spoken around them, they will learn to discriminate among those sounds that make a difference in the meaning of English words (the phonemes), and they will learn to disregard those that do not. If the children hear Spanish spoken around them, they will learn to discriminate among some sounds the English speaker learns to ignore, as between the flapped r in pero ‘but’ and the trilled rr in perro ‘dog,’ and to disregard some differences that are not distinctive in Spanish, but vital to English word meaning, as the sh and ch of share and chair.
On average children have mastered most of the distinctive sounds of their first language before they are three years old, and an awareness of basic discourse patterns such as conversational turn-taking appear at an even earlier age. Children control most of the basic L1 grammatical pat terns before they are five or six, although complex grammatical patterns continue to develop through the school years.
The same natural and generally effortless learning processes take place when there is significant exposure to more than one language in early childhood. If young children hear and respond to two (or more) languages in their environment, the result will be simultaneous multilingualism (multiple L1s acquired by about three years of age). As noted in the first chapter, simultaneous multilingualism is not within the usual scope of study in SLA, which focuses on sequential multilingualism (L2s acquired after L1).
Our understanding of (and speculation about) how children accomplish the early mastery of L1(s) has changed radically in the past fifty years or so, primarily owing to developments in linguistics and psychology. It was once suggested that first language acquisition is in large part the result of children’s natural desire to please their doting parents, who wait impatiently for them to utter a recognizable word. Yet the offspring of even relatively indifferent parents successfully acquire language at about the same rate. Others argued that children’s language acquisition is purposive, that they develop language because of their urge to communicate their wants and needs to the people who take care of them. This has not proven to be an adequate explanation, however, since within young children’s limited sphere of activity, communicative needs seem to be largely satisfied by gesture and such non-speech sounds as squeals, whines, grunts, and cries.
Perhaps the most widely held view by the middle of the twentieth century was that children learn language by imitation (the stimulus-response theory). While it is true that much of children’s initial language learning can be attributed to their imitation of sounds and words around them, many of their utterances are quite original and cannot be explained as imitations at all, since they can never have heard them before. The role of natural ability Humans are born with a natural ability or innate capacity to learn language. Such a predisposition must be assumed in order to explain several facts:
• Children begin to learn their L1 at the same age, and in much the same way, whether it is English, Bengali, Korean, Swahili, or any other language in the world.
• Children master the basic phonological and grammatical operations in their L1 by the age of about five or six, as noted above, regardless of what the language is.
• Children can understand and create novel utterances; they are not limited to repeating what they have heard, and indeed the utterances that children produce are often systematically different from those of the adults around them.
• There is a cut-off age for L1 acquisition, beyond which it can never be complete.
• Acquisition of L1 is not simply a facet of general intelligence.
In viewing the natural ability to acquire language in terms of innate capacity, we are saying that part of language structure is genetically “given” to every human child. All languages are incredibly complex systems which no children could possibly master in their early years to the degree they succeed in doing so if they had to “learn” them in the usual sense of that word. Children’s ability to create new utterances is remark able, and their ability to recognize when a string of common words does not constitute a grammatical sentence in the language is even more so. For example, children acquiring English L1 can recognize early on that Cookies me give is ungrammatical. They have never been told, surely, that the particular group of words is not an English sentence, but they somehow know, nevertheless. If a child had to consciously learn the set of abstract principles that indicate which sequences of words are possible sentences in their language as opposed to those that are not, only the smartest would learn to talk, and it would take them many more years than it actually does. This is part of “the logical problem of language acquisition,” which is discussed further below.
A hypothesis which many linguists and psychologists support is that a great many of these abstract principles are common to all language, as opposed to the principles that are language-specific (i.e. specific to particular languages). According to this view, those principles that are universal are “programmed” into all human children just by virtue of their being human, and this accounts for children’s ability to process the smorgasbord of sounds and words that they hear, and their ability to come up with essentially the same structures as other children
. To explain why all L1 development follows essentially the same sequence, we may view children’s language development as a gradual process of acquiring a more and more complex set of structures and rules for combining them. Because the stages and levels of language development can be delineated and studied, it is possible to talk about child grammar: that is, it is possible to systematically describe the kinds of utterances a child can produce or understand at a given maturational level. The differences between their grammar and that used by adults are not viewed as failures on the part of the children, but are considered the normal output of children at that level of development. As children mature, so do their language abilities. Since certain grammatical processes are more complex than others, they require a higher maturational level than simpler ones. As Jean Piaget observed several decades ago (e.g. 1926), in order to master complexities in their L1 which are beyond their present linguistic grasp, what normal children need is additional time, not additional stimuli.
