Investigating First Language Acquisition of Indonesian Phonemes for Toddlers

This paper describes the acquisition of Indonesian phones of 2.7-year-old children. Data is obtained through qualitative approaches with the aim of describing the facts of language that occur in language acquisition (phonemes) in children as is. The result obtained is that in children aged 2.7 years, all vocal sounds can be pronounced precisely both in the initial, middle and end positions of the word, while for consonant sounds there are still some that are not perfectly spoken. For example, phoneme /s/ if it is at the beginning and middle of the word is pronounced /c/, and at the end position is pronounced /s/. Same with consonsn /l/. This sound can be pronounced perfectly if it is in the starting and final position of the word, but if in the middle position the phoneme is not visible. The phoneme /r/ cannot be pronounced precisely at either the initial, middle or end position of the word.

Constructivist Approaches to First Language Acquisition

Constructivist approaches to language acquisition predict that form-function mappings are derived from distributional patterns in the input, and their contextual embedding. This requires a detailed analysis of the input, and the integration of information from different contingencies. Regarding the acquisition of morphology, it is shown which types of information leads to the induction of (lexical) categories, and to paradigm building. Regarding the acquisition of word order, it is shown how languages with fixed or variable word order profit from stable syntactic hyperschemas, but require a more detailed analyses of the form-function contingencies to identify the underlying, more specific semantic, syntactic and morphological patterns. At a theoretical level, it is shown how findings from acquisition and processing converge into new linguistic theories that aim to account for regular as well as irregular phenomena in language.

FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION ON A THREE-YEAR-OLD CHILD

Studying children’s language acquisition is quite fascinating to be conducted because as we know that the astonishing advancement of their language obtaining from 0 to 3 years or more. The aim of the study is to obtain deep understanding about language acquisition on a three-year old child "Gadis Mardhiyah" and to observe language development of her. Besides, this study uses qualitative approach. In this case, researcher observes her daily conversation in her surrounding in order to get the natural result without any setting. This study was conducted at her house in Bintaro sector 9 Pd. Pucung Tangerang Selatan. Regarding this, the study was conducted for four weeks and preliminary study was done for a month before the researcher doing her observation. Data analysis was carried stage by stage in accordance prior to the focus of the problems. After the data obtained through observation and document inductively processed, then the next step is to define the meaning on the basis of phonological analysis, morphological analysis, syntactical analysis, and discourse analysis. Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that Gadis was able to communicate properly and appropriately according to her age.

Adults adapt to child speech in semantic use

Children acquire their first language while interacting with adults in a highly adaptive manner. While adaptation occurs at many linguistic levels such as syntax and speech complexity, semantic adaptation remains unclear due to the difficulty of efficient meaning extraction. In this study, we examine the adaptation of semantics with a computational approach based on distributional information. We show that adults, in their speech addressed to children, adapt their distributional semantics to that in the speech children produce. By analyzing semantic representations modeled from the Manchester corpus, a large longitudinal acquisition corpus of English, we find striking similarity of semantic development between child and child-directed speech, with a slight time lag in the latter. These findings provide strong evidence for the semantic adaptation in first language acquisition and suggest the important role of child-directed speech in semantic learning.

Universal Grammar: Arguments for its Existence

The first part of this paper discusses the rationale for universal grammar (UG) theory to explain first language acquisition. It also illustrates the issues of language acquisition Chomsky argued which could not be supported by behaviourist theories and shows how Chomsky proposed a solution to this problem through his theoretical model of universal grammar. The next part outlines this theory’s key tenets, arguing that these principles must be an innate endowment of the human mind. Moreover, the study illustrates specific examples of grammatical phenomena that universal grammar seeks to explain. Lastly, it shows that certain distinct grammatical features are linked and that these connections can be explained within the Universal Grammar theoretical framework. The only reasonable explanation for the first language learning needs only limited linguistic exposure to activate them and set criteria for the language being learned for children whose minds have already been wired with essential language concepts.

Preferred sound groups of vocal iconicity reflect evolutionary mechanisms of sound stability and first language acquisition: evidence from Eurasia

In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some degree of form–meaning resemblance, a feature labelled vocal iconicity. Vocal iconicity plays a role in first language acquisition and was likely prominent also in pre-historic language. However, an unsolved question is how vocal iconicity survives sound evolution, which is assumed to be inevitable and ‘blind’ to the meaning of words. We analyse the evolution of sound groups on 1016 basic vocabulary concepts in 107 Eurasian languages, building on automated homologue clustering and sound sequence alignment to infer relative stability of sound groups over time. We correlate this result with the occurrence of sound groups in iconic vocabulary, measured on a cross-linguistic dataset of 344 concepts across single-language samples from 245 families. We find that the sound stability of the Eurasian set correlates with iconic occurrence in the global set. Further, we find that sound stability and iconic occurrence of consonants are connected to acquisition order in the first language, indicating that children acquiring language play a role in maintaining vocal iconicity over time. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages'.

The traceback method in child language acquisition research: identifying patterns in early speech

abstract This paper discusses the traceback method, which has been the basis of some influential papers on first language acquisition. The method sets out to demonstrate that many or even all utterances in a test corpus (usually the last two sessions of recording) can be accounted for with the help of recurrent fixed strings (like What’s that?) or frame-and-slot patterns (like [What’s X?]) that can also be identified in the remaining dataset (i.e., the previous sessions of recording). This is taken as evidence that language learning is much more item-based than previously assumed. In the present paper we sketch the development of the method over the last two decades, and discuss its relation to usage-based theory, as well as the cognitive plausibility of its components, and we highlight both its potential and its limitations.