1. Unit 11: Language
Comparison, Error Analysis, and
Instructional Implications
By: Caitlin Tramontozzi
Frank Barbrie

2. First Language Acquisition
• First Language Acquisition is often referred to
as the end result of a process of grammar
– the mental system that allows people to speak
and understand language
• A mature language user is able to produce and
understand an unlimited number of novel
sentences

3. Do Children Acquire these Skills?
• Research has indicated that children do
acquire grammatical rules
– This is based upon the speech errors that occur
during the early stages of language acquisition
“Look I goed for
a walk!

4. Language Acquisition
• Errors such as, doed, goed, and runned, tell us as
educators that children must formulate a general
rule that associates all of the past tense with the
ending ed.
• In order to fully understand language acquisition,
the researchers must often look to the study of
phonology, morphology, and syntax for help in
identifying and describing the grammatical
system that children acquire during the first few
years of life.

5. Methods of Data Collection
• Approaches:
– Naturalistic approach: investigators observe and
record children’s spontaneous utterances.
– CHILDS (Children Language Data Exchange System)
• It is important to understand that data
collection does not provide all of the answers
about how the language acquisition process
unfolds

6. Experimental Studies
• These usually employ tasks that test children’s
comprehension, production, or imitation of
skills

7. Phonological Development
• Children seen to be born with a perceptual
system that is especially designed for listening
to speech
• From one month of age, children exhibit the
ability to distinguish among certain speech
sounds
• At six months babbling sounds begin
– This is the beginning of speech development

8. Developmental Order
• Children begin with babbling
– This increases until about the age of twelve
months, here they begin to produce their first
understandable words
• Once a child has acquired fifty or more words
they begin to adopt a fairly regular pattern of
pronunciation

9. Developmental Order
• Vowels are generally acquired before consonants
(age 3)
• Stops tend to be acquired before other
consonants
• Labial are often acquired first, followed by
alveolar, velars, and alveopalatals
– Interdentals are acquired last
• New phonemic contrasts manifest themselves
first in word-initial position.
– The /p/-/b/ contrast, for example, is manifested in
pairs such as, pat-bat before mop-mob

10. Early Phonetic Process
• The ability to perceive the phonemic contrast
of a language develops well in advance of the
ability to produce one.
• The special character of the sound patterns in
children’s early speech lies in the operation of
a limited number of universal phonetic
processes

11. Syllable Deletion
• Syllables bearing the primary or secondary
stress are more noticeable than unstressed
counterparts
• They are more salient to children in the early
stages of language learning
• However, unstressed syllables in the final
position are retained because the end of
words are easier to notice and to remeber

12. Syllable Simplification
• Speech involves the systematic deletion of
certain sounds in order to simplify syllable
structure
– Consonant clusters ae reduced by deleting one or
more segments

13. Substitution
• The replacement of one sound by an
alternative ha the child finds easier to
articulate
– Common substitution includes:
• Stopping: the replacement of a fricative by a
corresponding stop
• Fronting: the moving forward of a sound’s place of
articulation
• Gliding: the replacement of a liquid by a glide
• Denasalizing: the replacement of a nasal stop by a non-
nasal counterpart

14. Assimilation
• The modification of one or more features of a
segment under the influence of neighboring
sounds

15. Vocabulary Development
• Once a child reaches
eighteen months, they
should have a vocabulary of
around fifty words or more
• Noun-like words make up
the single largest class in a
child’s earliest vocabulary
– Verb and adjective-like words
are the next most frequent
categories

16. Strategies for Acquiring Word Meaning
• There are three main strategies
– The Whole Object Assumption: a new word refers
to a whole object
– The Type Assumption: a new word refers to a
type of thing, not just a particular thing
– The Basic Level Assumption: a new word refers to
objects that are alike in basic ways
• Appearance, behavior, etc…)

17. Meaning Errors
• Overextension and Underextension
– Two most typical semantic errors
• Over: the child’s word is more general or
inclusive that that of the corresponding adult
form
• Under: the use of lexical items in an overly
restrictive fashion
• Verb Meanings: errors that occur with verbs
due to syntactic patterns

18. Morphological Development
• Words produced by English-speaking children
seem to lack any internal morphological
structure
– Affixes are systematically absent and most words
consist of a single root morpheme
• Overgeneralization: errors that result of the
overly broad application of a rule
– Adding (s) to irregular verbs to make them plural

19. Developmental Sequence
• An important result of child language is the
development of bound morphemes and
functional categories that takes place in an
orderly fashion
• Determining Factors:
– Frequency
– Syllabicity
– Absence of homophony
– Few or no exceptions in the way it is used
– Allomorphic invariance
– Clearly discernible semantic function

20. Word Formation Process
• Adding suffixes to the end of words is the
major word formation process
• Suffixes that occur with children under the age
of four:
– Er (walker)
I love my
– Ie (doggie) doggie!
– Ing (running)
– Ness (happiness)

21. Syntactic Development
• The emergence of syntactic structure takes place
in an orderly manner and reveals much about the
nature of the language acquisition process
• One Word Stage: can be used to express the type
of meaning that is associated with an entire
sentence in adult speech (holophrases)
– Using the word “dada” to assert “I see daddy”
• Two Word Stage: “mini sentences”
– Baby chair (meaning the baby is sitting on the chair)

22. Later Development
• Children continue to acquire the complex
grammar that underlies adult linguistic
competence
• Children signal yes-no questions by means of
rising intonation alone and auxiliary verbs
appear in statements in child language

23. Wh-Questions
• Emerge gradually between the ages of two
and four
• What and Where are the first words acquired
• Followed by who, how, and why, when, which,
and whose

24. Interpretation of Sentence Structure
• Passive: Children are able to associate
thematic roles with particular structural
positions at a very early point in the
acquisition process
• Children find it much harder to interpret
certain other types of sentences correctly

25. How is Language Acquisition Possible?
• The relationship between input and
acquisition is subtler and more complicated
than one may think
• A connection between of such speech is
caregiver speech
– This helps because it is slow, carefully articulated
speech
• It is easy for children to learn and pronounce

26. Cognitive Development
• Language Acquisition is to a large extent
independent of other types of cognitive
development
– A study of individuals whose general cognitive
development is deficient but whose language is
highly developed
• This implies that mental mechanisms responsible for
acquisition of parts of grammar are relatively
autonomous

27. Inborn Knowledge
• Children are born with prior knowledge
• Language they Acquire will belong to a small
set of syntactic categories combined with
particular ways to create larger phrases
• Not ever feature of language’s grammar can
be inborn
– Vocabulary and morphology must be learned, as
well as syntax