The rate of progression through stages of language development can vary radically among individual children, even as the order of development is relatively invariant both for different children and for different languages. This is because the rate may be influenced by individual fac tors, while the order is “primarily determined by the relative semantic and grammatical complexity of constructions” (Brown 1973 :59).
Saying that there is a “cut-off point” for L1 acquisition means that nor mal development does not occur if the process does not begin in child hood. Even when acquisition starts at an early age, there is evidence that progress in language development usually begins to slow sharply at about the age of puberty – no matter what level has been reached. Severely retarded children, who have a slower rate of development (but in the same relative sequence), are likely never to develop a complete adult grammar for this reason. The effects of age on both L1 and L2 acquisition are dis cussed in Chapter 4 as the Critical Period Hypothesis.
Given the complexity of language, it is no wonder that even adults with their mature intellects seldom attain native fluency in a new language. But almost all children, with their limited memories, restricted reasoning powers, and immature analytical abilities, acquire perfect fluency in any language to which they are adequately exposed, and in which they inter act with others. The ability to acquire language could not be dependent upon intellectual powers alone, since children with clearly superior intelligence do not necessarily begin to speak earlier, or with better results, than children of ordinary intellect.
The role of social experience
Not all of L1 acquisition can be attributed to innate ability, for language specific learning also plays a crucial role. Even if the universal properties of language are preprogrammed in children, they must learn all of those features which distinguish their L1 from all other possible human languages. Children will never acquire such language-specific knowledge unless that language is used with them and around them, and they will learn to use only the language(s) used around them, no matter what their linguistic heritage. American-born children of Korean or Greek ancestry will never learn the language of their grandparents if only English sur rounds them, for instance, and they will find their ancestral language just as hard to learn as any other English speakers do if they attempt to learn it as an adult. Appropriate social experience, including L1 input and inter action, is thus a necessary condition for acquisition.
Intentional L1 teaching to young children is not necessary and indeed may have little effect. Some parents “correct” their children’s immature pronunciation and grammar but most do not, and there is no noticeable change in rate of acquisition among children who receive such instruction. Some adults simplify both grammar and word choice, adding more complex structures as the child does, but adults’ notion of “simplicity” does not correspond to the actual sequence in language acquisition. Some adults imitate children’s language production, and in this imitation, they sometimes provide expansions of children’s structures (such as saying Yes, that’s a big, brown dog in response to the child saying That dog). The expansion may play a role in developing children’s ability to understand new forms, but it cannot be considered necessary since many children do not receive this type of input and still develop language at essentially the same rate.
Sources of L1 input and interaction vary depending on cultural and social factors. Mothers’ talk is often assumed to be the most important source of early language input to children, but fathers or older siblings have major childrearing responsibilities in many societies and may be the dominant source of input, and wealthier social classes in many cultures delegate most of the childrearing responsibilities to nannies or servants. The relative importance of input from other young children also varies in different cultures, as does the importance of social institutions such as nursery schools.
As long as children are experiencing adequate L1 input interaction from people around them, the rate and sequence of their phonological and grammatical development does not appear to vary systematically according to its source, although children’s pronunciation is naturally influenced by the regional and social varieties or styles of the L1 which they hear. There is considerable variance in vocabulary knowledge depending on social context, however, because vocabulary is typically learned in con junction with social experiences. There is also variation to some extent in what functions of speaking children learn to use at an early age depending on social experience. For example, I have found that children who attend nursery school are often more advanced in development of verbal skills that are needed for controlling and manipulating other children than are children who are raised at home without the experience of inter acting and competing with peers.
When young children’s social experience includes people around them using two or more languages, they have the same innate capacity to learn both or all of them, along with the same ability to learn the language specific features of each without instruction. Acquiring other languages after early childhood presents some significant differences, which we will explore in the following section.
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