Depto. de Psicología Experimental, Procesos Cognitivos y LogopediaFac. de PsicologíaTRUEpu

López Ornat, Susana

Susana Lopez Ornat

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Language Acquisition and Development

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1S.López Ornat: Language Acquisition and Development. In: Norbert M. Seel (Ed.)(2012) Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. Springer Verlag, Part 12, 1718-1721,DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_298Synonyms:First language acquisition, L1 learning process, Language development,Language acquisitionDefinitionLanguage acquisition is a process which starts three months before birth(Elman et al 1996; Karmiloff & Karmiloff-Smith 2001) and gradually leads tothe child’s mastery of his/her native language/s, at around adolescence.Language learning, language acquisition and language development can beunderstood as synonymous. However, this lexical differentiation carriesinteresting theoretical nuances.Theoretical backgroundWhy would a child acquire and not learn or develop a language?The term acquisition reflects the influence of Noam Chomsky, and of nativist(generativist) models inspired by his work, since the late 1950s. The term isrooted in linguistics, and emphasizes the notion that grammar is only triggeredby the environment rather than learned. It also implies that languagedevelopment is rather independent of other kinds of development, whetherlinguistic or otherwise. The process depends on inherited grammaticalknowledge. Its modelling is formalist with the role of experience reduced to thebare minimum.The term learning ties up with behaviourism, and is rooted in psychology. Inthe late 1950s, Skinner put forward the first scientific explanation of how alanguage is learned. It focused on experience, and on an associative languagelearning process, with reinforcement by adults gradually shaping the child’slanguage performance.Currently, the constructivist-emergentist models describe languagedevelopment as a process of ontogenetic, gradual, complex, and adaptivechange. Change is driven by a complex interaction of experience and thelearning brain, plus some general innate constraints. Emergentist models claimto reveal how the grammar of a language is learned. Their evidence wouldimply that it is not enough to “land” in a linguistic setting -á la Skinner-, butinstead, it is necessary to add rich internal cognitive dynamics to the learningprocess. Their evidence would also imply that knowledge which is alreadylinguistic and is innate –á la Chomsky- is not needed in a scientific account ofthe language development process.Much of the current research on child language is based on emergentism(Bavin 2009). Emergentist models are related to the theory of complexity. It isargued that the language acquisition process itself is a recursive process bywhich interactions among primitive linguistic elements give rise to higher-levelEasy PDF Creator is professional software to create PDF. If you wish to remove this line, buy it now.2emergent linguistic entities with emergent properties, such that interactionsamongst these new emergent linguistic entities give rise to yet higher-levelemergent entities with their own emergent properties, and so on.Current language acquisition research has gained reliability, depth, and detailusing new methodology. Neuro-imaging techniques are frequently used,identifying neurological correlates of early language processing (Elman et al1996). A form of computer modelling (connectionism, neural nets) is a richsource of hypotheses of possible brain-like processes of analysis andrepresentation (Elman et al 1996). Nowadays research in the field is oftenmulticultural and multidisciplinary. Research questions are better focused andnew experimental methods like eye-tracking, or preferential looking have beendevised to investigate early comprehension processes. As questions havebecome more precise, fine-grained analyses based on massive detailedinformation have been devised. Nevertheless, longitudinal corpora still formthe backbone for a number of questions in the field, especially in studying newphenomena or new languages.The use of child language corpora itself has been enhanced by the availabilityof computer software and hardware, which has enormously facilitated research.Nowadays the language which is directed to the child is also a research field,seeking to further elucidate the observed growth in the child’s linguisticcompetence. Since 1991 collaboration has resulted in the database of the ChildLanguage Data Exchange System (CHILDES) (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu),which includes longitudinal acquisition data from normal monolingual andbilingual children of many languages, plus the same sort of data for atypicallanguage development. Parent report measures for documenting the linguisticand communicative development of infants and toddlers have also beencreated. A screening instrument for differentiating atypical from normaldevelopment from very early on (8 months) exists for many different languages(www.sci.sdsu.edu/cdi/cdiwelcome.htm).Important scientific research and open questionsMost present day scientific questions have to do with how babies, toddlers andchildren ‘crack the code’ to become competent language users. Language has aformal structure which is never explicitly taught to the small child. In spite ofthat, by about 27 months of age children successfully start finding the grammarof their language/s.Nativist models propose all humans are endowed with genetic grammaticalknowledge, termed UG (Universal Grammar). UG is a set of very generalgrammatical “rules” which will somehow mature and then guide the child in itssearch for the grammar of the environmental language/s it is born to (Chomsky1972; Hauser et al 2002). Because language acquisition is assumed to dependon the genetic UG endowment, and/or its “maturation”, research from thisperspective focuses on possible descriptions of the genetic UG. The modeldoes not focus on the roles played by the environment, by the experience, bythe brain, and by the cognitive processing of the learner.Easy PDF Creator is professional software to create PDF. If you wish to remove this line, buy it now.3Emergentist models are not strictly empiricist. Rather, several innate butgeneral brain processing constraints are described which bias the humanlearning process and experience (Bavin 2009; Elman et al 1996; Karmiloff &Karmiloff-Smith 2001; Tomasello 2003). As opposed to nativism, alongdevelopment, the child´s brain develops language-specific processingmechanisms, which are a consequence of its successful language learninghistory.As for open research questions, within emergentist models the notion of locallearning constitutes a lively research field today. According to this childrenlearn linguistic categories through statistical learning procedures applied tospecific examples. Analyses of these categories lead to rule-like structuresthemselves then subject to analysis. This language learning process would, atfirst, advance practically item-by-item. This is why researchers observe that, atfirst, a certain language structure (an inflection, an agreement, a syntacticstructure) is only produced correctly with one or a few words, and not withothers, in specific local contexts, and not in others (Bavin 2009; Tomasello2003).Another set of open research questions stems from the fact that although thelanguage development process is apparent in the growth of the child´sproduction, it also occurs both in the input and in the learning system itself.Both the input and the learning system change along the process becoming,themselves ever more complex. The learning system is said to filter thequantity and quality of input it receives as a function of its own developmentalstate (Elman et al, 1996). In turn, it modifies itself, creating various types oftransitional states on the way. It is these transitional states which are the focusof much current research.A third set of issues concerns the development of intentional communication.The general cognitive skills of small children will help them identify thedistributional patterns of their language(s) but will also help them identify theintentions of the model speakers (Tomasello 2003). Closely tied to this is theissue of imitation. Imitation plays an essential role in the take-off of anyparticular language acquisition process. Children begin to learn linguisticstructures by imitating linguistic exemplars which implement them, eventhough, in the end, what they learn is the language, the formal conventionalsystem. Imitation is not a single learning mechanism, but a conflation of manyof them. In order for an immediate imitation of a linguistic structure to takeplace:a-the learning system must have oriented its attention to that structure,b-the intention of the imitated speaker must have been hypothesised,c-the detected structure must have been segmented out of the continuousspeech stream,d-the system must have built a motor equivalent of the perceived structure,e-the articulatory system must produce it.Currently, each one of those processes constitutes a research field of its own. Alinguistic structure which can be “imitated”, can also be internally“represented” and stored. This inner availability, in turn, would allow thesystem to search for statistical regularities in the stored materials.Easy PDF Creator is professional software to create PDF. If you wish to remove this line, buy it now.4There is now much research activity on what could be part of a neurologicalsupport of imitation, the Mirror Neuron System, first described in adultmacaque monkeys. This is a series of neurons that fire not only when thesubject performs an action but also when it observes another performing thataction (Tomasello 2003).Another group of current research questions focus on the acquisition ofdiscourse, in later language development. During the early languageacquisition process, the child succeeds in learning a basic linguistic code(phonology, lexicon, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) of his-herlanguage/s. Five year-olds are still not fully developed speakers, but they havethe foundations of their language/s. From then onwards, until adolescence, theprocess is termed late language acquisition (Bavin, 2009).Narrative and dialogue are special cases of discourse. Dialogue itself is an“easy” case of narrative, by which human beings can build oral texts throughcooperation. Narrative involves guiding a listener through a beginning, amiddle, and an end while linking successive sentences together by usinglinguistic instruments such as tense marking, connectives, and pronouns. Suchlinguistic instruments (cohesion devices) allow the speaker to refer back tothings said earlier, to leave things unsaid, to link events coherently, to progressthrough the narrative smoothly, to avoid going back through every detail(Karmiloff & Karmiloff-Smith 2001). Research today is examining howconceptual coherence and linguistic cohesion relate to one another dynamicallyat every stage of children´s discourse development.The development of subtlelinguistic features such as humour, sarcasm and metaphor each constitute aresearch field today. Language development is a very long developmentalprocess, perhaps the slowest development of all human cognitive abilities.But linguistic development in literate societies also includes the learning of ameta-language. In many societies, by the time children are starting to acquiresome basic oral discourse skills, they also start to be explicitly trained inreading and writing. This new linguistic level requires the learning of letter andwritten word recognition, the refinement of phonological awareness, thedevelopment of completely new spelling skills, the learning of letter-to-soundcorrespondences and the learning of new narrative skills as applied to thewritten form. This meta-level of linguistic development, in turn, creates its owndifficulties in development and its own observable effects on brainconnectivity. All of them are subject of specialised research today.There are many different types of language learner for each of which there isdedicated research (Bavin, 2009). For example, for the child born into a bi/tri-lingual environment the normal process of language learning takes place in thevarious languages simultaneously. With the exception of some trivialconfusions the bi/tri-lingual baby, toddler, or small child, gets to match thelinguistic level of monolingual children in his-her languages at around age 4-5.The same overall normality is found in deaf children born to deaf parents whoare users of a sign language. Most deaf babies, though, have hearing parentswho do not know a sign language, and these babies have more difficulties.Atypical language developments, like Specific Language Impairment (SLI),Easy PDF Creator is professional software to create PDF. If you wish to remove this line, buy it now.5Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Williams Syndrome and Down Syndromeeach constitute highly developed specialized fields, with interest not just ontheir own, but also for issues of brain plasticity, and of brain activity patterns asdependent on linguistic development and linguistic experience.Even within “normal” language development processes there are variations.There are differences in the language acquisition process which depend ondifferences in culture, or in language, or in socioeconomic status (SES) but inaddition deep individual differences have been found. in “equivalent” children,i.e. the same culture, the same language, and the same SES. These variations,difficult to reconcile with nativist (UG) models are linked with subtledifferences in linguistic experience and processing as would be predicted in theemergentist model.People might suppose all adults belonging to the same linguistic communitywill be equivalent in their mastery of their common language. But that intuitionrests on the typical descriptive paradigm for mainstream linguistics. Theintuition of the homogeneous speech community is a fiction. Instead, one of themore striking ways in which individuals differ is in their learning and use oflanguage (Bavin 2009; Elman et al 1996). Interestingly, some individualvariations in language development suggest that the learning system followsalternate paths or routes in the acquisition of particular sounds, or words, orgrammar, or of narrative (Karmiloff & Karmiloff-Smith 2001). This plasticityof the process constitutes another interesting research issue today.Cross ReferencesBilingualism; Connectionist theories of learning; Constructivist learning;Developmental cognitive neuroscience and learning; Imitation: definitions,evidence, and mechanisms; Language development and behavioural methods;Self-organized learning; Speech perception and learningReference listBavin, E.L. (2009) (Ed.) The Cambridge handbook of child language. NewYork: Cambridge University PressChomsky, N. (1972). Language and mind. New York: HarcourtElman, J.L, Bates, E., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., &Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective ondevelopment. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.Hauser, M.D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W.T. (2002). The faculty of language:what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science, 298, 1569-1579.Karmiloff, K. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2001). Pathways to language: Fromfetus to adolescent. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory oflanguage acquisition. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.Easy PDF Creator is professional software to create PDF. If you wish to remove this line, buy it now.

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Language Acquisition and Development

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