PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

The Study of First Language Acquisition

Lecturer: Normalia Sirande, SS., M.Pd.

Created by Team 1:
Aksa
Aliviah Nabila Putri
Siti Sakinah
Bonaventura
Ratna Sari
Kesya
Lembang
Moris

ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION DEPARTEMENT

FACULTY OF TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION

UKI TORAJA,UNISMUH MAKASSAR,UKDW JOGJA

2022
 CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the study

Language acquisition is just one of psycholinguistics which is all about
how people learn to speak and the mental processes involved.
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological
and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend
and produce language. Language acquisition is the process by which humans
acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and
communicate. Language development is a complex and unique human quality
but yet children seem to acquire language at a very rapid rate with most
children's speech being relatively grammatical by age three (Crain & Lillo-
Martin, 1999). However, learning a first language is something that every
normal child does successfully without much need for formal lessons.

Children acquisition of language has long been considered one of the

uniquely defining characteristics of human behavior. Today, it is still the
commonly held belief that children acquire their mother tongue through
imitation of the parents and the people around their environment. Many
psychologists feel that the study of the process whereby children learn to speak
and understand language holds the key to many fundamental problem of
behavior.

B. Focus of the Study

From the background of the study above, the writer focuses on two
subjects. They are; the relationship between the children and mother in first
language, and the influence of the behavior in first language acquisition. The
subject of this research are four children from different age, family, and
different background.
C. Significance of the Study
The result of this study will be beneficial and give contributions to the
following:
1. For the English Department students
English department students can enrich their knowledge and
understanding about psycholinguistics especially first language
acquisition. Besides, the writer hopes that this research finding will be
useful for language learner as means of improving their
psycholinguistic knowledge of the children utterances or children
language.
2. For the other researcher
The findings of this research can be used as a reference for further
studies dealing with psycholinguistics study, especially the use of first
language acquisition.
 CHAPTER II

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

A. Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the

psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use,
comprehend and produce language. Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive
processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful
sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes
that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc.

Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability

to learn language, usually with experimental or at least quantitative methods
(as opposed to naturalistic observations such as those made by Jean Piaget in
his research on the development of children). Psycholinguistics is
interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such
as psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics.

According to Taylor (1990:3) says that psycholinguistics is the study of

language behavior: how real (rather than ideal) people learn and use language
to communicate ideas. It means that in learning language the people should
acquire, comprehend, produce and store language in order to have a good
language.

Psycholinguistics is well-known as language development. According

to Scovel (2009:4) state that the use of language and speech as a window to the
nature and structure of the human mind is called psycholinguistics. It also
discusses the process of children language development and theories of firs
language acquisition and second language acquisition. Development
psycholinguistics tries to inject some objective and system into study of
language acquisition (Taylor, 1990:228). "In general, psycholinguistic studies
have revealed that many of the concepts employed in the analysis of sound
 structure, word structure, and sentence structure also play a role in language
processing. However, an account of language processing also requires that we
understand how these linguistic concepts interact with other aspects of human
processing to enable language production and comprehension." (William
O'Grady, et al., Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. Bedford/St.
Martin's, 2001)

B. First Language
The term first language acquisition refers to children's natural
acquisition of the language or languages they hear from birth. It is
distinguished from second language acquisition, which begins later, and from
foreign language learning, which typically involves formal instruction. There is
strong evidence that children may never acquire a language if they have not
been exposed to a language before they reach the age of 6 or 7. Children
between the ages of 2 and 6 acquire language so rapidly that by 6 they are
competent language users. By the time children are of school-age, they have an
amazing language ability; it is a seemingly effortless acquisition (Cole & Cole,
1993).
First language acquisition is a rapid process. In the span of just a few
years, newborn infants who neither speak nor understand any language become
young children who comment, question, and express their ideas in the language
of their community. This change does not occur all at once. First, newborns'
cries give way to coos and babbles. Then, infants who coo and babble start to
show signs of comprehension such as turning when they hear their name.
Infants then become toddlers who say “bye-bye” and “all gone” and start to
label the people and objects in their environment. As their vocabularies
continue to grow, children start to combine words. Children's first word
combinations, such as “all gone juice” and “read me,” are short and are missing
parts found in adults' sentences. Gradually children's immature sentences are
replaced by longer and more adult like sentences. As children learn to talk,
 their comprehension abilities also develop, typically in advance of their
productive speech. As children master language, they also become masters at
using language to communicate. One-year-olds who can only point and label
become 2-year-olds who comment, question, and command, and 4-year-olds
who can carry on coherent conversations. Studies of middle-class, typically
developing children acquiring English have documented that by four years of
age children are nearly adult like in phonological properties of their speech;
they have vocabularies of several thousand words, and they produce most of
the types of structures observable in the speech of adults (Hoff, 2008).

