语言学论文

Qingfei Zhang (Tiffany)

Class 2

The Study of Language

Mid-Paper

May. 12

The Analysis of First Language Acquisition

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words to communicate. The capacity to acquire and use language is a key aspect that distinguishes humans from other beings. For example, many animals are able to communicate with each other by signaling to the things around them, but this kind of communication lacks the arbitrariness of human vocabularies. Other forms of animal communication may utilize arbitrary sounds, but are unable to combine those sounds in different ways to create completely novel messages which can then be automatically understood by another. Hockett called this design feature of human language "productivity." It is crucial to the understanding of human language acquisition that we are not limited to a finite set of words, but, rather, must be able to understand and utilize a complex system that allows for an infinite number of possible messages. Therefore, I want to discuss the first language acquisition here.

Firstly, we should consider about the Basic Requirements of first language acquisition. What we need to know is that the language a child learns is not genetically inherited, but is required in a particular language-using environment. Then the child must also be physically capable of sending and receiving sound signalsa and the child must be able to hear that language being used. The crucial requirement appears to be the opportunity to interact with others via language.

Next I’d like to talk about the stages of the acquisition.

1. Pre-speech: Much of importance goes on even before the child utters his first word: infants learn to pay attention to speech, pays attention to intonation and the rhythm of speech long before they begin to speak.

Children learn to recognize the distinctive sounds, the phonemes of the language they hear from birth long before they are able to pronounce them. Infants can distinguish between /p/ and /b/ at three or four months. But children do not learn how to use these sounds until much later-- around the second year or later--as shown by the experiment with /pok/ and /bok/. The same is true for rising and falling intonation, which only becomes systematically funtional much later. Infants know the difference between one language and another by recognition of phonological patterns

2. One word (holophrastic) stage: Infants may utter their first word as early as nine months: usually mama, dada. This stage is characterized by the production of actual speech signs. Often the words are simplified: "du" for duck, "ba" for bottle. Incorrect pronunciations are systematic at this time.

The extra-linguistic context provides much of the speech information. Rising and falling intonation may or may not be used to distinguish questions from statements at the one-word stage. Words left out if the contexts makes them obvious. At this stage, utterances show no internal grammatical structure.

3. The two-word stage: By two and a half years most children speak in sentences of several words--but their grammar is far from complete. This stage rapidly progresses into what has been termed a fifth and final stage of language acquisition,