英语语言学Chapter 16 First Language Acqu

1、 interact with other language users in order to bring the “language faculty” into operation a particular language-using environment physically capable of sending and receiving sound signals in a language American Sign Language for deaf infants All normal children ,regardless of culture, develop lang

2、uage at roughly the same time, along much the same schedule. The language acquisition schedule has the same basis as the biologically determined development of motor skills. The biological schedule is tied to the maturation of the infants brain and the lateralization process the biological/acquisiti

3、on capacity to cope with constant linguistic input work out the regularities in a particular language and then apply them The early environment of a child differs considerably from one culture to the next The issue of “innateness”: Noam Chomsky The linguistic production of young children the charact

4、eristically simplified speech style adopted by someone who spends a lot of time interacting with a young child Features of “motherese” -frequent questions, often using exaggerated intonation -baby-talk: simplified words or alternative forms with repeated simple sounds -simple sentence structure and

5、a lot of repetitionCooing stage: -3 months old -with velar consonants and high vowel presentBabbling stage: -6 months old -contains syllable-type soundsLater babbling stage:-around 9 months old-recognizable intonation patterns to consonant and vowel combinationLate babbling stage-10 and 11 months ol

6、d-using vocalization to express emotions and emphasis between 12-18 months produces a variety of recognizable single unit utterances single terms for everyday objects such as “cookie”, “milk”. a single form functioning as a phrase or sentence Around 18 to 20 months occurrence of two separate words A

7、 variety of combinations such as baby chair, mommy eat Communication is taking place By the age of two, the child is able to produce 200 or 400 distinct words multi-word utterances strings of lexical morphemes omission of function morphemes Children follow the same principle of economy as sending a

8、telegraph The words they use and the order in which they use them convey the relevant information; function morphemes would be redundant Children actively construct, from what is said to them, possible ways of using the language. Their linguistic production, then, is mostly a matter of trying out co

9、nstructions and testing whether they work or not The order of regular appearance of the inflectional morphemes -the ing form -the plurals with s form -the possessive s -the different forms of to be -irregular past tense forms -regular past tense forms -regular s markers on the third person Throughou

10、t this sequence, individual children may produce good forms one day and odd forms the next. Overgeneralization -foots and mans -boyses and footses -goed and comed The formation of questions Stage 1: adding wh-form to the beginning or simply using rising intonation Stage 2: more complex expressions,

11、but the rising tone remains Stage 3: the required inversion of subject and verb, but the wh- forms do not always undergo the required version The formation of negatives Stage 1: no or not stuck on the beginning of any expression Stage 2: dont and cant used and with no and not, begin to be place in t

12、he front of the verb rather than at the beginning of the sentence Stage 3: the incorporation of other auxiliary forms such as didnt and wont Overextension: the process of overextending the meaning of a word on the basis of similarities of shape, sound and size, and to a lesser extent, of movement and texture In term of hyponymy, the child first uses the middle level term such as animal-dog-poodle Antonymous relations are acquired fairly late (