SUMMARY First Language acquisition by Brown D. Ch 2

Competence and Perfomance:

Competence is our underlying knowledge of the system of language, rules of grammar, vocabulary, and pieces of language and how those pieces fit together.   

Performance is actual production (speaking, writing) or the comprehension (listening, reading) of linguistic events. 

Performance reflects in some way our linguistic competence. Competence increases by being exposed to different linguistic contexts, by interacting with others, by using the language. It cannot decrease, what seems to decrease is performance.

1.       The Nativist Approach. 

They mainly propose that language is innately predetermined, that we are endowed with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to acquire a language. 

Comprehension and Production:

A willful Act in Sausseran terms, refers to the notion that comprehension is equated to performance.

In Child language, one has to acknowledge the prominence of comprehension over production

we can surely state the comprehension competence runs ahead production competence.

For example: 

A girl told the man her name was Litha, when he said oh, Litha, she replied saying, No, Litha, then he said ah! Lisa, and she replied then Yes, Litha. It shows she was able to understand her name well, and even identify a mistake, but she wasn’t able to produce it.

Brown's chapter says that Language is systematic.

Children make hypotheses permanently, based on the input they have received, and they also test these hypotheses by using them. These hypotheses are changed, reshaped, revised and abandoned.

Sistematicity and Variability:

The process of language acquisition denotes remarkable stages that exhibit children anilities to identify regualrities of the language system. However, there is a great deal of variability in the process of acquisition.

In some cases children are not able to notice commonalities of the system, such as categories of verbs to describe past tense.

The relationship between Language and Thought:

Language affects thought in such a way that it imposes a particular worldview on the speaker. In other words, we see the world in a specific way depending on the language we speak.