1.5 A review of first language acquisition

During 1960s and 1970s, when SLA was beginning to establish itself as a research discipline, there also existed an increased pace of research on first language acquisition. We discuss first language acquisition here because much SLA research parallels the developments in first language acquisition research, and over the years has drawn on concepts from first language acquisition area to understand L2 phenomena. There has been an influence of first language acquisition research on the study of  L2 learning, and this influence can be felt both at the theoretical and at the practical level.

At the theoretical level, researchers have been working with exciting new ideas about language and the learning process. Concepts such as imitation and habit-formation have to a large extent been replaced by notions which emphasize the child’s own creativity in constructing his knowledge of the language. These concepts and ideas have been employed to view second language learning from the same perspective and to find evidence to support this view. At the practical level, first language researchers have developed new techniques for collecting and analyzing children’s speech. These techniques have also been used in the field of L2 learning, to gather data and accumulate evidence about the sequences and processes that are involved.

A large amount of research on children’s grammatical development has been conducted since 1960s. Here we introduce some gains in such research , which we hope will enable us to have an understanding of how children’s grammatical competence grows.

 

1.5.1 From babbling to words

The first characteristic of children’s speech can be described as ‘babbling’, produced by infants at about six months. Babbling most commonly consists of consonant-vowel sequences, such as bababa, dadada, and later bada.  These early babbling sounds are often taken to be “words” by parents, with mamama, for instance,  referring to the infant’s mother. In order to express meaning, children use intonation to express meaning. They can use proper stress and intonation contours of their language to distinguish among statements, questions, and requests. For example, a child can say dada with the stress on the second syllable. We can imagine the child stretching out her arms with the intention of a request, something like Pick me up, daddy! Or when a child hears a door open and says dada with rising intonation, this can be interpreted as a question such as Is that daddy?

After using babbling to express meaning,  children are beginning to use single words to express their ideas. Such early speech of children can also be described as “telegraphic speech”, because children’s speech lacks inflections and those small function words such as articles and prepositions. At the earliest stage, children’s speech consists of one-word utterances. The following are some examples taken from a stage when children are already joining two words to form an utterance:

 

Allgone sticky (after the child had washed her hands)  

Allgone outside (after closing the door)

More page (asking an adult to continue reading)

Sweater chair (indicating where the sweater is)

(Littlewood, 2000:7)

 

It can be seen clearly that the situation plays an important role in conveying meaning though the utterances are so reduced. The result is that the same two words might bear different meanings in different situations. For instance, when a child picks up his mother’s sock and says mommy sock, he expresses the relationship between the two words, as in the sentence ‘This is mommy’s sock’. In another situation, when the mother is dressing the baby, he might also say mommy sock, but this time he means ‘Mommy is putting on my sock’. Even at this stage, we can see that children use the language creatively, since they use utterances which have never been heard. The above examples such as allgone sticky and allgone outside are children’s own creations. Children , just like adults, are making use of an ability to combine items from a limited set so as to communicate meanings.  

Researchers have been attempting to write ‘grammars’ for children’s two-word utterances. Lois Bloom (1970) found that sentences containing two nouns were used to express five kinds of relationship, as can be shown in Table 1.

 

       Table 1.1 Five relationships between children’s two-word utterances

Relationship            example             possible meaning

Conjunction            cup glass           cup and glass Description             party hat           a party hat Possession             daddy hat           daddy’s hat Location               sweater chair       The sweater is on the chair. Agent-object           mommy book        Mommy is reading a book.

    Dan Slobin (1979), similarly, studied the communicative functions performed by two-word utterances in the speech of children who were acquiring six different languages. He found seven main types of function, adapted in the following table:

Table 1.2 Seven functions of children’s two-word utterances

Communicative functions           Examples          Possible meaning

Locating or naming                    there book           The book is there. Demanding or desiring          more milk           Give me more milk. Negating                         not hungry        I am not hungry. Describing an event or situation   block fall           A block falls. Indicating possession                  my shoe            This is my shoe. Describing a person/thing       pretty dress       The dress is pretty. Questioning                            where ball         Where is the ball?

Another well-known analysis of the communicative function of children’s speech is that of Michael Halliday (1975). Halliday argues that language acquisition takes place because the child realizes he can do certain things with language, and that he learns these different functions in a predictable order. First, the child uses language to get what he wants (‘instrumental’ function); next, he uses language to control other people’s behaviour (‘regulatory’ function), and so on. Halliday’s ‘functional’ approach to language and language learning has great influence on second language teaching.

1.5.2 Development of inflections and function words  

As children’s processing capacity grows, the telegraphic speech extends beyond the two-word stage, and longer utterances appear, which are still telegraphic. Examples are: Andrew want that and Cat stand up table. At this time, children are on the way to acquiring inflections and function words. These small items are usually called morphemes. Here, we introduce Roger Brown’s study (1973) about how three children acquired morphemes in their first language. The findings came to have a wide influence for studies in both first language acquisition and second language learning. It was found that children do not master each morpheme suddenly, from one day to the next, but gradually, over a period of time. One problem is to decide at what point a morpheme should be counted as ‘acquired’. Brown’s criterion is that a child should produce it on 90 percent of the occasions when the adult grammar requires it. Based on this criterion, Brown found that the 14 morphemes were acquired in a sequence which was remarkably similar for the three children. Illustrated in the following is the ‘average’ order:

Table 1.3 Average order of acquisition of morphemes

            1 present progressive –ing  (as in She is running)

            2 preposition on

            3 preposition in 

            4 plural –s (as in two books)

            5 irregular past forms (as in she went)

            6 possessive ’s (as in daddy’s hat)

            7 un-contractible copula (e.g. is in yes, she is)  

            8 articles the and a (which were classified together)

            9 regular past –ed (as in she walked)

            10 regular third-person-singular -s (as in she runs )

            11 irregular third-person-singular forms (e.g. she has)

            12 un-contractible auxiliary be (as in she was coming)

            13 contractible copula (as in she’s tired)

            14 contractible auxiliary be (as in he’s coming)

 

Brown also calculated the relative frequency of these morphemes in the speech of the children’s parents. It was found that the order of frequency does not correlate with the order of acquisition, which cannot be explained in simple habit-formation terms. This evidence shows that the children are acquiring language creatively.

Unlike Brown’s longitudinal research, in which he studied the three children’s performance over a period of time, Jill and Peter de Villiers (1973) conducted a cross-sectional study of twenty-one children’s use of the same morphemes. They examined how well the children performed with the morphemes and ‘scored’ each morpheme according to how accurately it is produced by children. As a result, they found that the accuracy order was similar to the acquisition order which Brown had obtained (Littlewood, 2000:10).  

Children’s acquisition of verb inflections also offers evidence for their creative learning process. Before mastering the regular past inflection –ed, children produce some common irregular past forms, such as came and went. At this stage, these forms are simply individual words for children, not the result of a productive rule for forming the past tense. Then comes a stage in which children produced erroneous utterances such as Where it goed? And It camed off. This actually does not mean that children’s acquisition order is from irregular to regular verb past forms. Nor is it a sign of regression. Instead, it is a sign of progress in children’s developing system. The truth is that they have now mastered a rule for forming the past tense. It is this rule that leads children to produce goed and comed. Only later will he learn that go and come have irregular past tense, and they are exceptions to the rule. This is also discussed in the study of second language learners’ interlanguage in Chapter two.

1.5.3 Development of negatives and interrogatives

While children are mastering morphemes, they are also increasing their ability to produce more complicated utterances. The development of  negatives and interrogatives has aroused researchers’ interest. For both structures, children seem to follow similar sequences of development.

The sequence of children’s acquisition of negatives has been observed and can be illustrated as follows: At first, the negative element is not part of the structure of the sentence, but is attached to the beginning or end, as in No singing song, and No the sun shining. Then comes the second stage, in which the negative element is inserted into the sentence, as in I no want envelope, He no bite you, and He don’t want it. Children also begin to produce the appropriate part of do, be, or the modal verbs, to suit the person or tense, such as You don’t want some supper, Paul didn’t laugh, and I am not a doctor.

As for the acquisition of interrogatives, there is also a predictable development for all children. Lightbown and Spada (2006) provided the examples of the acquisition of question formation. In stage 1, children use intonation in yes/no questions, as in Cookie? Mommy book? In stage 2, children use intonation with sentence complexity. For yes/no questions, they use declarative sentence order with rising intonation as in You like this? For Wh- questions, a question word with declarative order is used as in Why you catch it? In stage 3, children begin to use inversion in yes/no question, but keeps declarative order in Wh- questions. Examples are Can I go? Is that mine? Why you don’t have one? Stage 4 is inversion. The auxiliary word do is used in yes/no questions, but still not in wh-questions. Children may say Do you like ice cream？where I can draw them? In stage 5, inversion is used with wh-questions as in Why can he go out? But when negation needs to be included, the declarative form is maintained, as in Why he can’t go out? In stage 6, children may over-generalize the rule for forming questions by saying, for example, I don’t know why can’t he go out.

Listed above are some findings in studying children’s  language development in first language acquisition. It must be pointed out that the evidence is not sufficient to determine whether all children pass through these same stages. When discussing second language acquisition, we will also see that, in the development of interlanguage, adults learning a second language go through such predictable sequences while acquiring certain structures. However, the situation with adult second language learning is more complex due to possible interference of their mother tongue.