SUMMARY First Language acquisition by Yule

Basic requeriments: a child growing up in the first two or three years interaction with other-languge –user in order to bring the language faculty into operation with a particular language, such as English.

Genre case: a child that does not hear,or is not allowed to use language will learn no language.

Cultural transmition:Tha language a child learns is not genetically inherited but is acquired in a particular language-using enviroment. “ The child must also be physically capable of sending and receiving sound signals in a language” By itself, however, hearing language sounds is not enough.Thecnicial requeriment appears to be the opportunity to interact with other via language.

The acquisition calendar:

The biological calendar,it depends very much to the motivation of the infant’s brain and the lateralization process. If there is some general biological program underlying language acquisition. It is certainly depend on an interplay with social factors in the child enviroment.

Caretaker speech: ( motherese) there are frequent questions, often using exagerated intonation. In theseearly stages, this type of  speech also incorporates a lot of forms associated with “ baby talk”

Also, It is characterized by simple sentences structures and lot of repetion.

Pre-languages stages: the period from about 3-10 months is usually characterized by three stages of sound production in the infant’s developing repertoire.

3 months: the first recognizable sounds are descrbed as cooing with  velar sounds [k] ; [g]

6 months : the sound production at this stage is described as babbling and may contain syllable types sound such as mu-da

9 months: there are recognizable intonation patterns to the consonant and vowel combination being produced.

The one – word holophrastic stage ( 12-15 months) children begin to produce a variety of recognizable single unit utterances this period is called the one-word stage is characterized by speech in which single terms are uttered for everyday objects such as : milk,cat,cup.

The term holophrastic ( a single form functioning as a phrase or sentences)

The two word stage: the child intences to communicate with expressions. By the stage of 2 wether the child is producing 200-400 distinctics words, he or she will be capable of understanding five times as many, and will typically be treated as an entertaining conversational partner by the principal carataker.

Telegraphic speech: 2 and 3 years old, the children will begin producing a large number of utterances which could be classified as multiple-word utterances.  An particular interest is the sequence of inflectional morphemes which ocurrs.

This is characterized by strings of lexical morphemes in phrases such as andrew want ball, cat drink milk.

By the age of two and a half, vocabulary is expanding rapidly and the child is initiating more talk.

By three, the vocabulary has grown to hundreds of words and pronunciation has become closer to the form of the adult language.

The acquisition process:

The child’s linguistic production, is mostly a matter of trying out constructions and testing whether they work or not.

The child can be heard to repeat versions of what adults say and is in the process of adopting a lot of vocabulary from their speech.

Nor does adult correction seem to be as very effective determiner of how the child speaks.

Even when the correction is attempted in a more subtle manner, the child will continue to use a personally construted form.

One factor which seems to be crucial in the child’s acquisition process is the actual use of sound and word combinations, either in interaction with others or in word – play, alone.

Morphology

By the age of 3, the child is going to beyond telegraphic speech forms and incorporating aome of the inflectional morphemes which indicate the grammatical function of the nouns and verbs uses. The first to appear is usually the – ing form in expressions such as cat sitting and mommy reading book. The acquisition of this form is often accompanied by a process of overgenaralization.

Syntax:

Similar evidence against imitation as the basis f child’s speech production has been found in studies of the syntactic structures used by children.

In the formation of questions ans the use of negatives, there appear to be three identifiable stages:Stage 1 ocurrs between 18 and 26 months, stage 2 between 22 and 30 months, and stage 3 between 24 and 40 months.

Questions:

In forming questions,the first stage has two procedures. Symple add a wh-form ( where, who) to the beginning of the expression or utter the expression with a rise in intonation towards the end.

In the second stage, more complex expressions can be formed intonation strategy continues to be used.

In the third stage, the required inversion of subject and verb in English questions has appeared, but the wh- forms do not always undergo the required inversion.

Negatives:

In the case of negatives stage 1 seem to have  simple strategy which says that no or not should be stuck on the beginning of any expression.

In the second stage, the additional negative forms don’t and can’t are used and with no and not, begin to be placed in front of he verb rather than at the beginning of the sentence.

The third stage sees the incorporation of other auxiliary forms such as didn’t and won’t, and the disappearance of the stage 1 forms.

Semantics:

It seems that during the holophrastic stage many children use their limited vocabulary to refer to a large number of unrelated objects.

For example a child used bow-wow to refer to a dog and then to a fur piece with glass eyes,  a set cufflinks and even a bath thermometer. But other child often extend bow-wow to refer to cats, horses, and cows. This process is called overextension and the most common pattern is for the child to overextend the meaning of word on the basis of similarities of shape, sound and size.

Despite the fact that the child is still acquiring aspects of his or her native language through the later years of childhood, it is normally assumed that, by the age of five, the child has completed the greater part of the basic language acquisition process. According to some, the child is then in a good position to start learning a second ( or foreign) language.