INTRODUCTION
1.1
Defenition of Language acquisition
Language
acquisition is very similar to the process of children use in acquiring
first and second languages. It requires meaningful interaction in the target
language natural communication--in which speakers are concerned not with the
form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and
understanding. Language acquisition is important for our understanding of man
in general and of the intellectual development of the child in particular, it
addressed major quiestions about the nature of man, question that have
generated a great deal of lively and often acrimonious debate over the
centuries amongst philosophers and psychologist.
Psycholinguistics has an important social role to play in demonstrating
that all of links in this argument are faulty. The pedagogical emphasis on the
role of language as a tool of cognitive development is. In fact, linguistic
communication plays a very specialized role in cognitive development perhaps
both fasilitating and retarding various aspect of the process. Linguistics
provides the child-language researcher with carefully defined concepts and
units of analysis for the investigation of language, as well as formal
descriptions of the adults knowledge of language, the end point of the child’s
development.
Some
changes in the child’s speech and understanding reflect the growth of
linguistic knowledge, others reflect the development of memory capacity,
attention span, or reasoning ability.
CONTENT
2.1 From sound to
meaning
Phonetics is concerned with how
sounds are produced, transmitted and perceived (we will only look at the production
of sounds). Phonology is concerned with how sounds function in relation to each
other in a language. In other words, phonetics is about sounds of language,
phonology about sound systems of language. Phonetics is a descriptive tool necessary
to the study of the phonological aspects of a language.
For a start, the child must
differenciate between speech sounds and other sounds in his environment,
especially between speech and the other noises produced by the people around
him. The child must know how to produce and discriminate those particular
sounds used as speech elements in his language. Phonetics provides us with a
description of how speech sound in any language are produced by the various
organs of the vocal tract (articulatory phonetics) and a description of the
sound waves themselves (acoustic phonetics).
English has two major classes of
speech sound, consonants and vowels.
a).
Consonant
On the way out the air flow can be more or less
obstructed, producing a consonant, or is simply modified, giving a vowel. If
you pronounce the first sound of the word paper you close your mouth
completely and that is the most obstruction, whereas if you pronounce the first
sound of the word after the mouth is more open than normal, the air
flows as freely as it possibly can.
The
consonants of English are produced by impeding or cutting off a stream of air
expelled from the lungs as it passes through the throat and mouth, sometimes
diverting it through the nose. The phonetic classification of consonant sounds
specifies three variables: (1) their manner of articulation, (2) their place of
articulation, and (3) whether or not they are accompanied by vibration of the
vocal cords.
b).
Vowel
Vowel are produced by the air
expelled from the lungs flowing through the vocal cords and then passing freely
through the mouth and sometimes through the nose. If the vocal cords are
stretched with the righ tension, they vibrate as the air passes through them,
causing sound waves. These sound waves are modified, primarily by the height
and location of the tongue in the mouth and by the shape of the lips, to form
the different vowels. For example, the vowel sound in Pete is produced with the tongue raised near the front of the
mouth, so it is called a high front vowel.
The vowel in pool is produced
with the tongue raised near the back of the mouth, so, it is called high back vowel. Vowels differ in
lenght, in pitch, and in the tenseness of the articulators during their
production. A full phonetic transcription provides symbols that indicate the
value of each attribute in pronounciation of the vowel.
We perceive words as made up of
separate speech sounds, although the acoustic pattern is continuous. There is
in fact no time slice of the stream of speech that can be heard as one of the
stop consonants alone.
2.2 Phonemes-the functional sounds
of a language
The production and discrimination of
the speech sounds of a language is a complicated business, but just being able
to produce and discern all the sound is not enough. All languages group
particular variations of sound into speech units, or phonemes. Phonemes are those categories of sount that function to
signal differences in the words in the language. They are best defined in terms
of contrasting minimal pairs of words that differ by only one sound but have
different meanings. The words pin, bin,
gin, din, shin, kin, chin, thin, fin, win, and tin differ only in their initial sound, In English the following
consonants are voiced: b, d, g, v, ᶞ,
z, Ʒ, l, r, j, w, ʤ, m, n, ŋ, and the following ones are unvoiced: p, t, k, f, Ɵ,
s, ʃ, h, ʧ
4.1
Later Grammer
4.1.1 Phrase structure
Whereas
the two – years – old child uses very simple sentences consesting of single
nouns and verbs, the sligly older child expands theses constituents.The single
noun phrases serving the same gramatical
roles but expressing much richer meaning s.The two-year-old may talkof dog,but
three-or four-year-old will have expended this to that big dog or Mrs.Brown,s
dog or the dog with thewiggly tail.
4.1.2 Noun Phrases
The
simple sentences children produce canbe deveded into two types : thosewith
amain verb between two nouns and those with capula between two nouns ,for
example :
The dog ate candy.
Versus
The puppy is a pest.
So the noun phrases children use can serve four
distinct roles: as subject or object of the first type of sentence,and as
subject or predicate nominative of the second type .
The noun phrases playing these four roles were at first quite distinct. The subject of
capula sentences was often the pronoun it or that ,as in :
That a car.
But the object of copular sentences was never a
pronoun. The subject of sentences with
main verbs was almost always an animate noun, the object inanimate noun , as in :
Man
drives truck.
4.1.3 Verb
Phrases
Among
the earliest verb expansions learned by child are the inflections for the third person ,simple
past tense, and progressive endings .The
first true auxiliaries to appear are the negative ones,don’t,can’t ,and won’t
(a fact that won’t surprise any
parents), but they seem to be mere variations of the word not .For instace , the positive forms do ,can ,and
will only appear later , and the child
at the early stage produces no varians
like doesn’t or didn’t .The full
auxiliary system of engglish blossoms forth shortly after
this period ,around age fuor ( or
MLU 3.5 ).There are some aspectsof verb modulation that the child takes considerably
more time to master ,in particular the hypothetical markings ,such as would and the frefective forms with have. As mentioned earlier,these
seem to await the child’s conceptual development rather than his grammar .
Children
make surprisingly few errors
with verb phrases: for example
,they rarely produce inperative sentences
with auxiliaries or in flections that out of place .
Some wh
–questions allow a verb
phrases in reply ,and discourse
provides evidence that the
child can isolate that constituent
appropriately:
What are your doing? Playing fiddle.
What must I do? Read.
These responses are perfectly
acceptable in discourse even though
they are not whole sentences;
they are known as elipses .
4.1.4 Adverbial
Phrases
The eraliest
type of adverbial constituent to
appear in child speech seems to express location,usually in simple prepositional phrases like on top or in here. Like noun and verb phrases
,adfverbial can be elaborated indefinitely to specify
more exactly ;
On top of the tallest chest of drawers in
the back bedroom .aof specificity
of reference required.)Very late
developments include the adverbs
of time and manner
,reflected again in the
child’s replies to questions. There are also subtle
differences within adverbial phrases of manner . One was drawn to our attention when we where playing with a two – and a half – year- old
girl who had made a “ meal “ from play
do .The dialogue when as follows :
Terry
(2 ½): Look, a meal.
Jill:
Oh, but what are you going to eat it with?
Terry:
with my bib on.
On
another occasion, a child had made play do spaghetti that cried out for
play do meatballs, so we asked him :
Jill:
Oh but what are you going to eat with it?
Alec:
A fork.
Routines
Linguists
have two other other souces of
information abaut the constituent
structure of adult sentences. First, they can ask adults to judge
“belongingness” of certain groups of words, to discover the natural breaks
in sentences . for example, which is amore natural break :
Thounght
that king Kong might appear on my balcony /terrifies me.
The
thought that king kong might appear/on my balcony terrifies me.
Second,
if two constituent structures are possible for a single sentence, an adult will
find it ambiguous ,as in;
4.1.5 Transformations and deep structure
Linguists
studying adult language have found it necessary to distinguish between the
surface structure and the deep structure
of sentences.Bloom (1970 ) has claimed
that young children’s sentences also
have a deep structure richer than
their surface form. If the linguistic description is also correct as a
psychological account, then the child mush be learn the transformasional rulers
that relate deep and surface structure.
Adult
Comprehention
Psychologists
in the early 1960s enthusiastically took up the model of transformational
grammar proposed by Chomsky in 1957. They reasoned as follows: If to describe fully
the meaning of a sentences it is
important to take in to account its deep
structure, surely it also necessary for listener to get to the deep
structure of a sentence he hears.
This
was an exciting step forward towards a model of psychological processes in
sentence comprehentinsion. Up until this point there had only been rather
barren attempts to measure sentence complexity using variables such as length
in words or the probability of certain word sequences.
Child
Speech
In
studying child speech , do we even
concider the derivational
theory of complexity ? Brown argued that
different assumptions are used in applying the theory to child language (Brown
and Herrenstein, 1975). The proceding experiments were testing the hypothesis
that transpormations correspond in some direct way to the mental operations we
perform in decoding a sentence for its meaning, that is, processing speech one we
have acquired language.
At
that time the model of negationin transformation al grammar proposed that
negatives had a separate deep structure that included a negative
“ marker “ At sertain point in the derivation of surface form, this
marker triggered certain transformational rules that inserted a negative morpheme adjacent to the verb. Of
course, true master of all features of
negation takes much longer , especially when indenfinite forms are included. Children
characteristically make errors on indenfinites for many years, which is not at
all surprising given the complexity of
the rules for their combination. Some typical errors are:
I’m
not scared of nothing.
Why
can’t we have no milk ?
He’s
not doing nothing but standing still
I
don’t got no brothers and sisters.
5. The Development of Word Meaning
There are several problems to semantic
development, or the acquisition of meaning. Children’s early sentences express
underlying semantic relation such as agent-action-object, locative, or
processor-possessed. Children also use their utterances to serve different
function – to query, request, describe, deny, and so forth. These functions
represent the pragmatic meanings of sentences, the roles they play and the
purposes they serve in conversations.
A third aspects of semantics
concerns the meanings of the individual words in sentences. The child has to
learn the words for objects, actions, or the properties of those objects and
actions, as well as for the relationship between objects and their positions in
space and time. This task requires far more than simply the association of a
complex sound uttered by an adult with a particular object that may be present at the time.
The words
that the child learns differ in the complexity of their condition of use:
1. At the simplest level come proper names. Here there is
only one referent for each word, though the referent must be recognized through
many transformations arising from changes in clothing, distance, angle of
regard, and so on. Many of the child’s first words are proper names likes Daddy
and Mommy or name their favorite toys.
2. The next level is common noun. The child feels
difficult to map the words onto the appropriate classes of objects, for
example, dogs and chairs. The description of nouns, verbs, and adjectives
greatly oversimplifies their linguistic characterization. Not all nouns refer
to objects (for example, justice or sanity) nor do all verbs refer to actions
or activities that can be seen or heard. More classes of word are not acquired
in childhood.
3. Still more complex are the meanings of relational
words, such as the dimensional adjectives big
and little, tall and short, or thick and thin. The child still assume that elephant is big even the smaller
one. In order to correctly understand the meanings of these adjectives the
child must not only identify the relevant properties of the objects but also
perform a comparison to the standard. So the child should learn about the
antonyms. So again the child’s linguistic knowledge must be mapped onto his
conceptual knowledge about spatial relationships.
4. The most complex relational words that we will
consider in this chapter are certain deictic
expressions. Deictic expressions draw the attention of the hearer to a
particular object in the situation of the utterance, not by naming it, but by
locating it in relation to the speaker. Examples of these are the demonstrative
adjectives, this and that, and the location adverbs, here and there. Deictic expressions of time, like
now, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Children have difficulty in
learning these terms because the implicit standard of distance that constrast this from that or here from there shifts as the context of the
utterance changes.
5.1
The First Terms of Reference
A. Nouns
At
first, a noun may be used by the child almost as a proper name, referring to
only a single object, but he soon extends its use to other objects that are similar in some respect, usually in function
or perceptual form. If an adults introduced them a noun with an article, the
child did not pay attention on it. Otherwise, he will use both, flower or a flower.
1.
Overextensions
The child usually called a doggie not only to the
family mutt and other dogs, but to horses, cows, sheep, and cats as well. With respect
to development, the semantic feature hypothesis suggests that when a child
first begins to produce identifiable words he does not know their full meaning
for adults. Instead, he identifies the meaning of a word with only some subset
of the features or components of meaning that adults might associate with it.
2.
Overextensions
in Comprehension
If a child identifies the meaning of a word with a
single defining feature, let us say doggie
with [four-legged], he should not only overextend the use of that word in
his own speech, but also overextend it in his comprehension of what other
people say. He may call dogs, horses, cows, and cats all doggie, and also be unable to pick out the doggie from a set of animals. Children may also employ this
strategy to discover the correct words for objects, since overextensions of a
word frequently elicit a correction from the parent.
3.
Underextensions
The meanings of word classes sometimes get narrow-down
or differentiation of the meanings of the words. The direction of semantic
development ought therefore to be from word meanings that are too broad towards
more and more specific meanings.
4. Behavioral Equivalence and the
Acquisition of Category Names
Vocabulary
development proceeds in both direction, towards more specific and more general
class names. Sometimes our mother may name coins as dimes or nickles for an
adult but as money for the child.
Similarly, she will name cars as Kijang, Fords, and Toyota for an adult, but as
cars for her young child. To summarize, objects are
named for the child by his parents or other adults at an intermediate level of
generality, usually at the level at which the objects are behaviorally
equivalent for him.
B. Verb and Simple Adjectives
There has been somewhat less systematic study of the child’s
acquisition of simple verbs and adjectives than of his acquisition of nouns.
Most of the early verbs in child’s vocabulary seem to refer to changes in the
objects that he plays with: for example, broke, fell, open; or to his own
actions: jump, run, throw, and so on (Nelson, 1973). In acquiring the color
words, the child first seems to learn that a certain set of words go together
as colors. The child usually guesses a color even it is not true.
C. The Basis for Early Semantic Categories
Much of the child’s early semantic development
consists of the acquisition of names for concepts or categories of objects and
actions, these categories being formed on the basis of similarities in
perceptual or functional attributes. In fact, semantic categories based on both
types of feature seem to occur from the beginning in child’s vocabulary
development.
5.3
Relational Words
Words that specify relationship between people,
objects and events occur quite early in child language, but the meanings of most relational
words are not acquired in all their complexity until the child is four or five,
even older.
A.
Spatial
Adjectives
Considerable research into semantic development has
been focused on the set of spatial relational adjectives: big/little,
tall/short, high/low, long/short, wide/narrow, fat/skinny, thick/thin, and
deep/shallow.
a.
The
Order of Acquisition
In children’s spontaneous descriptions of objects, big
and little are the first of the spatial adjectives to appear, well before any
of the other contrastive pairs (Brown, 1973). For the other pairs of spatial
adjectives, the percentages of appropriate responses dropped off precipitously:
to 45 percent for high/low, 12 percent for thick/thin, 7 percent for
wide/narrow, and only 2 percent for deep/shallow.
1.
Positive
and Negative Poles
Another characteristic of the dimensional adjectives
is that they come in antonymous pairs, one referring to the most extended or
positive, end of the dimension, the other to the least extended or negative,
and end. For three related reasons the word for the positive pole seems to be
primary and that for the negative pole secondary.
2.
Semantic
Confusions
According to the semantic feature hypothesis, the
feature [physical extent] is more general than and prior to [vertical] or [horizontal], since the
latter two specify the dimension along which physical extent is to be measured.
Similarly [vertical] and [horizontal] are logically prior to [positive/negative
pole], since the polar feature specifies which end of the dimension is being
referred to.
B.
Verbs
of Possession
Like the spatial adjectives, the verbs give, take,
pay, trade, spend, buy, and sell form a set of relational words that are linked
together by common components of meaning. For their comprehension they also
require reference to the relationship between the interactors in the
transaction. Children master these verbs in order, from least complex to most complex.
5.4
The Process of
Word Learning
A common account of word learning suggests that the
child imitates the new words that his parents say to him. In a general sense
this must be true, since the child does come to produce the words that he hears
from adults, but immediately mimicking part or the adult’s entire sentence
containing a new word does not seem to be necessary for the acquisition of
words. Some children do imitate utterances containing new words before they use
those words spontaneously in their own speech (Bloom et al.,1974; Lieven, cited
by Ryan, 1973), but most children do not (Leonard and Kaplan, 1976).
CONCLUSION
Second
language acquisition deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults)
of additional languages. The capacity to successfully use language requires one
to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics,
and an extensive vocabulary. Language might be vocalized as speech or manual as
in sign.
Theories
of second-language acquisition are various theories and hypotheses in the field
of second-language acquisition about how people learn a second language.
Research in second-language acquisition is closely related to several
disciplines including linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology, neuroscience,
and education, and consequently most theories of second-language acquisition
can be identified as having roots in one of them. Each of these theories can be
thought of as shedding light on one part of the language learning process;
however, no one overarching theory of second-language acquisition has yet been
widely accepted by researchers.
REFERENCES
Stephen D
Krashen. (1981). “Second Language
Acquisition and Second Language Learning”. University of
Southern California.
Vikner, S. (1986). “Phonetics and Phonology”. Geneva: University of Geneva, dept. Of English.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar