CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
1.1
Background
Language
acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and
communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities
including syntax,
phonetics,
and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with speech or
manual as in sign. Language acquisition usually refers to first language
acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language,
rather than second language acquisition that deals
with acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.
Before children put together their first two-word
sentences, at very approximately 18 months of age, their language acquisition
appears, in terms of what strikes the investigator’s ear, to consist mainly in
amassing a stock of words. The period from the child’s first ‘word’, at very
approximately 9 months, to the first sentences is then a conveniently delimited
one for an essay on early vocabulary.
The capacity to acquire and use language is a key aspect
that distinguishes humans from other organisms. While many forms of animal communication exist, they have a limited
range of no syntactically structured vocabulary tokens that lack cross cultural
variation between groups.
A major concern in understanding language acquisition is
how these capacities are picked up by infants from what
appears to be very little input. A range of theories of language acquisition
has been created in order to explain this apparent problem including innatism
in which a child is born prepared in some manner with these capacities, as
opposed to the other theories in which language is simply learned.
Generative grammar, associated especially with
the work of Noam Chomsky, is currently one of the principal approaches to
children's acquisition of syntax. The leading idea is that human biology
imposes narrow constraints on the child's "hypothesis space" during
language acquisition. In the Principles and Parameters Framework, which
has dominated generative syntax since Chomsky's (1980) Lectures on
Government and Binding, the acquisition of syntax resembles ordering from a
menu: The human brain comes equipped with a limited set of choices, and the
child selects the correct options using her parents' speech, in combination
with the context.
An important argument in favor of the generative approach
is the Poverty of the stimulus argument. The child's
input (a finite number of sentences encountered by the child, together with
information about the context in which they were uttered) is in principle
compatible with an infinite number of conceivable grammars. Moreover, few if
any children can rely on corrective feedback from adults when they make a
grammatical error. Yet, barring situations of medical abnormality or extreme
privation, all the children in a given speech-community converge on very much
the same grammar by the age of about five years. An especially dramatic example
is provided by children who for medical reasons are unable to produce speech,
and therefore can literally never be corrected for a grammatical error, yet
nonetheless converge on the same grammar as their typically developing peers,
according to comprehension-based tests of grammar.
Considerations such as these have led Chomsky, Jerry Fodor,
Eric Lenneberg
and others to argue that the types of grammar that the child needs to consider
must be narrowly constrained by human biology (the nativist position). These innate constraints
are sometimes referred to as universal grammar,
the human "language faculty," or the "language instinct."
CHAPTER
II
DISCUSSION
2.1
The Acquisition of Syntax
Children
eventually acquire all the phonological, syntactic, and semantic rules of the
grammar. Not only are very young children more successful at this task than the
most brilliant linguist, their grammars, at each stage, are highly similar, and
deviate from the adult grammar in highly specific constrained ways.
To
account for the ability of children to construct the complex syntactic rules of
their grammar, it has been suggested that the child’s grammar is semantically
based. This view holds that the child’s early language does not make reference
to syntactic categories and relations (noun, noun phrase, verb, verb phrase,
subject, object, and so on) but rather solely to semantic roles (such as agent
or theme). The examples of the language of Italian-speaking children of about
two years old studied by Nina Hyams cited in the examples earlier, however,
show that this cannot be the case: their utterances can only be explained by
reference t syntactic categories and relations.
As
discussed above, Italian children at a very early age inflect the verb to agree
in person and number with the subject. We repeat two of the examples here.
1.
Tu loggi il
libro ‘You read (2nd-person
singular) the book’
2. Gira
il Pallone ‘Turns (3rd-person
singular) the balloon.’ (The balloon
turns)
Subject-verb
agreement cannot be semantically based, because the subject is an agent in
utterance (1) but not it (2). Instead, agreement must be based on whatever noun
phrase is the subject, a syntactic relationship.
Hyams
upholds this position by reference to other kinds of agreement as well, such as
the ‘modifier-noun agreement’ also illustrated earlier. There is nothing
intrinsically masculine or feminine about the nouns that are marked for such
grammatical gender. But children produce the correct forms based on the
syntactic classification of these nouns.
Children
learning other languages with similar agreement rules, such as Russian, Polish,
or Turkeys, show this same ability to discover the structure of their language.
Their grammars from an early stage reveal their knowledge of the kinds of
structure dependencies.
