First Language Acquisition
First language acquisition is the process by which infants and children acquire the language or languages of their community without formal instruction.
Definition
The acquisition of one's native language during early childhood through exposure to and interaction with language users.
Scope
This topic covers the typical developmental sequence from speech perception and babbling through first words, vocabulary growth, and the emergence of grammar and morphology, along with the methods (longitudinal corpora, the wug test, looking-time measures) used to study it. It describes what children do and when, and the inferences drawn about underlying mechanisms.
Core questions
- What is the typical sequence and timing of early language milestones?
- How do children acquire productive morphological and grammatical rules?
- What does children's overregularization reveal about rule learning?
Key concepts
- babbling
- the one-word stage
- mean length of utterance
- overregularization
- fast mapping
Key theories
- Usage-based acquisition
- Children build grammar from item-based constructions abstracted out of concrete utterances through general cognitive and social-pragmatic learning.
- Productive rule acquisition (the wug test)
- Berko's demonstration that young children apply morphological rules to novel words shows they extract productive grammatical patterns rather than memorizing forms.
History
Systematic study of children's grammar advanced with Brown's longitudinal work in the 1960s and 1970s establishing developmental stages, and Berko's 1958 wug test demonstrating productive morphological knowledge in preschoolers.
Debates
- Rules versus statistics in morphological development
- Whether children's productive morphology reflects symbolic rules or the gradual statistical learning of patterns, a debate sharpened by overregularization errors.
Key figures
- Roger Brown
- Jean Berko Gleason
- Michael Tomasello
Related topics
Seminal works
- brown1973
- berko1958
- tomasello2003
Frequently asked questions
- Why do children say 'goed' and 'foots'?
- These overregularizations show that children have extracted productive rules (add '-ed', add '-s') and apply them even to irregular words, rather than simply imitating adult speech.