DWI PARAMITA SAPUTRI (0743042008) BABY TALK

SECOND LANGUAGE AQCUISITION

By

Dwi Paramita Saputri

0743042008

LANGUAGE TEACHING AND ART DEPARTMENT

TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION FACULTY

UNIVERSITY OF LAMPUNG

2010

Baby talk

The early speech of children is often described as telegraphic. This is because it lacks inflections and many of the small function words such as articles or prepositions. This is the example taken from a stage when children are already joining two words to form utterance:

More page(asking an adult to continue reading)

Sweater chair (indicating where the sweater is)

Children use the language creatively, since they use utterances, which they can never have actually heard. Los bloom (1970) found that sentences containing two nouns were used to express five kinds of relationships depended on her observations of the child in an actual conjunctions:

1.      Conjunction

2.      Description

3.      Possession

4.      Location

5.      Agent object

And Dan Slobin(1979) found seven many types of communicative functions. They are: locating or naming, demanding or desiring, negating, describing an event, indicating possession, describing a person or thing and questioning.

Children are in the process of mastering inflections and function words. In the relevant studies, these small items are usually referred to as morphemes.

At the same time as children are increasing their mastery of grammatical morphemes, they are also increasing their ability to carry out transformations on the sentences structure, in order to produce more complex utterances. The development of negatives and interrogatives has attracted particular attention. For both of this structures. children seems to follow similar sequences of development as in the following:

1.      First, the negative element is not part of the structure of the sentence

2.      The negative element is inserted into the sentences

3.      Children begin to produce the appropriate part of do, be or the modal verbs

The development of these transformations provides interesting evidence that grammatical development is partly a matter of growing competence and partly a matter of increasing performance capacity. Ursulla Klima (1968) found the following progressions in the child’s ability to carry out more than one transformations in a single utterance.

1.      The child can either invert subject and verb or propose questions word, but do not do both. We thus find inversion in yes/no questions

2.      The child is able to combine boyh perations.

3.      This limitations goes and the child is able to perform all three operations in the sane utterance prepose a question word, invert and negate.

Linguistic development has been the subject of less intensive study than that of the early year. Some subtle grammar distinctions may be mastered much before the age of ten.

Caretaker speech is a number of observational studies of the language addressed to small child by mothers, other adult or older children. Caretaker speech has a number of characteristics which distinguish it from typical speech between adult. Caretaker speech seems particularly well suited to helping the child to learn the rules and meaning of the language. Caretaker speech more suitable asa model for imitation. However, the role of imitation in the acquisition process is not clear. According to Krashen, language acquisition refers to the process of picking-up a language, i.e. a process of a development of ability in a language by using it in natural, communicative situations.

Some terminology will be encountered in the discussion of second language acquisition. Among others are: native language, target language, second language acquisition, foreign language learning.

1.      Native language (NL): this refers to the first language a child learns. It is also known as the primary language, the mother or the L1.

2.      Target language (TL): this refers the language being learned

3.      Second Language ACQUSITION (SLA): this is common term used for the name of the field. It refers to the learning of another language after the native language has been learned. Sometimes the term refers to the learning of a third ot fourth language.

Brown (1980:17) says that every one of us has witnessed the remarkable ability of children to communicate. A small babies, children babble coo and cry and vocally or non vocally send an extraordinary number of messages and receive more massages. As they reach the end of their first year, specific attempts are made to imitate words and speech sounds heard around them. And about this time, they utter their first “words”. At around 18 months of age, these words have multiplied significantly and are beginning to appear in combination with each other to form two-word and three-word “ sentences” which are usually called as “telegraphic” utterances –such as “all gone milk,” bye-bye daddy.” Gimme toy,” and so forth.

A good example of this phenomenon was given by W.R Miller(1963) in phonological development:” recently a three year old child told me her name was Litha. I answered Litha? No, litha.”Oh lisa .”Yes, Litha.” The child apparently understood the contrast between s and th , even though she could not produce the contrast herself. This is well known as “lag” between comprehension and production. We also know that even adults understand more vocabulary than they ever use in speech and also perceived more syntactic variation then they actually produce.

