First language acquisition

• the innateness hypothesis: we have a language gene and our brain has a capacity which helps us to acquire a language
• The most important stages: —cooing (ca. 4 months)—babbling (6-10 months)—the holophrastic stage (12-18 months)—the two-word stage (18-20 months)—telegraphic speech (2-2.5 years old)
• cooing: the first sounds à high vowels like [i] and [u] and velar consonants [k] and [g]; by ca. 5 months, children are able to distinguish between [i] and [a]
• babbling: coincides with the moment when a child starts to sit up; a variety of syllables, often repeated (babababa, gagaga); later on (8-10 months): first attempts at using intonation + more variation of syllables in ‘utterances, + nasal sounds
• holophrastic stage (à one phrase stage, or single unit stage
• holophrastic stage: one-word stage
• —two-word stage: two distinct words uttered one after the other:—, the active vocabulary includes 200-300 words and the passive one, 1000-1500 words
• —telegraphic speech: 2-2.5 y.o., strings of words (nouns, verbs, adjectives a content words or lexical morphemes), multiple word speech—grammatical variations in word forms, —simple preposition (in, on)—correct word order
• caregiver speech: speech style adopted by someone who spends a lot of time interacting with a young child
• —morphology: Study of the structure of words
• after the telegraphic speech stage (2 y.o. +) the first tense marker to appear in speech is -ing, the plural marker –s, Another pronunciation (allomorph) of the plural is /-Іz/
• overgeneralization: in L1 acquisition, using an inflectional morpheme on more words than is usual in the language
• Developing word structure: The 1st past forms to appear: went + came, followed by regular -ed forms, 3rd person singular –s in present simple, mostly, overgeneralizations are over by ca. 4 y.o.
• overextension = using a word to refer to more objects than is usual in the language, based on similarities in shape, size, texture but never on colour
• of hyponymy, i.e. the lexical relation in which the meaning of one word is included in the meaning of another, animal – dog – poodle, the child will pick the middle
• latest acquired (at ca. 5 y.o): antonyms
• Semantics: the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences