L1 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

UNIVERSIDAD PEDAGÓGICA EXPERIMENTAL LIBERTADORINSTITUTO PEDAGÓGICO DE CARACAS

DEPARTAMENTO DE IDIOMAS MODERNOSPROGRAMA DE INGLÉS

CÁTEDRA DE LINGÜÍSTICA

April, 2012

Caretaker Speech

Under normal circumstances, in Western cultures, the human infant is certainly helped in his or her language acquisition by the typical behavior of the adults in the home environment. Adults such as mom, dad, granny and grandpa tend not to address the little creature before them as if they are involved in normal adult-to-adult conversation.

Caretaker Speech

Mother: there’s your cup of teaChild: (takes cup)Mother: you drink it nicelyChild: (pretends to drink)

Mother: oh— is that nice?Child: (assents)Mother: will Mummy drink her tea?Child: (assents)Mother: l’ll drink my tea

Caretaker speech is also characterized by simple sentence structures and a lot of repetition. If the child is indeed in the process of working out a sys tem of putting sounds and words together, then these simplified models produced by the interacting adult may serve as good clues to the basic structural organization involved.

Lateralization

The term brain lateralization refers to the fact that the two halves of thehuman brain are not exactly alike. Each hemisphere has functionalspecializations: some function whose neural mechanisms are localizedprimarily in one half of the brain.

Lateralization

In humans, the most obvious functional specialization is speech and languageabilities. In the mid-1800s, Paul Broca (a French neurosurgeon) identified aparticular area of the left hemisphere that plays a primary role in speechproduction. Shortly afterwards, a German neurologist, Carl Wernicke,identified another part of the left hemisphere primarily concerned withlanguage comprehension.

Lateralization

Even thought the two hemispheres have different functions they do not work independently of each other. They communicate back and forth across the corpus callosum. This is not an equal partnership however, one hemisphere usually dominates over the other, an effect best illustrated by the fact that most people are only good with either their right or left hand. In most cases the left hemisphere is believed to be the dominate hemisphere

The general belief is that during childhood (up until puberty), there is a period when the human brain is most ready to 'receive' and learn a particular language.This period is referred to as the critical period. If a child does not acquire language during this period, for any one of a number of reasons, then he or she will have great difficulty learning language later on.

Critical Period

Motherese

Many studies were undertaken to see what the effects of the way a mother spoke to her baby had on the language learning process. This type of speech was coined "motherese" and "caregiver" talk.

Motherese

Motherese plays an important role in first language acquisition and that it also has special functions that are shown to be present in second language acquisition.

Motherese serves three purposes: 1. To aid in communication 2. To teach language and 3. To socialize the child (Ferguson 1977). The first appears to be the most important for a mother and child because the main motivation is to communicate, to understand, to be understood and to keep two minds focused on the same topic (Brown 1977)

Hi baby!!

How Adults Support Children's Language Learning

Motherese

When adults are helping infants learn to talk, it is remarkable how much of this "help" comes naturally and unconsciously. Take the case of a mother engaged in face-to-face play with a six-month-old child.• The mother gazes into the child's face and raises the pitch of her voice

to a high register• .• She makes swooping changes from low to high, from soft to loud.• She exaggerates consonant sounds, and stretches out vowel sounds.• She speaks in sentences with few words and simple syntax.• She leaves pauses in her utterances: she speaks and waits, speaks and

waits, as if she were inviting the baby into a conversation and showing him where to slot his utterances.

Baby Talk

The simple language forms used by young children, or the modified form of speech often used by adults with young children. Also known as motherese.

Motherese is the consciously imperfect or altered speech used by adults in speaking to small children ( Merriam-Webster, 2010)

Baby Talk

Examples and Observations

Linguists who have studied the structure of baby talk words have pointed out that there are some typical sound change rules that relate the baby talk word to its adult equivalent. For instance, reduction of the word to a shorter form is common, as is reduplication of the short form, hence, words such as 'din din' and 'bye bye.' It is not clear, however, how some baby talk words were derived: no simple rule explains how rabbits turned into bunnies.

Baby Talk

Reduplication (repetition) in Baby Talk

It may be agreed that reduplication is a "general pattern that all children follow in varying degrees" (Fee & Ingram 1980). Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) is repeated exactly or with a slight change.(British Encyclopedia, 2010)

'Baby words' like doggie or moo-cow do not help a child to learn language more efficiently. The reduplication of sounds in words like baba and dada, on the other hand, does enable babies to communicate because the words are easy to say."(Sara Thorne, Mastering Advanced English Language. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

Baby TalkUsing Baby Talk With the Elderly

"Caporael (1981) focused on the use of displaced baby talk to the institutionalized elderly. Baby talk is a simplified speech pattern with distinctive paralinguistic features of high pitch and exaggerated intonation contour that is usually associated with speech to young children. More than 22% of speech to residents in one nursing home was identified as baby talk. Further, even talk from caregivers to the elderly that was not identified as baby talk was more likely to be judged as directed toward a child than was talk between caregivers.

Thanks!!

REFERENCES

Norquist, R (2012) Definition and examples of baby talk[Document on line] About.English. Available: http://grammar.about.com/od/ab/g/babytalkterm.htm?p=1[Searched: 2012 April]

Gazzaniga, M (2011) What is Lateralization? [Document on line] The Psychology Career Center . Available: http://www.allpsychologycareers.com/topics/lateralization-right-brain-left-brain.html [Searched: 2012 April]

Yule, G (1996). The study of Language. Second Edition. Cambridge University Press . UK.

Temple, J. et al (eds) (2011) "Motherese": How Adults Support Children'sLanguage Learning [Document on line] Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall. Available: http://www.education.com/print/motherese-support-children-language-learning/ [Searched: 2012 April]