First Language Acquisition – By Silvia Gelosi. 

The aim of this essay is to express my thoughts about how children acquire their first language and to express my views on Chomsky’s theory of FLA. In order to do this, I will base my work on chapter 3 from Vivian Cook’s book Second Language Learning and Teaching.

Children can learn from the positive evidence that they encounter through the process of acquiring the language. I believe that imitation is a positive source of language acquisition. Children imitate what they hear from their parents or other people. However, they also create new utterances. In this process, children apply general grammatical rules. When they use the past form of an irregular verb, in English and Spanish, for example, an English speaker child might say “goed” instead of “went”; a Spanish speaker child might say “rompido” instead of “roto”. Parents correct their children’s errors by saying the precise form, but they do not explain the grammatical rule for verbs in the past form, because they are not aware of the rules for irregular verbs. I agree with the position that claim that in first language acquisition the explanation of the grammar is not very useful. Parents do not possess sufficient knowledge of abstract grammar to explain to their children why the sentence is grammatically incorrect. They simply say the sentence in the right way without providing grammatical explanation. 

I think social interaction is also a significant provider of language input. Children find in the interaction with their parents and other caretakers, examples of expressions and vocabulary to expand their own language. To create linguistic competence, children need to hear a variety of sentences from adults. According to Chomsky, UG is concerned with core grammar rather than with the periphery. Peripheral elements, such as polite expressions like please and thank you, can be learned in ways that are not connected to UG. They may be learnt through active communication with adults.  

When I first read about Chomsky’s theory, what caught my attention was the notion of the Universal Grammar (UG) present in the child’s mind as a system of principles and parameters, within their black box called Language Acquisition device (LAD) and the fact that this device allows all children to learn any languages.

In response to evidence from the environment, the child creates a core grammar that attributes values to all the parameters. This process ends by acquiring one of the allowable human languages. While interacting with their parents, children hear their tongue so UG parameters are set automatically. The input is vital to the process of acquiring the language. Without any evidence at all, they will acquire nothing. With evidence, they will acquire any human language they encounter.

Another aspect of Chomsky’s theory I would like to mention is the conceptualization of language acquisition in terms of initial and final “states” of the mind, which means progressing from not having any language to having full competence. In the beginning there is the mind of the new born-baby who knows no language, named the initial or zero state, and at the end, there is the adult native speaker with full knowledge of it. Competence is essentially complete at this stage.

The studies carried out by Chomsky and other researchers made me aware of the complexity of the process of first language acquisition. Before that, I had never paid attention to the way children construct their language. It is fascinating to see how they all go through the same steps during the process. Finally, and in my personal opinion, the fact that the child’s mind is open to any human language is one of the most interesting concepts of Chomsky’s theory.

Silvia. 

 Listening to Chomsky