Makalah Psycholinguistics
Makalah Psycholinguistics
Makalah Psycholinguistics
A PAPER
Acquisition Assignment
Complied by:
Nai Nurbaeti
Setyaningsih
2017
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Over the last fifty years, several theories have been put forward to explain
the process by which children learn to understand and speak a language. They can
be summarized as follows:
1. Behaviorism
B.F. Skinner described learning as a behavior produced by learner's
response to stimuli which can be reinforced with positive or negative feedback to
environmental stimuli. Skinner added that learning can be observed, explained,
and predicted through observing antecedents and consequences. Both positive
reinforcement and negative reinforcement increase the probability that the
antecedent behavior will happen again. In contrast, punishment (both positive and
negative) decreases the likelihood that the antecedent behavior will happen again.
Positive indicates the application of a stimulus; Negative indicates the
withholding of a stimulus. Learning is therefore defined as a change in behavior in
the learner. Punishment is sometimes used in eliminating or reducing incorrect
actions, followed by clarifying desired actions. Educational effects of behaviorism
are important in developing basic skills and foundations of understanding in all
subject areas and in classroom management.
Skinner's Behaviorist approach contends that children learn language
through imitation, repetition and the reinforcement of the successful linguistics
attempts. Mistakes are considered to be the result of imperfect learning or
insufficient opportunities for practice. In such, that a child having a pleasant
learning experience (such as rewards or praise) is positive reinforced. Through
that positively reinforcing stimulus, a child's learning capacity is triggered.
However, unpleasant experiences (such as punishment) serve as negative
reinforcements, and cause learners to avoid undesirable responses to stimuli. As
such, continuous reinforcement increases the rate of learning, be it positive or
negative; a child will respond to different triggers and with experience, remember
what is to do and to avoid. Hence, intermittent reinforcement helps a child to a
longer retention of what is learned.
Skinner contends that both positive and negative reinforcement can shape
behavior, and this in turn affects their language acquisition capability, as such, a
lack of any reinforcement can also shape behavior. If people receive no
acknowledgement of their behavior, they will likely change that behavior until
they receive some kind of reinforcement.
Behaviorism gave birth to a stimulus-response (S-R) theory which sees
language as a set of structures and acquisition as a matter of habit formation.
Ignoring any internal mechanisms, it takes into account the linguistic environment
and the stimuli it produces. Learning is an observable behavior which is
automatically acquired by means of stimulus and response in the form of
mechanical repetition. Thus, to acquire a language is to acquire automatic
linguistic habits. According to Johnson (2004:18), "Behaviorism undermined the
role of mental processes and viewed learning as the ability to inductively discover
patterns of rule-governed behavior from the examples provided to the learner by
his or her environment". Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991:266) consider that S-R
models offer "little promises as explanations of SLA, except for perhaps
pronunciation and the rote-memorization of formulae" (Menezes, V. n.d.).
This view of language learning gave birth to research on contrastive
analysis, especially error analysis, the main focus of which is the interference of
one's first language in the target language. An important reaction to behaviorism
was the interlanguage studies, as the simple comparison between first and second
language neither explained nor described the language produced by SL learners.
Interlanguage studies will be present in other SLA perspectives, as the concern of
the area has been mainly with the acquisition of grammatical morphemes or
specific language structures.
Beside there some truth in Skinner's explanation, but there are many
objections to it, such as:
Language is based on a set of structures or rules.
The vast majority of children go through the same stages of language
acquisition.
Children are often unable to repeat what an adult says.
Few children receive much explicit grammatical correction.
2. Innateness
Language is not an autonomous system for communication. It is embedded
in and supplemented by gesture, gaze, stance, facial expression, voice quality in
the full array of options people can use for communicating (Clark, 2009).
