ORDEROFACQUISITION
المؤلف:
John Field
المصدر:
Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P194
2025-09-21
365
ORDEROFACQUISITION
A fixed order in which an infant acquires the syntactic, morphological or phonological features of its target language. If a natural order of this kind exists, it might provide evidence in support of the nativist notion that human beings are innately endowed with a Universal Grammar which determines the way in which their first language is acquired.
Early evidence from so-called morpheme studies suggested that certain inflections of English were indeed acquired in a fixed order. The age and rate at which they were acquired by the infant might vary; but the order remained relatively constant. The first inflection acquired (between 19 and 28 months) is usually-ing as in Mommy driving. It is followed by the-s plural at 27 to 33 months. Next come the possessive and the irregular Past Simple. The features selected for these studies included function words as well as inflections. Some of the functors (e.g. prepositions) were semantically quite transparent and shown to be acquired early; others (e.g. the articles) were more complex and delayed.
The results were not as conclusive as is sometimes suggested: they showed a considerable time overlap between certain features. In addition, there are a number of serious problems with this kind of study– not least the difficulty of establishing at what point a child can be treated as having ‘acquired’ a particular form. The usual yardstick is 90 per cent accuracy of use, but this ignores the fact that the child might have mastered the form receptively long before producing it. Furthermore, many inflections first occur attached to a limited set of words– suggesting that these particular items may have been acquired as a single unit. A further problem in determining ‘acquisition’ is that, after apparently mastering a form, the child may show signs of U- shaped development where the correct form is replaced by an erroneous one. Finally, considerations of meaning as well as form may be involved: -ing tends to appear first on durative verbs (e.g. driving) and-ed on verbs of rapid action (dropped). This suggests that these forms are first acquired as unanalysed vocabulary items.
Later research has considered semantic as well as formal criteria. It suggested that deixis (this, that, here, there) emerges early, though infants have difficulty in adjusting to the viewpoint of their co-locutor. There seems to be considerable variation in the age at which definite and indefinite articles are used consistently, though the distinction between commonand proper nouns (That’s Dax vs That’s a dax) is grasped quite quickly. It has been noted that subject pronouns are often absent from early utterances. I and it tend to appear before you, singular forms before plural and masculine before feminine.
If there is indeed a consistent order of acquisition for certain inflections and syntactic features, the reasons may lie within the language being acquired rather than in the projections of a universal grammar. It appears that the frequency with which an item occurs in adult speech does not correlate with the speed at which an infant acquires it. Instead, cross-lingual studies have suggested that the order of acquisition may reflect the relative difficulty of a feature within a particular language. Thus the plural is acquired quite early in English but later in Arabic (which has a dual form as well as a plural and distinguishes gender). Similarly, gender emerges early in English, where it is related to natural gender and chiefly affects the he/she contrast; but much later in Fulani, a West African language which is remarkable for having 12 genders.
Variations may also reflect the relative importance of a feature. Children acquiring highly inflected languages (Russian, Hungarian) show an early sensitivity to inflections. There is evidence of rapid and accurate mastery of inflections among children acquiring Greenlandic Eskimo, Japanese, Turkish and German. Similarly, in languages where word order is important, children seem to recognise the importance of order very early.
Variation in order of acquisition between languages is neatly accounted for in Chomskyan theory by suggesting that the infant has to set certain parameters in relation to the language it is acquiring (for example, it has to determine whether the language licenses the omission of subject pronouns or not). Order of acquisition thus reflects the relative difficulty of setting different parameters.
One theory in the Chomskyan tradition (Radford, 1990) suggests that infants start out with an innate grammar that is based upon a reduced system, lacking inflections, determiners and complementiser phrases (I know that he is innocent). The order in which features of language are acquired is determined by the gradual development of these tree branches within the child’s grammar.
See also: Language acquisition: stages, Syntactic development
Further reading: Aitchison (1998: Chap. 4); Fletcher and Garman (1986: 307–447); Foster-Cohen (1999: Chaps 6–7); Slobin (1982)
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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