C. Language Acquisition
Language acquisition is the process how people learn languages. It
begins from receive and comprehend language then producing language (using
words) to communicate to others. Language acquisition is one of the
quintessential human traits, because nonhumans do not communicate by using
language. Language acquisition usually refers to first-language acquisition,
which studies infants' acquisition of their native language. This is distinguished
from second-language acquisition, which 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.

D. First Language Acquisition

First language acquisition is a process of acquiring or learning first
language (mother tongue). There are many theories about first language
acquisition. They are:
1. Behaviorism
One of the best-known attempts to construct a behaviorism model of
linguistics behavior was embodied B.F.Skinner’s classic, verbal behavior
(1957) to environmental circumstances and effect of it. A child come into
this world with a tabularasa, a clean sheet bearing no preconceived
 notions about the world or about language. This child are then shaped by
the environment and slowly conditioned through various schedules of
reinforcement. It explains that a child can acquire mother tongue because
of stimulus or habit formation factor. It is derived from child environment
such as his/her family. The stages of behaviorism are:
 Imitation
 Repetition
 Memorization
 Controlled drilling
 Reinforcement

The children start to imitate (imitation) their mother tongue. Then

they repeat (repetition) their mother tongue or words for several times.
Next, they memorize (memorization), to improve their language, their
environment provide to drill words to them (controlled drilling) and the
last, there is the reinforcement to the children. The child tend to learn
whatever responses are “reinforced” either by some immediate , drive
reducing or by some indirect, secondary cue of an eventual reward;
responses which are not reinforced tend to drop out of the child’s
repertoire of responses. When consequences are rewarding, behavior is
maintained and increased in strength and perhaps frequency. When
consequences are punishing, or when there is a total lack of reinforcement,
the behavior is weakened and eventually extinguished.
2. Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge which states that knowledge
comes only or primarily from sensory experience. One of several views of
epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism,
idealism, and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience
and evidence, especially sensory experience, in the formation of ideas,
over the notion of innate ideas or traditions; empiricists may argue
 however that traditions (or customs) arise due to relations of previous
sense experiences.
Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes evidence,
especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the
scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against
observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori
reasoning, intuition, or revelation.
Empiricism, often used by natural scientists, asserts that “knowledge
is based on experience” and that “knowledge is tentative and probabilistic,
subject to continued revision and falsification.” One of the epistemological
tenets is that sensory experience creates knowledge. The scientific method,
including experiments and validated measurement tools, guide empirical
research.
3. Environmentalist
Environmentalist theories of language acquisition hold that an
organism’s nurture, or experience, are of more significance to
development than its nature or inborn contributions. Yet they do not
completely reject the innate factors. Theorists such as John Watson, B.F.
Skinner, and Albert Bandura contributed greatly to the environmentalist
perspective of development. Environmentalists believe the child's
environment shapes learning and behavior; in fact, human behavior,
development, and learning are thought of as reactions to the environment.
This perspective leads many families, schools, and educators to assume
that young children develop and acquire new knowledge by reacting to
their surroundings.
Kindergarten readiness, according to the environmentalists, is the
age or stage when young children can respond appropriately to the
environment of the school and the classroom (e.g., rules and regulations,
curriculum activities, positive behavior in group settings, and directions
and instructions from teachers and other adults in the school). The ability
to respond appropriately to this environment is necessary for young
 children to participate in teacher-initiated learning activities. Success is
dependent on the child following instructions from the teacher or the adult
in the classroom. Many environmentalist-influenced educators and parents
believe that young children learn best by rote activities, such as reciting
the alphabet over and over, copying letters, and tracing numbers. This
viewpoint is evident in kindergarten classrooms where young children are
expected to sit at desks arranged in rows and listen attentively to their
teachers. At home, parents may provide their young children with
workbooks containing such activities as coloring or tracing letters and
numbers--activities that require little interaction between parent and child.
When young children are unable to respond appropriately to the classroom
and school environment, they often are labeled as having some form of
learning disabilities and are tracked in classrooms with curriculum
designed to control their behaviors and responses.
4. Naturalism
Methodological naturalism is concerned not with claims about what
exists but with methods of learning what nature is. It is strictly the idea
that all scientific endeavors—all hypotheses and events—are to be
explained and tested by reference to natural causes and events. The genesis
of nature, e.g., by an act of God, is not addressed. This second sense of
naturalism seeks only to provide a framework within which to conduct the
scientific study of the laws of nature. Methodological naturalism is a way
of acquiring knowledge. It is a distinct system of thought concerned with a
cognitive approach to reality, and is thus a philosophy of knowledge.
5. Nativism
Noam Chomsky is one of the main theorists who has contributed a
large amount to the field of language acquisition. He believes that we have
pre-wired structures deep within our brains which helps us to have
advance knowledge about language, known as nativism.
Noam Chomsky believes that children are born with an inherited
ability to learn any human language. He claims that certain linguistic
 structures which children use so accurately must be already imprinted on
the child’s mind. Chomsky believes that every child has a ‘language
acquisition device’ or LAD which encodes the major principles of a
language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain. Children
have then only to learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures
from the LAD to form sentences. Chomsky points out that a child could
not possibly learn a language through imitation alone because the language
spoken around them is highly irregular – adult’s speech is often broken up
and even sometimes ungrammatical. Chomsky’s theory applies to all
languages as they all contain nouns, verbs, consonants and vowels and
children appear to be ‘hard-wired’ to acquire the grammar. Every language
is extremely complex, often with subtle distinctions which even native
speakers are unaware of. However, all children, regardless of their
intellectual ability, become fluent in their native language within five or
six years.
6. Interactionism Theory
Interactionism Theory explains that the ability of learning and
comprehending first language each child is influenced by the
communication people around him or her who wants to communicate with
him/her.
According to Vygotsky, social interaction plays an important role in
the learning process and proposed the zone of proximal development
(ZPD) where learners construct the new language through socially
mediated interaction. Vygotsky's social-development theory was adopted
and made prominent in the Western world though by Jerome Bruner who
laid the foundations of a model of language development in the context of
adult-child interaction.
Stages in child language acquisition
1. The first few months, Vocalizations.
Crying, cooing, and miscellaneous non-descript sounds of the first three or
four months are probably most significant in that, in addition to exercising
the maturing speech apparatus they make it for the infant to learn, through
appropriate reinforcement, the instrumental, the communicative character
of vocal sounds as when crying brings relief from hunger or pain. The
infant early develops the capacity of reacting differentially to adult voices.
2. The “Babbling” stage.
The “cooing” of the first several months gradually develops into a much
more phonetically diversified type of random vocalization usually called
babbling, with both vowels and consonants. Babbling is probably mainly
unlearned, since it can be observed even in deaf infants, but in the period
from six to ten month of age. It may provide a context for rudimentary
imitative behavior if there is appropriate reinforcement.
3. The beginning of language comprehension.
In the latter part of the babbling period, usually from eight to ten months,
but sometimes earlier, there are the first evidences of understanding and
recognition of certain symbolic, gestures, intonations, words, and phrase
structures on the part of the child. This is an extremely important period of
language development; research should investigate the extent to which
individual differences in language development depend upon the amount
and variety of the child’s linguistic experience at this stage.
4. The beginning of symbolic communication.
The first active, meaningful, voluntary use of vocal language is usually
found at about the end of the first year, although it is difficult to
distinguish such an event from mere babbling or imitation. Even before
this time, this infant has probably already learned to use verbal behavior
instrumentally; his chief problem is mobilizing his speech apparatus to
action in an appropriate situation. The utterance learned in the period 12 to
18 months are particularly likely to be learned as whole unit even when
 from the adult point of view composed of several words and their
pronunciation is extremely imprecise. This is also a period of the “one-
word sentence” when a single word or word-like utterance can stand for a
multiplicity of meanings and be used in many different situation.

5. The beginning of differentiated speech communication.

Toward the end of the second “year” of life, when there is also a rapid
growth of vocabulary, the child starts indulging in what might be called
“linguistic experimentation”. Perceiving that segments of utterances can be
similar while other segment differ. This behavior lays the foundation for
the development of truly articulated sentence structure.
6. Later stages.
After the beginning of differentiated speech communication, when the
child first start to manipulate the syntactical structures of language freely.
It is less useful to distinguish stage in development. Language
development is rapid in all respects. By the age about six, the average
child has mastered nearly all the phonemic distinction of his language and
practically all its common grammatical form and construction.
 CHAPTER II

CONCLUSION

A. Conclusion

After conducting the research and get the result, the writer can make
some conclusion. The result of the study above sowed that first language
acquisition is happened in the child from different age, gender and family
background has their own way to acquire first language. Some children
couldn’t pronounce some words in the right way. There were some mistake on
phonology, morphology and syntax. But it can develop to the right way during
the growth of the children. Throughout his language development, the child
learns what verbal or gestural responses will get what he wants or fend off
what he dislike and what responses on the part others are the cues for what he
wants or doesn’t want.

Besides, the interaction between the child and the parents has important
function of the success of language acquisition. Each child has. It depends on
how the interaction between the parents and the other people in their
environment run. Children can be influenced by their environment as well as
the language input children receive from their care-givers.
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http://www.education.com/reference/article/first-primary-language-acquisition/

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/
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