Learning is complex and the context where it takes place is influenced by our
learning experience due to our different experiences. Clark (2009: 7) states that
in learning language, children may first rely on nonlinguistic options, both in
their initial understanding and in their own early use. The Innateness theory by
Noam Chomsky (Pinker, 1994) shows the innatist limitations of behaviorist view
of language acquisition in 1960s to the alternative generative account of
language. The main Argument in this theory is that children are born with an
innate knowledge which guides them in the language acquisition task. The
childrens ability makes the task of learning a first language easier than it would
otherwise be (Crain & Lillo-Martin, 1999). Pinker (1994, p.26) claims that the
universally of complex language is a discovery that fills linguists with awe, and is
the first reason to suspect that language is not just any cultural invention but the
product of a special human instinct. It is an innate biological function of human
beings just like learning to walk. On the other side, Clark (2009, p.2) poses that
even if children are born with a learning mechanism dedicated to language,
the main proposals is to focus only on syntactic. The rest has to be learnt. This
essay believes that children have the innate ability to learn language as Chomsky
believes, but this needs to be learn and develop by social interacting with
environments such as adults and in cognitive development. According to Clark
(2009) children beside their innate abilities; their acquisition of language could
also be affected by social interaction and cognitive development. Moreover,
Chomsky (2009) argues that Language learning is not really something that the
child does; it is something that happens to the child placed in an appropriate
environment much as the childs body grows and matures in a predetermined
way when provided with appropriate nutrition and environmental stimulation.
Furthermore, according to Crain and Lillo-Martin (1999), the innate
knowledge, known as the language Acquisition Device (LAD), includes principle
common to all human languages, called the Universal Grammar (UG). This is
similar to Pinker(1994, p.43) claims that the evidence corroborating the claim that
the mind contains blueprints for grammatical rules comes, once again out of the
mouths of babes and sucklings. For example, looking at the English agreement
suffix- s as in He walks Chomsky theorized that children were born with a hard-
wired language acquisition device (hereafter, LAD) in their brains (Pinker, 1994).
LAD is a set of language learning tools, intuitive at birth in all children (Pinker,
1994). Pinker (1994) further expands this idea into that of universal grammar, a
set of innate principles and adjustable parameters that is common to all human
languages. The language acquisition Device (LAD) is a postulated organ of the
brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device for learning symbolic
language (Chomsky, 2009). To Chomsky (1977, p.98) all children share the same
innateness, all children share the same internal constraints which characterize
narrowly the grammar they are going to construct
Therefore, Crain and Lillo-Martin (1999) pose that LAD explains human
acquisition of the syntactic structure of language; it encodes the major principles
of a language and its grammatical structures into the childs brain and enables the
children to analyze language and extract the basic rules of universal grammar or
generative grammar because it is a system of rules that generate or produce
sentences of the language. We are born with set of rules about language in our
brains and children are equipped with an innate template or blueprint for language
and this blueprint aid the child in the task of constructing a grammar for their
language (Chomsky, 2009). The universal grammar according to Chomsky
(2009) does not have the actual rules of each language but it has principles &
parameters in which the rules of language are derived from the principles &
parameters. In other words, the principles are the universal basic features of
grammar such as nouns and verbs and the parameters are the variation across
language that determines one or more aspects of grammar e.g. pro, drop and head
direction (Chomsky, 1977). Therefore, the parameters in children set during
language acquisition (Chomsky, 2009).
3. The Cognitive Theory
The Swiss psychologist Piaget (1990) placed acquisition of language in the
context of a child's mental or cognitive development. He argued that a child has
to understand a concept before she/he can acquire the particular language form
which expresses that concept.
A good example of this is seriation. There will be a point in a child's
intellectual development when s/he can compare objects with respect to size. This
means that if you gave the child a number of sticks, s/he could arrange them in
order of size. Piaget suggested that a child who had not yet reached this stage
would not be able to learn and use comparative adjectives like "bigger" or
"smaller".
Object permanence is another phenomenon often cited in relation to the
cognitive theory. During the first year of life, children seem unaware of the
existence of objects they cannot see. An object which moves out of sight ceases
to exist. By the time they reach the age of 18 months, children have realized that
objects have an existence independently of their perception. The cognitive theory
draws attention to the large increase in children's vocabulary at around this age,
suggesting a link between object permanence and the learning of labels for
objects.
According to the cognitive theorist all aspects that are learnt by an
individual are as a result of what learners have constructed or discovered their
own mental process and not through observable behaviour (Warren, 2012).
Wilburg (2010) asserts that children /learners come to school with knowledge,
skills and related experiences to the learning situations and this make them
actively involved in their learning process. Therefore, several studies has
shown that children growing up in polyandry situations are taking part in multi-
party conversation from an early age and in many of these cultures adults have
particular interactional techniques to help them do so. According to Wyatt (2007),
he describes the speech transmission between adult and child in Piaget theory
namely:
Psychological level: the feelings of speech partners for each other, their
relationship, their mutual expectancies, and the respective levels of
maturation, which determine the choice of words by the speaker and the
interpretation of their meaning by the listener.
Linguistic level: process of word finding; selecting the correct sounds and
putting them into correct sequences; putting words into correct
grammatical order to form sentences.
Physiological level: Neural activities affecting the speakers
perceptual and motor mechanisms and activating the hearing mechanisms
of speakers and listener.
Acoustic level: Sound waves travelling through the air between speaker
and listener.
There is not much evidence of the effects of the presence of siblings on
childrens language. On the other hand, Lieven (1994) reviews a report on
young childrens language in conversations which include their mother and an
older sibling as more complex than when alone with the mother.
4. Input or Interactionist Theories
In contrast to the work of Chomsky, more recent theorists have stressed the
importance of the language input children receive from their care-givers.
Language exists for the purpose of communication and can only be learned in the
context of interaction with people who want to communicate. Interactionists such
as Bruner suggested that the language behavior of adults when talking to children
(known by several names by most easily referred to as child-directed speech or
CDS) is specially adapted to support the acquisition process. This support is often
described to as scaffolding for the child's language learning. Bruner also coined
the term Language Acquisition Support System or LASS in response to
Chomsky's LAD. Trevarthen studied the interaction between parents and babies
who were too young to speak. He concluded that the turn-taking structure of
conversation is developed through games and non-verbal communication long
before actual words are uttered.
Scaffolding Theory was first introduced in the late 1950s by Jerome
Bruner, a cognitive psychologist. He used the term to describe young children's
oral language acquisition. Helped by their parents when they first start learning to
speak, young children are provided with instinctive structures to learn a language,
for example are bed-time stories and read aloud. Scaffolding represents the
helpful interactions between adult and child that enable the child to do something
beyond his or her independent efforts. The construction of a scaffold occurs at a
time where the child may not be able to articulate or explore learning
independently. The scaffolds provided by the tutor do not change the nature or
difficulty level of the task; instead, the scaffolds provided allow the student to
successfully complete the task.
CHAPTER III
THE RELATED RESEARCH
3. One word (holophrastic) stage. Infants may utter their first word as early as
nine months: usually mama, dada (these words resemble babbling). Deaf
babies whose parents use sign language begin making their first word/gestures
around eight months. This stage is characterized by the production of actual
speech signs. Often the words are simplified: "du" for duck, "ba" for bottle.
When the child has acquired about 50 words he develops regular pronunciation
patterns. This may even distort certain words-- turtle becomes "kurka".
Incorrect pronunciations are systematic at this time: all words with /r/ are
pronounced as /w/. sick--thick, thick--fick. Children tend to perceive more
phonemic contrasts than they are able to produce themselves.
The first 50 words tend to be names of important persons, greetings, foods,
highlights of the daily routine such as baths, ability to change their environment-
give, take, go, up, down, open.
The meaning of words may not correspond to that of adult language:
overextension-- dog may mean any four legged creature. apple may mean
any round object. bird may mean any flying object. Child can still distinguish
between the differences, simply hasn't learned that they are linguistically
meaningful. Dissimilarities linguistically redundant.
Two patterns in child word learning
referential-- names of objects.
expressive-- personal desires and social interactions: bye-bye, hi, good,
This is a continuum. Child's place on this continuum partly due to parent's style:
naming vs. pointing.
The extra-linguistic context provides much of the speech info. Rising and
falling intonation may or may not be used to distinguish questions from
statements at the one-word stage. Words left out if the contexts makes them
obvious. At this stage, utterances show no internal grammatical structure (much
like the sentence yes in adult speech, which can't be broken down into subject,
predicate, etc.)
4. Combining words-- 18 mo--2 years. By two and a half years most children
speak in sentences of several words--but their grammar is far from complete.
This stage rapidly progresses into what has been termed a fifth and final stage
of language acquisition, the All hell breaks loose stage. By six the child's
grammar approximates that of adults.
Children learning any language seem to encode the same limited set of
meanings in their first sentences:
ownership-- Daddy's shoes; describing events-- Me fall; labeling-- That dog;
locational relations-- toy in box.
Sentences usually two words. Children can repeat more complex sentences
spoken by adults but cannot create them until later (called prefabricated routines)
not indicative of the child's grammar.
4.1.1 Characteristics and Traits of First Language Acquisition
1) It is an instinct. This is true in the technical sense, i.e. it is triggered by birth
and takes its own course, though of course linguistic input from the
environment is needed for the child to acquire a specific language. As an
instinct, language acquisition can be compared to the acquisition of binocular
vision or binaural hearing.
2) It is very rapid. The amount of time required to acquire one's native language
is quite short, very short compared to that needed to learn a second language
successfully later on in life.
3) It is very complete. The quality of first language acquisition is far better than
that of a second language (learned later on in life). One does not forget one's
native language (though one might have slight difficulties remembering
words if you do not use it for a long time).
4) It does not require instruction. Despite the fact that many non-linguists think
that mothers are important for children to learn their native language,
instructions by parents or care-takers are unnecessary, despite the
psychological benefits of attention to the child. (https://www.uni-
due.de/ELE/LanguageAcquisition.htm)
Schumann in Ushioda (1993) lists five affective factors that may increase the
psychological distance:
1. Language Shock: Disorientation caused by learning a new linguistic
system.
2. Culture Shock: Stress, anxiety and fear caused when entering a new
culture, the routines activities suddenly become major obstacles.
3. Culture Stress: Prolonged culture shock, such as, homesickness, and
questioning self identity.
4. Motivation: Instrumental and integrative.
5. Ego permeability: The amount in which an individual gives up their
differences in favor of the TL group.
4.2.3 Social Identity and Investment in L2 Learning
Bonny Peirce has two views about the relationship between social context and
L2 acquisition:
1. The notions of subject to and subject of are central.
She has studied an adult immigrant learner of English in Canada named Eva.
The girl which is working with me pointed at the man and said:
Do you see him? I said
Yes. Why?
Dont you know him?
No. I dont know him.
How come you dont know him? Dont you watch TV? Thats
Bart Simpson.
It made me so bad and I didnt answer her nothing.
The theory of social identity assumes that power relations play a crucial
role in social interaction between language learners and target language speakers.
Eva indicated she had felt humiliated at the time. She said that she could not
respond to the girl because she had been positioned as a strange woman. What
had made Eva feel strange? The girls questions to Eva were in fact rhetorical. She
didnt expect, or possibly even desire a response from Eva: How come you dont
know him? Dont you watch TV? Thats Bart Simpson. It was the girl and Eva
who could determine the grounds on which interaction could proceed, it were
them who had the power to bring closure to the conversation.
Eva became subject to a discourse which assumed an identity she didnt
have. She was also the subject of the discourse had she attempted to continue on
which the interaction could proceed, for example, by asserting that she didnt
watch the TV program of which Bart Simpson was the star.
Opitz, Cornelia. (2011). First Languge Attrition and Second Language Aquisition
in a Second Languge Environment. University of Dublin: Trinity College.
Piaget, J. (1990). The child's conception of the world. New York: Littlefield
Adams
Pinker, S. ( 1994). The language Instinct. England: Clays Ltd.
https://www.uni-due.de/ELE/LanguageAcquisition.html.