Language Acquisition

Final Take-Home Exam Language acquisition, as its name suggests, is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use a language to communicate and understand. This capacity involves acquiring diverse aspects of language such as syntax, phonetics and a vast vocabulary. The process can be further divided into two categories: first language acquisition (FLA) which studies infants’ acquisition of their native language, and second language acquisition (SLA) which deals with how children and adults acquire additional languages. Both areas of study are still very hypothetical and subject to a lot of study and dispute. In this essay I will introduce how these two fields relate to each other and what are their basic differences. The basic way in which humans acquire language is the same for both FLA and SLA. The learner actively constructs abstract rules for the language being acquired and tries them out. With time, these rules are modified to fit new evidence perceived by the learner. This could be defined as a method of trial and error. In SLA these rules are different from both the L1 and L2 and are collectively called interlanguage. Despite this, the L2 learner’s language will always be influenced by its L1, and the route and speed of acquisition will be to a certain extent affected by this language transfer. For instance, a native speaker of Russian would have no problem understanding the case system in Greek as most of it overlaps with his or her L1. In contrast, a native speaker of English would most likely have trouble with cases in general. From this it can also be inferred that the route of acquisition in SLA is prone to much more variability, because in FLA the phenomenon of language transfer is not present. Evidence has also shown that language is acquired in stages. This applies equally for both FLA and SLA. This means that certain structures are acquired before others and the same order is seemingly present in both