Second Language Acq

1. Provide and discuss three of the evidence found in children when they acquire their first language to prove that language is an instinct.
The basic design of language comes from a mechanism innately wired into children. Any normal child, born anywhere in the world, of any racial, geographical, social, or economic heritage, is capable of learning any language to which he or she is exposed. Children can produce the sentences they have never heard or learned. Children develop complex grammars rapidly and without formal instruction and grow up to give consistent interpretations to novel sentence constructions that they have never before encountered. The following three examples which are Creole, one of Chomsky’s experiments, and Gordon’s “mud-eater” experiment are the evidences of language instinct in children when they acquire their first language.
First of all, when speakers of different languages have to communicate to carry out practical tasks but do not have the opportunity to learn one another’s languages, they develop a makeshift jargon called a pidgin. In many cases a pidgin can be transmuted into a full complex language in one fell swoop: all it takes is for a group of children to be exposed to the pidgin at the age when they acquire their mother tongue. The children injected grammatical complexity where none existed before, resulting in a brand-new, richly expressive language. The language that results when children make a pidgin their native tongue is called Creole.
Second evidence is from Chomsky’s experiment with three-, four-, and five-year-olds at a day care center. This particular experiment controlled a doll of Jabba the Hutt , of Star Wars fame. The other coaxed the child to ask a set of questions, by saying, for example, “ Ask Jabba if the boy who is unhappy is watching Mickey Mouse.” Jabba would inspect a picture and answer yes or no, but it was really the child who was being tested. The children cheerfully provided the appropriate questions, and, as Chomsky would have predicted, not a single one of them came up with an ungrammatical string like “Is the boy who unhappy is watching Mickey Mouse?, which the simple linear rule would have produced.
Another evidence is from Gordon’s “mud-eater” experiment. The children produced mice-eater but never rats-eater, even though they had no evidence from adult speech that this is how languages works. The children respect the subtle restrictions on combining plurals and compounds inherent in the word structure rules. It suggests that the rules take the same form in the unconscious mind of the child as they do in unconscious mind of the adult.
In conclusion, children have ability to learn language without any formal instruction, and the regularity of the acquisition process across diverse languages and environmental circumstances. Children must innately be equipped with a plan common to the grammars of all languages, a Universal Grammar that tells them how to distill the syntactic pattern out of the speech of their parents. All of three examples above have demonstration of knowledge despite “poverty of the input”, and also suggest that another basic aspect of grammar may be innate and language is




2. Discuss how language works in terms of syntax, morphology, and phonology. Give three examples to illustrate the contrast between Universal Grammar and language-specific parameters.
Everything speakers know about their languages –the rules of sentence formation called syntax, the rules of word formation called morphology; and the sound system called phonology.
To find out the principles of a language, and the principles that pertain to all languages. Those principles that pertain to all human languages, representing the universal properties of language, constitute a Universal Grammar. Three principles are showing below:
First of all every language has a notion of Subject, Verb, and Object.
Second, all languages have to add one word/ particle/affix to make the positive sentence negative.
Third, any spoken language has a class of vowels and a class of consonants.
All of these principles are Universal Grammar in terms of syntax, morphology and phonology that every language has to have it.
On the other hand, Language-specific is that which is the part specific to a certain language. It denotes characteristics of a particular language. Three examples are exhibiting in the following:
In terms of syntax, there is different word order to put Subject, Verb, and Object in language. For English speakers, they would say, “John loves Mary” which is SVO. People would say “John Mary love” in Japanese which is SOV.
There are six logical possibilities for arranging these linearly: SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OSV, and OVS. “SOV, SVO, VSO” are the vast majority of the world’s languages belong to one or other of these three types. Some languages of the Amazon region do have OSV as their basic word order. VOS has only a very small number of representatives, but OVS even fewer.
In terms of Morphology, different languages have different word/ particle/affix to negate a positive sentence. In English, the sentence “ This is a book.” is added “not” to become a negative sentence “This is not a book.” Other languages such as “nicht” is added in German, “ne pas” in French”, “nai” in Japanese, “me” in Bulgarian, “leisa” in Arabic, and “bu” in Chinese. The term of word, particle, or affix depend on types of language: isolating, agglutinating, and fusional.
In addition, different languages have different sets of vowel and consonant systems. Three different vowel systems are provided in the following three languages:
1.Liner vowel system of Adyghe (West Caucasian language)
∂
e
a
2.Quadrangular vowel system of Turkish
i ϋ i u
e ö a o


3.Triangular vowel system of Latin
i u
e o
a

Universal Grammar is general principles that we can find in all languages. All languages will work that way such as the notion of SVO, adding word/particle/affix for a negative sentence, vowels and consonants in all languages. Principle governs rules. In contrast, a rule specific to a certain language is language-specific as shown above.


II. Part Two (Grads only)
Discuss how language disorders caused by brain damage affect each of the following areas of grammar: Syntax, morphology, semantics, and phonology. Be sure to include examples for each area.
Language was the first distinct cognitive module to be supported by scientific evidence.
Paul Broca specifically related language to the left side of the brain. He stated that we speak with the left hemisphere on the basis of his finding that damage to the front part of the left hemisphere which is in Broca’s area resulted in loss of speech, whereas damage to the right side did not. If Broca’s area is damaged suffers from a syndrome of slow, labored, ungrammatical speech called Broca’s Aphasia. Patients with Broca’s aphasia exhibit impaired syntax and speech problems.
For example, here is an example, from a patient with Broca’s aphasia.
Yes..ah… Monday ah…Dad…and Dad..ah… Hospital…and ah.. Wednesday… Wednesday…nine o’clock and ah Thursday…ten o’clock ah…doctors.. tow…two..ah doctors and …ah…teth yah. And a doctor..ah girl…and gums, and I.

Second, Wernicke’s aphasia patients are fluent speakers who produce semantically empty utterances and have difficulty in comprehension. For example the patient with Wernicke’s aphasia who described a fork as “ tonsil, teller, tongue, fung” ; another, when asked about his poor vision said “ My wires don’t hire right”. These aphasics substitute words that bear no semantic relationship to the correct word, such as calling a chair an engine, other substitute words which, like normal speech errors, are related semantically, substituting for example, table for chair or elbow for knee.
Another kind of aphasia results in the substitution of one sound for another (phonology). Patients with the damage Wernicke’s area adjacent to the part of the cortex often produce such jargon. The area was once thought to underlie language comprehension. But that would not explain why the speech of these patients sounds so psychotic. An extreme variety of phonemic jargon results in the production of nonsense forms-nonoccurring but possible words. This kind of Aphasia patients may substitute words unrelated semantically to their intended message; others produce phonemic substitution errors, sometimes resulting in nonsense forms, making their utterances uninterpretable. Thus, the patient of this kind aphasia would utter something about like this: table might be pronounced as sable.
Damage to Wernicke’s area, together with the two shaded areas adjacent to it often causes a syndrome that is called Anomia. Anomia is a form of aphasia in which the patient has word-finding difficulties (Lexicon/morphology). The patient of Anomia uses noun phrases perfectly but cannot retrieve the nouns to put inside them: he uses pronouns, gerunds like falling down, and a few generic nouns like food and stuff, referring to particular objects with convoluted circumlocutions.
Aphasia studies show impairment of different parts of the grammar.