According Brown certain, typical patterns appear in child’s language . fo example it has been found that young children who have not yet mastered the past-tenses morpheme tend to learn past tenses first as separate items (walked, broke, drank) without knowledge of the difference between regular and irregular verbs. Then around the age of 4 or 5 they begin to perceive a system in which the-ed morpheme is added to a verb, and at this point al verbs become regularized (branked, drinked, goed).

Children are known as “good imitators”( Brown,1980). Two types of imitation behaviorist assume one type of imitation that is surface structure imitations, where a child repeats or mimics the surface string, attending to a phonological code rather than a semantic code. It is the level of imitation that enables an adult to repeat random numbers or nonsense syllables or to mimic unknown languages. According to Brown (1980) the earliest stages of child language acquisition may manifest a great deal of surface imitation, because the baby may not posses the necessary semantic categories to assign “meaning “to utterances. But as the child perceives the importance of the semantic level language, he attends primarily to the meaningful semantic level,i.e the deep structure of language. in fact the imitation of the deep structure of language can literally block his attention to the surface structure, therefore on the surface structure, he becomes poor imitator.

This is situation when a child (vivi 2,5 years old) talk to her aunt  when her aunt was eating, and she speak in her first language (lampung language) that her family use that language every day and she grow up in that language.

Vivi : biksu, gi nyow?

Aunt : mengan

Vivi : lat nyow?

Aunt : ha?

Vivi : alat nyow? Kacang?

Aunt : (her aunt laughing)

Kedow induk nikeu?

Vivi : asak

Aunt : apak?

Vivi: huma

Aunt: khadu mengan? Payo mengan!!

Vivi : muak ah…

Aunt: sangon kak mengan nikeu?

Vivi: gadew

Aunt : kalat nyew?

Vivi : mie..

Aunt: jeno kan makai telor?

Vivi: mie ah

Aunt: kiyai kedow??

Vivi: layangan

Aunt: bak mak musei??

Vivi: alah emak

Aunt: nyow cawa emak?

Vivi: culik

This conversation shows that the children in that age have not use complete sentences. She still use very simple sentence, even she have not able to use perfect word. Like in the sentence lat nyow formerly her aunt didn’t understand what she talking about. Her aunt need her repetition to catch and understand. Even when the child repeat again she still use uncompleted word. When the child answer the question that give them she only answer that in one or two word only. She have not able to answer in complicated sentence. In this age children have not active to ask some questions to someone. She only ask simple questions and answer question in simple answer.

If we observe children speaking for the first time, we will find it very fascinating. One of the amazing things is that language emerges at about the same time in children all over the world.( Aitcison,2008). Why do childrren normally begin to speak between their eighteenth and twenty-eight month?

Surely it is not because all mother on earth initiate languge training at that time. There is, in fact no evidance that any conscious and systematic teaching of language takes place, just as there is no special training for stance or gait.(lenneberg, 1967:125)

Languge may be set in motion by a biological click, similiar to the one which causes kittens to open their eyas when they are a few days old, chrysalies to change into butterfliesafter several weeks, and human to become sexually mature at around 13 years of age. However, until relatively recently few people had considered language within the framework of biological maturation.

From 5 or 6 months onwards it can “ bable “ a number of sound needed in speech, before the age of 18 months children utter few words. They have to wait for some biological trigger. The “trrigger” aperas to be connected with brain growth.two-words utterences which are usually regarded as the beginning of “ true language” begin just as a massive activity in brain growth slows down.

When one says that direct teaching is a failure. People smile and say, of course-whoever tries to teach a child to speak? Yet many parents often without realizing it, try to persuade their children to imitate them. They do this in two ways:

1.      By means overt correction

2.      By means of unconcious expansions.

 It can be seen forcing children to imitate is likely to be a disastrous failure. Children cannot be trained like parrots. And repeat complaining corrections may even hinder a child’s progress. However, Aitchison (2008) states that the matter is not quite as simple as first sight. The now famous “ meng-ga”. Dialogue show that corrections are unhelpful if the child’s attention is focused highly on matters other than the language. Later work has shown that kindly made corrections from a sensitive caregiver can enable a child to learn language faster.

In other words, correction which ties in with a child’s linguistic level may be more useful than we once assume. What is being claimed here is that practice alone cannot account for language acquisition. Children do not learn language simply by repitition and imitation.