Acquisition
of Phonology
In general the order at acquisition of the
classes of sounds goes by manner of articulation: nasals are acquired first,
and then glides, stops, liquids, fricatives, and affricates. Natural classes
characterized by place of articulation features also appear in children’s
utterances according to an ordered series: labials, velars, alveolars, and
palatals. It is not surprising that mama and dada are early words for many
children.
In early language, children
may not make a linguistic distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants,
although they can perceive the difference. If the first year is devoted to
figuring out the phonetic inventory of the target language, the second year involves
learning how these sounds are used in the phonology of the language, especially
which contrasts are phonemic.
Children’s early
pronunciations are not haphazard, however. The phonological substitutions are
rule governed. The following is an abridged lexicon for another child, Micheal,
between the ages of 18 and 21 months: {pun} “spoon” {majtl} “Micheal” {peyn} “plane”
{dajter} “diaper” {tis} “kiss” {pati} “papi” {tow} “cow” {mani} “Mommy” {tin}
“clean” {bert} “bert” {poler} “stroller” {bert} “(big) Bird” Of the many
phonological rules that children create, no one child will necessarily use all
rules. Early phonological rules generally reflect natural phonological
processes that also occur in adult languages
Acquisition of Word Meaning
In addition to what it
tells us about phonological regularities, the child’s early vocabulary also
provides insight into how children use words and construct word meanings. A
child may use the word “doggie” to refer to any four legged animal or “daddy”
to refer to any adult male. This illustrates how a child may extend the meaning
of a word from a particular referent to encompass a large class. Eventually
children do figure out the adult meanings of words..
Even if the child succeed in
associating the word cat with an animal on the mat he may mistakenly interpret
‘cat’ as ‘Cat’, the name of the particular animal, instead of a type of animal.
Upon hearing the word dog in the
presence of a dog, how does the child know that ‘dog’ can refer to any
four-legged, hairy, barking creature? Should it include poodles, tiny Yorkshire
terriers, greyhounds and huge mastiffs, all of which look rather different from
one another? What about cows, lambs, and other four-legged mammals? Why are
they not ‘dogs’? In other words, to learn a word like cat or dog children have
to figure out that the word refers to a class of objects and not just to the
object being referred to in a particular situation.
It is not surprising,
therefore, that children often overextend a word’s meaning, as J. P. did with
the word sock. A child may learn a word such as papa or daddy, which she first
uses only for her own father, and then extend its meaning to apply to all men,
just as she may use the word dog to mean any four-legged creature. On the other
hand, children may also use a lexical item in an overly restrictive way.
The
Acquisition of Morphology
The child’s
acquisition of morphology provides some of the clearest evidence of rule
learning. Children’s errors in inflectional morphology reveal that the child
acquires the regular rules of the grammar and then over applies them. This
overgeneralization occurs when children treat irregular verbs and nouns as if
they were regular. We have probably all heard children say bringed, goed,
drawed, and runned, or foot, mouses, and sheeps. These mistakes tell us much
about how children learn language because such forms could not arise through
imitation. In fact, children may go through three stages in the acquisition of
an irregular form:
Stage 1: Broke, Brought Stage 2: breaked, bringed Stage
3: broke,brought
In stage 1 the child uses the correct term such
as brought or broke. At this point the child’s grammar does not relate the form
brought to bring, or broke to break. The words are treated as separate lexical
entries. Stage 2 is crucial. Now the children constructs a rule for forming the
past tense and attaches the regular past-tense morpheme to all verbs—play, hug,
and help, as well as break and bring. Children look for general patterns. What
they do not know at stage 2 is that there are exceptions to the rule. Now their
language is more regular than the adult language. During stage 3 the child
learns that there are exceptions to the rule, and then once again uses brought
and broke, with the difference being that these irregular forms will be related
to the root forms.
Then the experimenter
would show the child a picture of two of the animals and say, “Now here is
another one. There are two of them. There are two. The child’s task was to give
the plural form, “wugs” [wʌgz]. Another little make-believe animal was called a
“bik,” and when the child was shown two biks, he or she again was to say the
plural form [bɪks]. The children applied regular plural formation to words they
had never heard, showing that they had acquired the plural rule.
The Acquisition of Pragmatics
In addition to
acquiring the rules of grammar, children must learn the appropriate use of
language in context, or pragmatics. The cartoon is funny because of the
inappropriateness of the interaction; showing that Zoe hasn’t completely
acquired the pragmatic “maxims of conversation” Context is needed to determine
the reference of pronouns
Children also show a
lack of pragmatic awareness in the way they sometimes use articles. Like
pronouns, the interpretation of articles depends on context. The definite
article the, as in “the boy,” can be used felicitously only when it is clear to
speaker and hearer what boy is being discussed.
Children do not always
respect the pragmatic rules for articles. In experimental studies,
three-year-olds may use the definite article for introducing a new referent. In
other words, the child tends to assume that his listener knows who he is
talking about without having established this in a linguistically appropriate
way It may take a child several months or years to master those aspects of
pragmatics that involve the felicitous use of determiners and pronouns, or the
conversational maxims which when violated (usually purposely) result in
implicatures..
The
Acquisition of Signed Languages
Deaf children who are
born to deaf signing parents are naturally exposed to sign language just as
hearing children are naturally exposed to spoken language. Given the universal
aspects of sign and spoken languages, it is not surprising that language
development in these deaf children parallels the stages of spoken language
acquisition. Deaf children babble, they then progress to single signs similar
to the single words in the holophrastic stage, and finally they begin to
combine signs..
In the acquisition of
wh questions in ASL, signing children easily learned the rules associated with
the wh phrase. The children sometimes move the wh phrase and sometimes leave it
in place, as adult signers do.
Sometimes the
parallels between the acquisition of signed and spoken languages are striking.
For example, some of the grammatical morphemes in ASL are semantically
transparent or iconic, that is, they look like what they mean; for example, the
sign for the pronoun ‘I’ involves the speaker pointing to his chest. The sign for
the pronoun ‘you’ is a point to the chest of the addressee. As noted earlier,
at around age two, children acquiring spoken languages often reverse the
pronouns I and you.
