英语语言学考试

英语语言学考试

语言获得 1、Language acquisition is concerned with language development in humans. In general, language acquisition refers to children’s development of their first language, that is, the native language of the community in which a child has been brought up. (FLA):The development of a first or native language (L1) is called first language acquisition, and then second language acquisition (SLA). L1 and L2 development do not seem to involve identical processes. 2、研究语言获得的意义The study of language acquisition enables linguists, psychologists and applied linguists to better understand the nature of human language and developmental processes of language acquisition. 3、First language acquisition第一语言获得 No one is more successful than others in acquiring a first language. Children follow a similar acquisition schedule of predictable stages along the route of language development across cultures, though there is an idiosyntactic variation in the amount of time that takes individuals to master different aspects of the grammar. 4、The biological basis of language acquisition语言获得的生理基础 This biological, or nativist 天赋, view of language acquisition means that humans are equipped with the neural prerequisites for language and language use. Our language faculty permits us to acquire any human language to which we are exposed to, including deaf children acquiring a sign language. Different languages have a similar level of complexity and details, and reflect general abstract properties of the common linguistic system called the 5、Universal Grammar 普遍语法. Language acquisition as the acquisition of grammatical rules 为什么说母语习得是语法规则的习得？ In principle, no human brain can store all the words and expressions of a language. What happens is that when processing the language they hear, children construct the grammar and make sense of the expressions according to the grammar. When producing utterances, they follow the internalized grammatical rules. Without the knowledge of the productive rules, it would be impossible for language users to produce and understand an unlimited number of sentences which they have never heard before. 6、The role of input and interaction在母语习得中，语言输入起什么样的作用？ Input refers to the language which a learner hears or receives and from which he or she can learn. For language to be eventually acquired, children must be provided with an appropriate linguistic environment in which they have access to language data and opportunities to interact with the input. Children must be provided with an appropriate linguistic environment. The modified speech typically addressed to young children is called caretaker speech,保姆语 also known as babytalk, mothers-es, or parentese. Exposure to this type of language makes it easier for children to match linguistic forms with their meanings and for that reason, their acquisition of the vocabulary and structure of the language is made easier. 7、The role of formal instruction 刻意的教学对母语习得有什么作用？ For the vast majority of children, language de­velopment occurs spontaneously and requires little conscious instruction on the part of adults. In natural settings, parents rarely correct young children s utterances that violate the rules of the grammar, still less do they go about teaching explicitly the correct forms of the language, al­though some parents believe that they constantly instruct their children to speak grammatical sentences. Even if they do, there is no convincing evi­dence that children need such instruction. In fact, parents often fail in their attempt to teach children grammatical rules. Of course, this is not to say that instruction is altogether useless in child language development from the stage of a babbler to that of a fluent speaker. A certain amount of conscious instruction on the part of parents and peers may have some effect on the language of a child. But the available ev­idence to date indicates that an explicit teaching of correct forms to young children plays a minor role at best. 8、The role of correction and reinforcement在儿童母语习得过程中，纠错起什么样的作用？ Proponents of Behaviorist learning theory suggested that a child’s verbal behavior was conditioned through association between a stimulus and the following response. Children are believed to gradually assume correct forms of the language of their community when their “bad” speech gets corrected and when their good speech gets positively reinforced. Researchers have found that correction and reinforcement are not key factors in child language development. Reinforcement has been found to occur usually in children’s pronunciation or reporting of truthfulness of utterances, rather than in the grammaticality of sentences. 9、The role of imitation模仿在母语习得中的作用是什么？ At one time, it was widely believed that children learned language by simply imitating the speech of those around them. We now know that this cannot be true, since many utterance types produced by children do not closely resemble structures found in adult speech. . If children learn their native tongue by imitating their parents, how can we account for the utter­ances that are typical of children' s language, such as the plural form "my foots," the past tense forms of " I eated," and the negative construction of “No the sun shining”? It is impossible that children imitate these structures from adults because they are never heard in adult conversations. In addition, Children with speech impairment for neurological or physiological reasons learn the language spoken to them and understand what is said. A more rea­sonable explanation is that children are attempting to construct and generalize their own grammatical rules. Some young language learners do seem to make selective use of imitation, but they do not blindly mimic adult speech in a parrot fashion, but rather exploit it in very restricted ways to improve their linguistic skills. The point is that imitation plays at best a very minor role in the child' s mastery of lan­guage. 10、Stages of first language acquisition 第一语言习得经过哪些主要阶段？ (1) The prelinguistic stage前语言阶段: at this babbling stage, the sounds and syllables that children utter are as yet meaningless. (2) The one-word stage: at this stage, children learn that sounds related to meanings. They use one-word utterances, or holophrastic sentences to express a concept or predication that would be associated with an entire sentence in adult speech. () The two-word stage: at this stage, children are heard uttering two-word expressions in a variety of combinations. (4) The multiword stage多词句阶段: at this stage, the salient feature of the utterances is the variation in strings of lexical morphemes. It is normally assumed that, by the age of five, with an operating vocabulary of more than 2,000 words, children have completed the greater part of the language acquisition process. There is substantial variation among children in terms of the age at which particular features of linguistic development occur. Some stages last short, some longer, some overlap for a short period, and the transition between stages may be sudden. 11、The development of the grammatical system语法体系的发展 1 The development of phonology语言 The emergence of articulatory skills begins around the age when children start to produce babbling sounds. Children first acquire the sounds that are found in all language of the world, no matter what language they are exposed to, and in later stages acquire the “more difficult” sounds. 2 The development of syntax句法 Children’s early language is not only semantically based, but also makes reference to syntactic categories, such as NP and VP, and grammatical relations, such as subject and object. 3 The development of morphology词形 Children’s early words are simply a bunch of bare stems without affixes. By the time they are going beyond the telegraphic stage, children begin to incorporate some of the inflectional morphemes which indicate the grammatical function of the nouns and verbs used. The first to appear is usually the “-ing” form. Then comes the marking of regular plurals with the “-s” form. This acquisition is often accompanied by a process of overgeneralization. 4 The development of vocabulary and semantics词汇和语义 Overgeneralization also occurs in this development. Children virtually acquired the basic fabric of their native language at the age of five or six. 12、Second language acquisition第二语言的获得 SLA is primarily the study of how learners acquire or learn an additional language (target language) after they have acquired their first language (L1). Some problems in L2 development do not exist in children’s L1. Very few adults seem to reach native-like proficiency in L2. 1 Acquisition vs. Learning习得与学习 A primary difficulty for most L2 learners can be captured in terms of a distinction between acquisition and learning, which was proposed by the American Stephen Krashen.

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