In
the discussion on telegraphic speech we noted that, at this stage, children’s
utterances consist mainly of content words from the major classes of nouns,
verbs, and adjectives and do not include grammatical morphemes-freestanding
words or bound inflections. In the course of syntactic development these
categories will develop.
It
is interesting that the utterances that are produced with these categories
missing are all possible in some human language. English-speaking children
produce subject less sentences such as See ball, which corresponds to the
grammatical sentence in Italian Vedo la palla. Sentences without the
copula verb be also are produced and such sentences are common in the adult
language in Russian and Hebrew. Languages such as Japanese and Chinese do not
have articles; Italian permits an article and a possessive pronoun in a noun
phrase, which is not permitted in English- Il mio libro but *The my
book. We see that even the deviant sentences produced by children are within
the range of what could be a human language; at an early stage of development,
the children have not yet discovered which sentences are and are not
grammatical in the language they are acquiring. This parallels the fact that in
the babbling stage children produce sounds that are possible speech sounds and
must learn which sounds are in and which are out of their language.
Just
as human adult languages are governed by universal characteristics, we see the
child’s grammar, while differing from the adult grammar in very specific ways,
also follows universal principles.
2.2
First Language Acquisition of English Children
The Younger children are, the more their
grammars appear to differ from those of adults. When
children first begin to speak, their utterances are composed of just one or two
words and, in the absence of context; it is often difficult to determine the
meanings they are attempting to convey. One might suppose that this early
‘stage’ of language development poses a serious threat to the continuity
assumption. But examination of cross-linguistic data, especially languages with
rich morphological systems, leads to a picture that is consistent with the
continuity assumption.
In English, syntactic categories like nouns and
verbs carry little morphological information, making it difficult to access
children’s knowledge of morphological properties of the language. The
observation that young children often leave off what little morphology English
has (for example, the 3rd person singular –s in he walks, and
so on) contributed to the initial pessimism about the continuity assumption.
Based on the children’s omissions, some researchers proposed that the grammars
of young children contain only lexical (content-bearing) projections such as
verb phrase and noun phrase, but do not contain functional projections that
carry grammatical information, such as Inflection Phrase (which carries tense
and agreement) and Complementizer Phrase (which hosts question words) (e.g.
Vainikka 1993). More specifically, one claim was that functional projections
mature, being biologically timed to emerge relatively late in language
development (e.g. Lebeaux 1988, Radford 1990).
In English, main
verbs do not raise, so main verbs should not appear to the left of the negative
element. English brings its own complications, however, because the dummy verb do
appears to the left of negotiation (e.g., He does not like cheese.)
Even before they acquire do-support, children’s productions of imperatives and
sentences with negations provide evidence that they know that main verbs remain
inside the verb phrase (Thornton 2000).
Not sing in the car! (Aurora1;1)
Not go here!
In early grammars, there are one or
two apparent counterexamples to the conclusion that children’s non-adult
productions are mainly errors of omission, and not errors of substitution. One
of these is the phenomenon known as ‘Optional Infinitives’ (Wexler 1994) or
‘Root Infinitives’ (Rizzi 1993).
Children’s optional infinitive
errors are a potential problem for the continuity assumption, because root
infinitives are not a core phenomenon of adult languages. On several current
accounts, optional infinitives arise because the young child’s grammar has not
matured, such that children can optionally omit tense or agreement features
from a phrase structure representation
2.3
First
Language Acquisition of Indonesian Children
It
is believed that, as children elaborate their language, they find ways to
incorporate more propositions into a single utterance in the form of negative
and interrogative sentences. They also elaborate their utterances through
coordination, relativization, and complementation. The 3 years old children
produce not only simple, negative, interrogative sentences, but also compound
sentences as well as complex sentences. Example of the sentences:
1. Simple
sentence : “Doni minta satu.”
2. Negative
sentence : “Dela aja enggak ngebongkarin.”
3. Interrogative
sentence : ”Guntingnya
mana?”
4. Compound
sentence :
“Mara lepas, Mogi jatuh.”
5. Complex
Adjective Clause sentence : “Dulu
yang ada topinya punya Aa Mada.”
6. Complex
Adverb Clause sentence : “Kalo
pedes, jangan diambil.”
7. Complex
Noun Clause sentence : “Kata Mogi itu cicak itu.”
