FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING

Psycholinguists believe that there are critical or sensitive periods for the acquisition of first language. Few mothers will dispute the fact, even though some may fret if a twelve months old fails to utter her or his first intelligible words. During what Jakobson (1962, p. 72) called the Lallperiode--lallation (i.e. between six and ten months), the baby produces an amazing number and variety of phonological phenomena which are universal. It is at the height of this period that the baby begins to imitate adult sounds, that it begins to discriminate vocalic and consonantal phonemes. Thus the human begins to acquire and learn the "mother tongue".

Some linguists believe that the child learns a second language through a process much like that adopted in first language learning: though there might not be actual lallation, there will be phonological experimentation and, more important, the succession of linguistically developmental steps will be the same. Other linguists reject this hypothesis.

The real feud comes from the belief, on one side of the fence, that adults learn a second language the way children do and the way they themselves learned their mother tongue; and, on the other side, that children and adults learn quite differently, and that second language is learned differently from first language. The latter position even holds that it is neurologically well-nigh impossible for children beyond fourteen years of age or

. . .
uses at ages well beyond those at which they are producing them, and that the type of relative clauses that appears to be least difficult in comprehension is distinct from the type that appears to be least difficult for production. Nelson and Bonvillian (1978, p. 537) conclude that the present data reveal... that the strategies of concept learning favor comprehension as a leading edge for some children but production as the leading edge for other children... Our data indicate that initial strategies favoring either production or comprehension are reasonable approaches and that neither is developmentally more mature than the other. More: Clark (1980, 1982) has argued that production of a structure may lead to its comprehension. The author even claims that production, rather than comprehension, may be "the leading edge of development." Actually, which comes first, the chicken or the egg, may have more to do with content than form. If the content is more challenging to recall, and/or the word is made easier to recall, production may be easier than comprehension. Children are attracted by sounds and images before being concerned with lexical usage or syntactical form (So, by the way, are adults!). Thus the myth of comprehension prec
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Period Hypothesis, Cochrane Sachs, Nelson Bonvillian, COMPARISON Psycholinguists, L1 Children, English Japanese, Response Method, Chapman Kohn, Hypothesis Heckscher, L1 L2, language acquisition, learning l2, children adults, language learning, learn language, phonological experimentation, language development, gathercole 1988, l1 l2, teaching english, chapman kohn 1978, leading edge children, cochrane sachs 1979, english speakers languages, acquisition tesol quarterly,
Approximate Word count = 3172
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

More Essays on FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING