1. Language
Acquisition
How do we learn the language we know?
What is going on when it doesn’t happen as we might
expect?

2. Basic Assumptions
• Some normal babies produce no words until they are at least two
years old
• Babies can learn to speak using the television
• Babies of deaf parents say their first word before babies of
speaking parents
• Language acquisition is innate for so a baby locked in a room for
four years with little human contact will still learn to speak
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• Are the following true or false?
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3. cont ..
• Babies learn baby talk from their parents
• Bilingual children are often slow to talk
• Babies who can only say two words cannot make themselves
clear
• It matters how much you talk to your baby
• You can speed up children’s language development
• At birth any child can learn any language fluently
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• Are the following true or false?
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4. • Language is acquired, not ‘learned’. Language is an instinct
and not a learned skill like playing the piano or riding a
bicycle.
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The Big Three
• The main theories which have tried to explain how this
happens are:
• Imitation theory
• Reinforcement theory
• Innateness and Active Construction of Grammar theory
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5. Imitation theory
• Children produce many things not in the adult grammar
• Children make consistent, predictable errors that cannot be
attributed to mispronunciation and which still are not ever heard
in the adult grammar
• Children can produce and understand novel sentences
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• We learn language by memorising words and sentences.
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6. Reinforcement theory
• Parents actually don't seem to correct children's grammar as
much as we might think, and they don't praise them for using
proper adult grammatical constructions either.
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• It’s just like dog training!
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7. • The brain of human beings is genetically predisposed for
language. Just as we are made to have two arms and are
designed to walk, we are made to talk.
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Innateness theory
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8. Disorders | Distinctions
• Acquired disorders
• Developmental disorders
• The acquisition of speech or language ability is impaired
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• Previously learned speech or language ability becomes impaired
• Language Deviance
• I saw man the on his bike
• /hot/ /kot/
• Language Delay
• Where language is still immature for the child’s age
• A time-lapse has been noticed
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9. Disorders | Distinctions
• Before we can say what is abnormal we need to reference experience
against norms
• Normal
•
•
•
•
•
•
What norm should the child be compared with?
How should the child be speaking?
What dialect is the child exposed to?
How much language should the child have acquired by her age?
What is the child’s gender? (rate of acquisition is faster in girls)
What is the social background? (there are differences in expectations
parents have about their child’s language which may relate to social
class)
NB special difficulties with bilinguals, immigrants, physically
disabled, and other exceptional groups.
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• Abnormal
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10. Specific Language Disorders
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
There are no deafness or sensory-perceptual deficit
No motor disorder
No evidence of global learning difficulties
No psychiatric difficulty (severe emotional problems)
Learning environments are adequate
Parenting patterns are not unusual
No evidence of gross neurological impairment
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• Developmental Language Disorders: Diagnosis by Exclusion
But the child is noticeably behind their chronological peers in their
ability to produce and comprehend speech.
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11. • These disorders are a result of a more fundamental deficit of a
cognitive nature. Evidence:
• Problems with auditory perception
• Problems in auditory storage capacity (very poor auditory shortterm memory)
• Difficulties in processing auditory information quickly
• Problems in understanding sequences presented auditorily
• Poor rhythmical abilities
• Poor awareness of symbolic behaviour (ie what is involved in play
or the meanings of a gesture)
• High level of distractibility and disorganisation
These deficits effect their speech and speech processing abilities
Work on the deficit and speech improves
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Hypothesis 1
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12. Hypothesis 2
• Phonological (difficulties in learning the sound system of their
language)
• Grammatical
• Morphology and ability to combine linguistic unit to form
phrases, clauses and strings of sentences
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• The disorders are a result of a deficit in the linguistic processing
system. Difficulties are:
• Semantic
• Limited vocabulary
• Errors in word use
• Difficulty finding appropriate words
• Pragmatic
• Unwilling to engage in conversation
• Will talk if talked to
• Will engage in conversation but who introduce their own rules
(introducing irrelevant topics , echoing, replying to their own questions)
• Will carry on a generally normal conversation with ‘odd’ remarks (asking
why at the wrong point for e.g.)
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13. Both hypotheses are right some of
the time
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Conclusion
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