CHAPTER 1: LEARNING A FIRST LANGUAGE.
Infants are able to hear subtle differences between sounds of human language.
By end of one year they can understand a few frequently used words. They can produce a couple of words that are recognizable.
By age 2, 50 words, and combine these words into simple sentences.
o Mommy juice .
o Telegraphic sentences: the leave out many auxiliary verb, articles, prepositions, etc.
o They are recognized as sentences even though function word and grammatical morphemes are missing, the word order reflects the language they are hearing.
By age 3-4, most children ask questions or give commands, report real events, and create stories about imaginary ones-complete with correct grammatical morphemes.
By 4 children have mastered the basic structures of the language.
Metalinguistic awareness: the ability to read language as an object, separate from the meaning it conveys-develops more slowly. Major metalinguistic awareness occurs when kids learn to read.
MA includes the discovery of things such as ambiguity- words and sentences that have multiple meanings. Gives kids access to word jokes, trick questions, riddles.
Simultaneous bilinguals: learn and hear more than one language from birth on.
Sequential bilinguals: learn second language later.
Subtractive bilinguals: cut off from family language as they are emerged in the second language. Children are caught because they have not had time to master the first language.
Developmental Sequences.
Grammatical morphemes: .
o Roger brown said that they develop in sequences (5) kids who have mastered the bottom of the list was sure to have mastered the top.
o Order of acquisition.
o Longitudinal study: over a period of time.
Negation: learn to deny, reject, disagree with and refuse something.
o Stage one: first neg, usually expressed by the word "no- in a simple sentence.
o Stage 2: utterances grow longer, sentence subject is included, and the negative usually appears before the verb.