First Language Acquisition

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First language acquisition (Gass) To learn a first language is a great challenge, but every child who is not cognitively impaired has a linguistic system that allows them to communicate. We all know that language is a way of communication and children can do it even before they acquire language (at least the way we see it), as infants have a way to transmit their need, e.g. crying, smiling, cooing among others. When a child is approximately six months of age, he starts to babbling, that is consonant-vowel sequences that sometimes are taken to be “words” by parents. They began to drop off in the amount of babbling when children “get” the concept of words as referring to something. But children also use other device to communicate: they use intonation. Children can use the appropriate stress and intonation even before they know anything about grammar. Then, children begin to use words, but “words” for children might reflect more than one word in the adult language. Those words have many functions; they are used to refer to objects, to indicate grammatical functions or to serve social functions. Children generally overextend the meaning of a word, that means that they give more than one meaning to a word, but they also underuse words, that mean that they use them with more restricted meaning than adults do. After some months, children began to use two or more words, but at the beginning they just use content words. Other important factors in acquiring a first language are sounds and pronunciation. Children do not pronounced words exactly identical to adult speech; they make substitutions, deletions and simplifications. However, it is clear that they are able to make the difference between what they hear and what they can actually produce (speak). Finally there is a predictable order of acquisition of certain inflectional morphemes in English. It means
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