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Word Order Acquisition between Comprehension and Production

Introduction:

Language acquisition begins very early in human lifespan and begins logically with the acquisition of sound patterns. Vocabulary grouth increase and primitive syntax begins with two –words strings. 80, syntax in first language acquisition is the fours of this paper, or more specifically, the acquisition of word order by Algerian children. The acquisition of word order weans acquisition the accepted ways into which already acquisition content and function words are fitted together to produce acceptable sentences. Many researchers agree that by approximately the age of four or fire, a normal child masters and uses a highly sophisticated but organized system of communication à (language), but the questions that I raise are the following. • How does word acquisition develop? • Does comprehension of word precedes its production? • What is the nature of telegraphic speech?

Stages of language acquisition:

In fact, there are fire stages of language acquisition process; crying and cooing, babbling, holophrastic stage, two-word stage and telegraphic stage. Since our objective is related to syntax acquisition, it is enough to focus on the last three stages.

The holophrastic stage: (12-16 months)

It is a stage where children start producing single-word utterances. They are referred to as one-word sentences because they express the rudimentary meanings of sentences. For examples,”ball” may mean,”I want a ball”, buy me a ball, «bring me a ball”. The words at this stage belong to concrete things which the child sees and touches. They do not contain any grammatical bound morphemes. This assumes that fumet: onal categories, which have a syntactic role in lges, such as morphemes referring to person, number, tense, gender are produced only after the lexical categories. Radford 1990. McKee contrasts what she refus to as grammatical poverty, i.e. lack of inflectional morphemes in a language, and performance poverty, i.e. the non-appearance of such morphemes in the speech of children. She explained the lack of bound morphemes in the utterances of young children as impoverished competence. According to many acquisitionists, the end of the holo phrastic stage is often characterized by the successive production of single words: successive – single- word utterances. According to Fonagy (1972), there are four stages of successive single wor utterances: Stage1: each word has the same intonational cantour and a primary stress. It is only their closeness in times which suggests any relation. Stage2: there is still a pause between the words, and each has a primary stress. The terminal falling pitch of the word, however, is not as great as that for the second one. Stage3: the stress on the first word is weaker than that on the second one, and the pause between them is reduced. Stage4: there is no longer a pause between the tow words. A succession of tow words is still indicated because of: the force of the tow accents, frequently a glottal stop occurring between the words, and the terminal falling pitch of the first word.

The two-word stage: (16-20 months)

In this stage, there is a variety of combinations, and adults interpretation of such combinations is very much tied to the context of their utterances. For examples, mammy eats, baby chair … An important characteristic of this stage is that utterances reflect the two basic components of the sentence: subject and predicate Another characteristic is the systematic appear once of syntactic constituents in the utterances produced VP. PP.

The telegraphic stage: 2-3 or 4 years

The child will begin producing a large number of utterances which could be classified as multiple-word utterances. The language at this stage seems to exhibit the basic syntactic patterns of language, however, is not yet an adult language. The child has clearly developed some sentence-building capacity and can order the forms correctly in which there is a clear increase in the mean length of utterances (MLU) (Brown 1973); that is, the average length of utterances consisting mainly of more than two lexical words, i.e. non-functional words. For example, “mammy go home”. We have mentioned these stages for two reasons; one is because the grammatical development has received the lion’s share in the stages of language acquisition. The other reason is for choosing the sample on which we will apply the theoretical work. Views abort word order acquisition: Sentences of English and other languages are originated simultaneously ints linear and hierarchical structures and native speakers, including children, whenever they speak, they ancon sciously use the constituent structure rules of the language to produce sentences. Some linguists suggest that sentence-structure in all languages derives from perceptual and motor organization; the percepto-motor system. Aspects of sentence structure have their origin in the vision or action neural systems and include predicate from SVO, VS … The neural souses for these forms are to be found in what Gregory named the grammar of vision or what Lashley described as The grammar of action. Action is necessarily serially ordered and speech as a form of action, also as to be expressed in a serial string. Roger Brown published an expire mental study, which provides evidence that syntactic organization determines how utterances will be understood by children. He provides credence for the “psychological reality” of syntactic categories in which human beings manage to develop their extensive lexicons and understanding the syntax of their language use. Steven pinker (1984) has constructed a theory of child language development consistent with what we know from observasion and empirical research regareting the acquisition of English. Most importantly:  Language develops gradually in the child.  There is rapid and error free development of word order in sentences. What is acquired is a system of rules which are abstract. N V N is the correct word order for declarative sentence. It is necessary for the theory to explain how the child initially figures out which of the words he hears are nouns, which are verbs since from the beginning, children’s multi-word constractions follow the word order. The child has to learn that “hit” is a verb that requires a subject and object and in this way, he acquires the core word order of this language.

Word order; comprehension and production:

We have already, at the beginning raised a question about which one comes first; comprehension or production of word order. To identify this relation, linguists have different views. Some of them like Hirsh and Glolinkoff (1991) claim that comprehension of word order precedes its production. Some others like Champ man and Kohn (1978), Champ man and Miller (1975) view that production precedes comprehension, where as Bloom (1978) says that both appear contemporarily. So, would children not yet producing multiword speech show comprehension of word order? This leads us to mention: Recently, experiments have been developed which allow researchers to test children’s passive knowledge of syntax. These experiments show that children as young as 16 or 17 months, who have a productive vocabulary of just a few words and who are not yet able to produce multi-word utterances, are never the less sensitive to the differences in meaning signaled by word order. In a technique called: The Preferential Booking Paradigm done by Hirsh Pasek and Golin Koff (1996), children are aurally presented with sentences followed by video display depicting different scenes, one of which corresponds to the sentence heard. Results show that when children hear a sentence such as: “Birt’s Tickling Ernie”, they will respond move to a video depicting “Birt is ticking Ernie” than to the video depicting “Ernie is tickling Birt”. Results such as these show that children have know ledge of grammar before they use it productively.

Clause structure and functional categories: (nature of telegraphic speech) Yong children frequently drop functional elements from their utterances. This early language is called telegraphic speech. Adults send a telegram trying to save money, but why do children drop these elements? There are various theories concerning this telegraphic speech:

Prefunctional grammar:

This theory claims that the early grammar is prefunctional, and children’s phase structure representations consist of lexical words only; that is NP.VP. One instruction of this is the small clause hypothesis, according to which children’s early sentences are structurally aquivalent to adult small clauses.

Metrical hypo thesis:

Some acquisitionists explain the nature of telegraphic speech phonologically. Function morphemes usually occur in unstressed syllable in English, so, various studies have shown that in experimental settings, children tend to omit function morphemes when they occur in an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, and they are less inclined to drop unstressed function morphemes when they follow a stressed syllable. Eg: the bear kissed Jane Jane kissed her

Pragmatic hypothesis:

Omition of functional elements is related to the child’s knowledge of pragmatics. Pragmatic concerns the rules of language use, including how sentences fit ints a larger discourse and non- linguistic context. Elements such as pronouns and definite articles require discourse antecedents other wise their reference will not be clear. Children often fail to make explicit information which can be inferred from context. For example, a child might simply open a discourse by saying: “eat bread” assuming that the reference is clean to the interlocutor. He assumes that the information is available through discourse context or that the background information is shared between speaker and hearer. Since our aim of this study is to investigate how Algerian children acquire syntax (word order), in my point of view, we can exclude the metrical hypothesis because it seems mechanical as it does not fit to Arabic language. We would rather explain telegraphic speech as a result of prefunctional grammar in which elements though do not occur in speech, perhaps the child is sensitive to and aware of these systems in comprehension; that is to say, innate capacity justifies this ability. Yet, I cannot neglect the pragmatic hypothesis which is not worthy. However, these suggestions will be tested in the analysis in the coming section.

Analysis of word order acquisition of Algerian children:

For the practical part of this essay, I have chosen two children whose ages are one year and a half, and two years and two months. This selection, in fact, was not randomly but on purpose because, first of all, I want to test the relation between comprehendsion and production of word order in the first child “halima” in which it fits to the best stage to test whether children not yet producing multi-word speech can comprehend word order. As far as the second child is concerned (Amin), I like to investigate the nature of his telegraphic speech. Halima: one year and a half She utters only single words, she can repeat the same word twice, but rarely says two words and if she does, these is a clean pause in between. These words are related to her need and maimly interpretable as requests. Eg: Boubou milk Ma water Balo ball To test her comprehension of word order, I used a technique in which I give her Utterances and see her reaction. Eg: Zahia hit Mariam No reaction (Zahia: her mother) Mariam hit zaria She started crying (Mariam: her ant)

 She has the ability to understand the relation between parts of the sentence;the subject and the predicate. So, we can say that comprehention of word order preedes its production; it is what Slobin (1979) refers to “passive grammar” in which although the child does not string his or her words ints phrases, he can comprehend some of the grammatical patterns. Slobin proposes comprehension compltence and production incompetence. Linguistically speating, we see that word order is already there.

Another point which is noteworthy in this stage has to deal with functional categories. In English language, children’s one-word ulterances do not contain any grammatical bound morphemes. These functional categories, gender, which have a syntactic role in languages such as morphemes referring to person, gender, tense …are produced only after the lexical categories. However, Arabic is more morphologic cally complex language where one-word utterances contain bound morphemes referring to various grammatical notions. So functional categories appear early in children acquiring Arabic.

Amin: two years and a half

He does not only comprehend sentences but he produces them, yat again they are not like adult utterances. His utterances reflect basic components of a sentence SV, VS … Eg: 1- mama kharget mummy went out 2- rahet tofla girl went 3- klehe halwa he ate it sweets What we notice from these examples is that despite certain elements are missing, the order of the major elements is correct. Also, he does not only use short sentences but longer and more complex ones. Eg: 4- I aoker him: when the dog comes, what will you do? He said: nejri, nothorbo bdabous wntaiho (I run, hit it with stick and make him doun ti earth). So, here, we have a correct word order as well as pronouns refer correctly to the object. In both examples, 2 and 4, we notice the absence of the definite article, and the example 3, we notice subject deletion. So in this respect, we night support the pragmatic hypothesis as a justification of these elements in which the child assumes that the reference is clear to the hearer. If we compare children acquiring English, to those acquiring Arabic, we find that the forms use infinitives in root clauses eg: mummy go, whereas the latter do not because of the nature of each language. Eg: mama rahet not man rah (infinitive). As well, in algerian language, some functional words such as those reefing to tense, eg: ani j a : (I am caming) or thork nj: do not occur at an early age but latter like children in other languages. Here, we use the prefunctional grammar hypothesis in which the absence of the absence of there elements is justified by the nature of the child’s grammar its elf and may utterances an not modeled by adult speakers and this may shed light on the nature of inrate linguistic knowledge.

Conclusion:

We have seen so far the development of syntax acquisition at the level of pre-schooling age and parti cularly, we have anly sed the word order acquisition by Algerian children. Infact, they start producing primitive word order in two-word utterances like all children all over the world. We have reacheda set of results;  Unlike other levels of acquisition, comprehension precedes production in acquining word order;  Word order is acquired relatively at short time with error free development;  Since the acquisition of word order is acquiring both empty and content words, Algerian children have much earlier acquisition of emty words unlike the English children;  It is a universal thing that the semantic knouledge exists already before syntax in which children have comprehension competen and production incompeter befor multi-word stage;  It is true that creativity shows up at partiwlarly at all levels of language acquisitor, but it is the multi-word stage that children start create their own sentences in the sense that they often come up with complete sentences of their own.

References:

1- Mc donongh, (1981), psychology foreign language teaching, London. 2- HSN Mc Farland (1971), psychological theory and education al practice , London. 3- Moha ennaji, Fatima saide qui (1994) applications of moder linguistic, afrique orient. 4- Matilda holzman, (1997), the language of children ; evolution and development seconday consciousness and language. 5- www.google.com.