"First Language Acquisition" (H. Douglas Brown)

When infants acquire a first language, they learn one of the most complex skills of their lives and they attain adult levels of skill in many domains by the age of 5 or 6. How do they learn a system that requires mastery of the sound system, a huge vocabulary, grammatical rules, meanings, and rules for usage, as well as articulatory skill, auditory discrimination, memory storage, recognition, and retrieval. What may be innate and what learned in this complex task has long intrigued psychologists, linguists and philosophers.

In the text wrote by Brown we can discriminate three different approaches about human language acquisition, he tells us about “behaviorist approaches, natives approaches and functional approaches”, and each one has influence in the language acquisition of every human. For example in one hand we can talk about behavior approach, we can find that humans get the majority of the language from the environment surrounding us while we grow up, and it means that in our relation with other people we learn grammatical structures based in our experience and not in our studies.

Now in the other hand talking about natives approach Brown tell us that This device(language)  is inside us since we are born, and it means that we have an innately way to learn and distinguish the different linguistic properties and structures. It’s very important reveal the two greatest contributions of this hypothesis in the understanding of the first language acquisition and they are: the faculty to separate the scientific method in the explanation of linguistic structures being developed in children and the description of a consistent system in the child’s language.

There are some important issues in the L1:

COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE

Competences refers to one’s underlying knowledge of a system of language (its rules of grammar, its vocabulary, all the pieces of a language and how those pieces fit together)

COMPREHENSION AND PRODUCTION

Comprehension and production can be aspects of both performance and competence. Research evidence point to the general superiority of comprehension over production.

NATURE OR NURTURE

 Nativist contends that a child is born with an innate knowledge, the innateness hypothesis presented a number of problems itself.

UNIVERSALS

Language is universally acquired in the same manners and moreover that the deep structure of language at its deepest level may be common to all languages. Maratsos enumerated some of the universal linguistic categories under investigation by a number of different researchers.

SYSTEMATICITY AND VARIABILITY

Children exhibit a remarkable ability to infer the phonological, structural, lexical and semantic system of language; it has been found that young children who have not yet mastered the past-tense morpheme tend first to learn past tenses as separate items without knowledge of the difference between regular and irregular verbs.

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT

It is proposed by  Vygotsky claimed that social interaction, through language, is a prerequisite to cognitive development.

IMITATION

The earliest stages of child language acquisition may manifest a good deal of surface imitation since the baby may not possess the necessary semantic categories to assign “meaning” to utterances. Researches has also shown that children, when explicitly asked to repeat a sentence in a test situation, will often repeat the correct underlying deep structure with a change in the surface rendition.

PRACTICE

A Behavioristic model of first language acquisition would claim that practice is the key to the formation of habits by operant conditioning. Practice is usually thought of as referring to speaking only. But one can also think in terms of comprehension practice.

INPUT

The speech that young children hear is primarily the speech heard in home. Linguists one claimed that most adult s` speech is basically semi grammatical, that children are exposed to a chaotic sample of language.

DISCOURSE

 While conversation is a universal human activity performed routinely in the course of daily living, the means by which children learn to take part in a conversation appear to be very complex. The child learns not only how to initiate a conversation but how to respond to another’s initiating utterance.