Exercises - Language Acquisition

I. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:

1. L1 development and L2 development seem to involve the same processes.

2. The capacity to acquire one's first language is a fundamental human trait that all human beings are equally well possessed with.

3. All normal children have equal ability to acquire their first language.

4. Children follow a similar acquisition schedule of predictable stages along the route of language development across cultures, though there is an idiosyncratic variation in the amount of time that takes individuals to master different aspects of the grammar.

5. Humans can be said to be predisposed and biologically programmed to acquire at least one language.

6. Some languages are inferior, or superior, to other languages.

7. Language acquisition is primarily the acquisition of the vocabulary and the meaning of language.

8. Human beings are genetically predetermined to acquire language, this genetic predisposition is a sufficient condition for language development.

9. Children who grow up in culture where caretaker speech is absent acquire their native language more slowly than children who are exposed to caretaker speech.

10. In mother tongue acquisition, normal children are not necessarily equally successful.

11. For the vast majority of children, language development occurs spontaneously and require little conscious instruction on the part of adults.

12. The available evidence to date indicates that an explicit teaching of correct forms to young children plays a minor role at best.

13. Correction and reinforcement are not key factors in child language development as they were claimed to be.

14. Imitation, plays at best a very minor role in the child's mastery of language.

15. Observations of children in different language areas of the world reveal that the developmental stages are similar, possibly universal, whatever the nature of the input.

16. A child's babbling seems to depend on the presence of acoustic, auditory input.

17. In general, the two-word stage begins roughly in the second half of the child's first year.

18. Children's two-word expressions are absent of syntactic or morphological markers.

19. Children first acquire the sounds in all languages of the world, no matter what language they are exposed to, and in late stages acquire the more difficult sounds.

20. Language acquisition begins at about the same time as lateralization does and is normally

complete, as far as the essentials are concerned, by the time that the process of lateralization comes to an end.

II. Fill in each blank below with one word which begins with the letter given:

21. The first language a____________ refers to the development of a first or native language.

22. According to a n__________ view of language acquisition, humans are quipped with the neural prerequisites for language and language use, just as birds are biologically prewired to learn the songs of their species.

23. A caretaker speech, also called m______ or b______, is the type of modified speech typically addressed to young children.

24. B_________ learning theory suggested that a child's verbal behaviour was conditioned through