Moreover,
Affirmative sentences also include two- and multi-word phrases which can be reconstructed
as sentences with implicit parts, such as rante sepeda, bubur
beras, and naik ke punggung bapaknya. This is possible primarily
because of the rich interpretation approach used in this study.
Another
thing worth mentioning is the fact that the children seemed to be free in
ordering the words of their simple sentences. Subjects might be placed at the
end, and verb phrases as well as adverbial and prepositional phrases might be
placed at the beginning. This might be somehow related with the pressure of
communication and with the strategies they were employing at the time of the
interaction. Based on the previous research on children sentence patterns, it
seems that at 3,5 years old, the children had little progress left before they
would achieve full mastery of the adult language sentence patterns.
In negative sentences, their language can be
classified into three groups:
1. Negative
sentence : “Ibunya enggak pake
itu.”
2. Negative
Interrogative : “Kertas ininya masih
ada enggak?”
3. Negative
Imperative : “Jangan maen pintu.”
Then,
their interrogative sentence can be grouped into two parts:
1. Confirmation :“Aernya kurang apa
enggak?”
2. Information :”Mana satunya yang
itunya?”
The
children also can produce compound sentences that have five types of it:
1. Time :”Katanya
Bapak pulang kerja, Mara maen komputer.”
2. Addition :”Sebelah sini ada.
Sebelah situ ada.”
3. Contrast :”Aa pake yang ini.
Mogi pake yang itu.”
4. Elaboration :”Robot kagantung
kepalanya. Mara iket kepalanya.”
5. Result :”Mara lepas,
Mogi jatuh.”
To
summarize this discussion on children’s compound sentences, it should be
emphasized that the decision to classify any two or three adjacent utterances
as a compound sentence is based on the existing propositional relationship
between the utterances, not on the existence of syntactical device between the
sentences. In other words, should the basis be syntax, the subject of the
present study did not seem to have acquired much of the structure of compound
sentences at age 3,5.
One
last thing to put forward concerning compound sentences is the convention of
writing. This convention compels one to decide whether a pause in a stretch of
an utterance should be represented by a period or by a comma. It should be
admitted that the assignment of a period or a comma to a pause in the subject s
spoken utterance was done quite arbitrarily.
Indonesian
children also can speak complex sentences, such as adjective, adverb and noun
clause. To summarize this discussion on complex sentences, the subject of the
present study was observed to incorporate adjective, adverb, and noun clauses
in their utterances. In addition, some of their adverb and noun clauses were
without explicitly expressed syntactical markers.
2.4
Three
Problems to be Solved
In
order to be able to handle three or more units in a single utterance, the child
must find solutions for three problems, which we will consider in turn:
1. How
to organize three or more units in an utterance
2. How
to handle a growing number of limited scope patterns
3. How
to handle a growing or word classes associated with such patterns
Finding
techniques for solving these problems will move the child ahead in three major
ways:
1. She
will move toward handling constituents hierarchically rather than linearly
2. She
will generalize patterns into fewer, more widely applicable ones
3. She
will generalize word classes, both functionally (in terms of case roles) and
grammatically (in term of formal patterning).
CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION
We
have received what is known about early syntax from the perspective of what it
is that the child must do in order to make the kinds of developmental shifts
that have been observed. This contrasts with views of the child’s achievements
as a series of stages that deviate in decreasing ways from the goal of adult
grammar. We have traced the emergence of early word combinations out of an
initial stage of item learning during which a critical number of linguistic
units is memorized. Pre-syntactic devices serve in various ways to ease the
transitions from one unit to two and from two to more. The evidence is that the
child’s basis for making early word combinations has a strong semantic
component; how soon there is a formal syntactic basis as well is still an open
question. The transition to three or more units is distinguished from the
earlier one by the new possibility for developing hierarchical organization of
constituents, although we do not yet know just when such hierarchical are
needed or discovered by the child. Throughout this period, at least up to MLU
2.5, individual differences in preferences for particular processing strategies
can make the syntactic development of one child seem quite different from that
of another.
Reference:
1.
Fromkin,
Victoria A. 1999. An Introduction to
Language. Harcourt. Australia
2.
Language
acquisition, Searching on 10 December 2010,
Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition,
3.
Paul Fletcher
and Michael Garman, Language Acquisition
Second Edition, 1986, New York: Cambrdge University
4.
The acquisition of Syintax, searching on 10 December 2010,
website: personal.maccs.mq.edu.au/~scrain/papers/2ECS%20sumtax%202001.pdf
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar