part of the brain

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

A. First Language Acquisition
It is the process whereby children acquire their first languages. All humans (without exceptional physical or mental disabilities) have an innate capability to acquire language. Acquisition occurs passively and unconsciously through implicit learning. In other words, children do not need explicit instruction to learn their first languages but rather seem to just "pick up" language in the same way they learn to roll over, crawl, and walk. Language acquisition in children just seems to happen.
Acquisition (as opposed to learning) depends on children receiving linguistic input during the critical period. The critical period is defined as the window of time, up to about the age of twelve or puberty, in which humans can acquire first languages. Children must receive adequate linguistic input including phonology (speech sounds), semantics (vocabulary and meaning), grammar (syntax or word order and morphology or grammatical markers), and pragmatics (use and context) and prosody (intonation, rhythm, stress) before the end of the critical period in order to acquire their first languages. If linguistic input is not adequate, children will never fully acquire language (as is the case of the Genie, an abused and neglected girl who was discovered by authorities in 1970). Language acquisition cannot normally occur after the critical period because the brain becomes "hardwired" to the first language.
In nearly all cases, children's language development follows a predictable sequence. However, there is a great deal of variation in the age at which children reach a given milestone. Furthermore, each child's development is usually characterized by gradual acquisition of particular abilities: thus "correct" use of English verbal inflection will emerge over a period of a year or more, starting from a stage where verbal inflections are always left out, and ending in a stage where they are nearly always used correctly.
There are also many different ways to characterize the developmental sequence. On the production side, one way to name the stages is as follows, focusing primarily on the unfolding of lexical and syntactic knowledge:
Stage Typical age Description
Babbling 6-8 months Repetitive correct vocalization patterns
One-word stage
(better one-morpheme or one-unit)
or holophrastic stage 9-18 months Single open-class words or word stems
Two-word stage 18-24 months "mini-sentences" with simple semantic relations
Telegraphic stage
or early multiword stage
(better multi-morpheme) 24-30 months "Telegraphic" sentence structures of lexical rather than functional or grammatical morphemes
Later multiword stage 30+ months Grammatical or functional structures emerge
Vocalizations in the first year of life
At birth, the infant vocal tract is in some ways more like that of an ape than that of an adult human. Compare the diagram of the infant vocal tract shown on the left to diagrams of adult human and ape.
In particular, the tip of the velum reaches or overlaps with the tip of the epiglottis. As the infant grows, the tract gradually reshapes itself in the adult pattern.
There are three main theoretical approaches to child language acquisition; all of them have merit but none can fully explain the phenomenon of child language acquisition.

1. Cognitive theory-- Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
A child first becomes aware of a concept, such as relative size, and only afterward do they acquire the words and patterns to convey that concept. Simple ideas are expressed earlier than more complex ones even if they are grammatically more complicated-- Conditional mood is one of the last. (cf. Spanish vs. Russian.)
There is a consistent order of mastery of the most common function morphemes in a language Example from English: first-- -ing, then in and on, then the plural -s, last are the forms of the verb to be. Seems to be conditioned by logical complexity: plural is simple, while forms of the verb to be require sensitivity to both number and tense. Pros and cons-- clearly there is some link between cognitive development and language acquisition; Piaget's theory helps explain the order in which certain a spects of language are acquired. But his theory does not explain why language emerges in the first place. Apes also develop cognitively in much the same way as young children in the first few years of life, but language acquisition doesn't follow naturally from their development. Bees develop the cognitive ability to respond to many shades of color, but bees never develop any communication signals based on shades of color.

2. Imitation and positive reinforcement
Children learn by imitating and repeating what they hear. Positive reinforcement and corrections also play a major role in Language acquisition. Children do imitate adults. Repetition of new words and phrases is a basic feature of children's speech. This is the behaviorist view popular in the 40's and 50's, but challenged, since imitation alone cannot possibly account for all language acquisition.

1) Children often make grammatical mistakes that they couldn't possibly have heard: Cookies are gooder than bread. Bill taked the toy. We goed to the store, Don't giggle me.
2) This hypothesis would not account for the many instances when adults do not coach their children in language skills. Positive reinforcement doesn't seem to speed up the language acquisition process. Children do not respond to or produce metalanguage until 3 or 4, after the main portion of the grammar has been mastered. (Children don't comprehend discussions about language structure.) Story about Tyler, Kornei Chukovsky: yabloka, tibloka)

3. The final theory we will discuss involves the belief in the innateness of certain linguistic features. This theory is connected with the writings of Noam Chomsky, although the theory has been around for hundreds of years. Children are born with an innate capacity for learning human language. Humans are destined to speak. Children discover the grammar of their language based on their own inborn grammar. Certain aspects of language structure seem to be preordained by the cognitive structure of the human mind. This accounts for certain very basic universal features of language structure: every language has nouns/verbs, consonants and vowels. It is assumed that children are pre-programmed, hard-wired, to acquire such things. (The "gavagai" experiment.)
Yet no one has been able to explain how quickly and perfectly all children acquire their native language. Every language is extremely complex, full of subtle distinctions that speakers are not even aware of. Nevertheless, children master their native language in 5 or 6 years regardless of their other talents and general intellectual ability. Acquisition must certainly be more than mere imitation; it also doesn't seem to depend on levels of general intelligence, since even a severely retarded child will acquire a native language without special training. Some innate feature of the mind must be responsible for the universally rapid and natural acquisition of language by any young child exposed to speech.
Chomsky originally believes that the Language Acquisition Devise is a series of syntactic universals, structural properties universally found in all languages. These syntactic structures are inborn. Only the words are learned. Allows us infinite creativity based on a limited number of patterns. Children thus generate sentences based on learned words and innate syntactic patterns. This is why children make grammatical mistakes that they could not be repeating. And yet, so far, no properties have been discovered that are truly universal in all languages. It seems that the syntactic structures differ from language to language and couldn't be innate. All attempts to construct a universal grammar that would underlie all structures in all languages have come to failure, Chomsky's theory of transformational grammar being a case in point.
The problem with the theory of innateness, then, is not in deciding whether the theory is correct, since the ability to learn language is certainly innate, but rather in identifying just what the mysterious language acquisition device actually is, what constraints or structural features are hard-wired in the mind. The LAD must be something more than general intelligence. And yet there doesn't seem to be any structural property or set of properties found in all languages that would allow us to identify any purely linguistic skill that is separate from human intelligence.

B. Second Language Acquisition
a. The nature of second language acquisition
Second language acquisition or second language learning is the process by which people learn a second language in addition to their native language(s). Many times this happens when a child who speaks a language other than English goes to school for the first time. Children have an easier time learning a second language, but anyone can do it at any age. Second language acquisition studies the psychology and sociology of the learning process. Sometimes the terms "acquisition" and "learning" are not treated as synonyms and are instead used to refer to the subconscious and conscious aspects of this process respectively. "Second language" or "target language" or "L2" are used to refer to any language learned after the native language, which is also called "mother tongue", "first language", "L1", or "source language". Second language acquisition also includes third language acquisition/multilingualism and heritage language acquisition.
There are many different things that factor into the decision about how to teach a person a second language, including the following:
 language spoken in the home
 amount of opportunity to practice the second language
 internal motivation of the learner
 reason that the second language is needed (e.g., to learn at school, to talk to a friend, or for work)
There are different ways that to introduce the second language:
 by setting (e.g., English is spoken only in the school, and Urdu is spoken only in the home)
 by topic (e.g., French is spoken only during meal time, and Spanish is spoken during school/work activities)
 by speaker (e.g., Mom will speak only in German, and Dad speaks Russian only)
The ability of a person to use a second language will depend on his or her family's ability to speak more than one language. It is important for parents/caregivers to provide a strong language model. If you cannot use the language well, you should not be teaching it.

b. Second Language Acquisition and its premises
Second language acquisition encompasses the acquisition of any language after the acquisition of the first language by a learner. Therefore, it incorporates learning the third or fourth languages which is closely related to bilingualism and multilingualism, and heritage language learning. Cenoz and Genesee (1998) terms multilingual acquisition and multilingualism as complex phenomena and add that they implicate all the factors and processes associated with second language acquisition and bilingualism as well as unique and potentially more complex factors and effects associated with the interactions that are possible among the multiple languages being learned and the processes of learning them. Valdés (2000) defines heritage language as the language someone learns at home as a child which is a minority language in society, but because of growing up in a dominant language, the speaker seems to be more competent in the latter and feels more comfortable to communicate in that language. However, since heritage speakers are commonly alienated from their heritage language for a long time, and get limited or no exposure to that language, they seem to be in a state of language acquisition that is greatly different from monolinguals or second language speakers of that language.

c. Five Components of Second Language Acquisition Theory
Second language acquisition theory seeks to quantify how and by what processes individuals acquire a second language. The predominant theory of second language acquisition was developed by the University of Southern California’s Steven Krashen. Krashen is a specialist in language development and acquisition, and his influential theory is widely accepted in the language learning community.
There are five main components of Krashen’s theory. Each of the components relates to a different aspect of the language learning process. The five components are as follows:
• The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis
This hypothesis actually fuses two fundamental theories of how individuals learn languages. Krashen has concluded that there are two systems of language acquisition that are independent but related: the acquired system and the learned system.
 The acquired system relates to the unconscious aspect of language acquisition. When people learn their first language by speaking the language naturally in daily interaction with others who speak their native language, this acquired system is at work. In this system, speakers are less concerned with the structure of their utterances than with the act of communicating meaning. Krashen privileges the acquired system over the learned system.
 The learned system relates to formal instruction where students engage in formal study to acquire knowledge about the target language. For example, studying the rules of syntax is part of the learned system.
• The Monitor Hypothesis
The monitor hypothesis seeks to elucidate how the acquired system is affected by the learned system. When second language learners monitor their speech, they are applying their understanding of learned grammar to edit, plan, and initiate their communication. This action can only occur when speakers have ample time to think about the form and structure of their sentences.
The amount of monitoring occurs on a continuum. Some language learners over-monitor and some use very little of their learned knowledge and are said to under-monitor. Ideally, speakers strike a balance and monitor at a level where they use their knowledge but are not overly inhibited by it.

• The Natural Order Hypothesis
This hypothesis argues that there is a natural order to the way second language learners acquire their target language. Research suggests that this natural order seems to transcend age, the learner's native language, the target language, and the conditions under which the second language is being learned. The order that the learners follow has four steps:
1. They produce single words.
2. They string words together based on meaning and not syntax.
3. They begin to identify elements that begin and end sentences.
4. They begin to identify different elements within sentences and can rearrange them to produce questions.

• The Input Hypothesis
This hypothesis seeks to explain how second languages are acquired. In its most basic form, the input hypothesis argues that learners progress along the natural order only when they encounter second language input that is one step beyond where they are in the natural order. Therefore, if a learner is at step one from the above list, they will only proceed along the natural order when they encounter input that is at the second step.

• The Affective Filter Hypothesis
This hypothesis describes external factors that can act as a filter that impedes acquisition. These factors include motivation, self-confidence, and anxiety. For example, if a learner has very low motivation, very low self-confidence, and a high level of anxiety, the affective filter comes into place and inhibits the learner from acquiring the new language. Students who are motivated, confident, and relaxed about learning the target language have much more success acquiring a second language than those who are trying to learn with the affective filter in place.


C. The difference of First and Second Language Acquisition
One of the major differences between first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition relates to the level of ultimate attainment. Children acquiring their native language manage within a relatively short period of time to acquire fully the language they are exposed to, whereas this is not the case for adults acquiring an L2. Adult L2 learners typically do not manage to achieve the full acquisition of the L2 grammar irrespective of the amount of exposure they have in the L2.






LANGUAGE PROCESSING IN THE BRAIN AND PARTS OF THE BRAIN WHICH ARE RESPONSIBLE IN PRODUCING LANGUAGE
A. Language Processing
Many psycholinguists conceive of the mental lexicon as a collective of individual units as in figure 1. In this figure, the lexicon is shown as a space in which entries of different types are stored and linked together. The main questions that are asked about the mental lexicon are: (1) How are entries linked? (2) How are entries assessed? (3) What information is contained in an entry?








Figure 1

Language processing involves the interplay of information that develops simultaneously as many different levels of analysis. When someone hear a sentence, for example ‘the dog bit the cat’ phonetic analysis will be performed to isolate the phonemes and word boundaries, and to relate these to representations in the mental lexicon. This inductive analysis is referred to as bottom-up processing. But people do not wait until they have analyzed all the phonemes in a sentence before beginning to try to understand it. Rather, people begin interpretation of a sentence spontaneously and automatically on he basis of whatever information is available. For this reason, by the time people get to the word in the sentence, they are not only recognizing it using bottom-up processing but they are also employing a set of expectations to guide phonetic processing and word recognition. This is called top-down processing. Normally, people use both bottom-up and to-down processing.













Figure 2

This figure shows how the language is processed. People first perform phonological processing. In this stage the input is processed into representation. At the lexical access stage, units of the mental lexicon is corresponding the phonological recognitions. Information from lexical access feeds the syntactic parsing which produces a representation. Then information from both lexical access and the syntactic parsing are fed to the representation pruning. Finally, the interpretation only becomes conscious in the final stage.

































Figure 3 Levelt’s model of speech production
Figure 3 is currently the most influential model of speech production and is based on a wide array of psycholinguistics result. It states that speech production begins in Conceptualizer (in which a message is formed). The message is then given linguistics form in the Formulator. The Formulator contains grammatical and phonological processes and draws upon the lexicon (represented in the centre of the model). From the Formulator, information is passed to the Articulator which actually produces the utterance.
In this model, information does not flow in one direction only. Rather there is feedback so that while producing a language, a speaker monitors through the comprehension system whether the utterance makes sense. This is represented as an arrow that feeds back to the Conceptualize.
B. Language and the Brain (Speech and language)
Language is a function of the peculiar structure of the human brain. Several areas of the brain have been identified with linguistic skills, such as producing and understanding speech. Furthermore, people with brain damage in specific areas have difficulties with very specific aspects of language, implying that it is a highly compartmentalized process. Furthermore, human brains are functionally asymmetrical, concentrating many areas essential for speech production in one hemisphere.
C. The Structure of the Brain
The first language area within the left hemisphere to be discovered is called Broca's Area, after Paul Broca. Broca was a French neurologist who had a patient with severe language problems: Although he could understand the speech of others with little difficulty, the only word he could produce was "tan." Because of this, Broca gave the patient the pseudonym "Tan." After the patient died, Broca performed an autopsy, and discovered that an area of the frontal lobe, just ahead of the motor cortex controlling the mouth, had been seriously damaged. He correctly hypothesized that this area was responsible for speech production.
Physicians called the inability to speak aphasia, and the inability to produce speech was therefore called Broca's aphasia, or expressive aphasia. Someone with this kind of aphasia has little problem understanding speech. But when trying to speak themselves are capable only of slow, laborious, often slurred sequences of words. They don't produce complete sentences, seldom use regular grammatical endings such as -ed for the past tense, and tend to leave out small grammatical words.
It turns out that Broca's area is not just a matter of getting language out in a motor sense, though. It seems to be more generally involved in the ability to deal with grammar itself, at least the more complex aspects of grammar. For example, when they hear sentences that are put into a passive form, they often misunderstand: If you say "the boy was slapped by the girl," they may understand you as communicating that the boy slapped the girl instead.

One of the first indications of brain function lateralization resulted from the research of French physician Pierre Paul Broca, in 1861. His research involved the male patient nicknamed "Tan", who suffered a speech deficit (aphasia); "tan" was one of the few words he could articulate, hence his nickname. In Tan's autopsy, Broca determined he had a syphilitic lesion in the left cerebral hemisphere. This left frontal lobe brain area (Broca's Area) is an important speech production region. The motor aspects of speech production deficits caused by damage to Broca’s Area are known as Broca's aphasia. In clinical assessment of this aphasia, it is noted that the patient cannot clearly articulate the language being employed.
In many animals that use sound for communication, the brain is lateralized, placing the control of sound production in one hemisphere of the brain (usually the left); this takes place quite strongly in songbirds and somewhat in monkeys, dolphins, and mice. The phenomenon of lateralization is extremely strong in humans, and in the vast majority language areas are concentrated in the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere controls language in only about 3% of right-handers and 19% of left-handers, and another 68% of left-handers have language circuitry in both hemispheres.
There are two major areas of the human brain that are responsible for language: Broca's area, which is though to be partially responsible for language production (putting together sentences, using proper syntax, etc.) and Wernicke's area, which is thought to be partially responsible for language processing (untangling others' sentences and analyzing them for syntax, inflection, etc.). Other areas involved in language are those surrounding the Sylvian fissure, a cleavage line separating the portions of the brain that are exclusively human from those we share with other animals. In general, the areas that control language would be adjacent to one another if the human brain was laid out as a flat sheet.
C.1. Broca's Aphasia
When people experience damage to Broca's area or its surroundings, their disorder is called Broca's aphasia. As predicted by the central role of Broca's area in language production, Broca's aphasics produce slow, halting speech that is rarely grammatical. Typical Broca's aphasics eliminate inflections such as -ed and words not central to the meaning of the sentence, such as the and and. They generally retain their vocabularies and have no difficulty naming objects or performing other meaning-related tasks. In general, they can deduce the meanings of sentences from general knowledge, but cannot understand sentences whose syntax is essential to their meaning. They are fully aware of their difficulties and the rest of their faculties are unimpaired.
The difficulties experienced by Broca's aphasics reveal that Broca's area is central to correct processing and production of grammatical information. However, some Broca's aphasics retain certain grammatical abilities, including the ability to process certain types of syntax. Moreover, the difficulty that Broca's aphasics experience in actual production of speech is also enigmatic; a problem that affected exclusively grammar would not necessarily create difficulty in speaking - only in speaking grammatically. As a result, Broca's area is clearly involved in grammar and language, but there may be other areas in the brain with overlapping functions, and it may not be the seat of all grammatical processing power.
C.2. Wernickle's Aphasia
This kind of aphasia is known as Wernicke's Aphasia, or receptive aphasia. When you ask a person with this problem a question, they will respond with a sentence that is more or less grammatical, but which contains words that have little to do with the question or, for that matter, with each other. Strange, meaningless, but grammatical sentences come forth, a phenomenon called "word salad."
Like Broca's area is not just about speech production, Wernicke's is not just about speech comprehension. People with Wernicke's Aphasia also have difficulty naming things, often responding with words that sound similar, or the names of related things, as if they are having a very hard time with their mental "dictionaries."
When people experience damage to Wernicke's area, the result is a disorder called Wernicke's aphasia, which is in some ways the opposite of Broca's aphasia. Wernicke's aphasics are able to produce generally grammatical sentences, but they are often nonsensical and include invented words. Wernicke's aphasics show few signs of understanding others' speech, and have difficulty naming objects; they commonly produce the names of related objects or words that sound similar to the object's name.
The symptoms experienced by Wernicke's aphasics seem to support the idea that Wernicke's are is related to the correct processing of others' communication. It also implies that Wernicke's area could be involved in the retrieval of words from the mental dictionary.
The second language area to be discovered is called Wernicke's Area, after Carl Wernicke, a German neurologist. Wernicke had a patient who could speak quite well, but was unable to understand the speech of others. After the patient's death, Wernicke performed an autopsy and found damage to an area at the upper portion of the temporal lobe, just behind the auditory cortex. He correctly hypothesized that this area was responsible for speech comprehension.
C.3. Other Areas
Despite the fact that Broca's and Wernicke's Areas are in different lobes, they are actually quite near each other and intimately connected by a tract of nerves called the arcuate fascilicus. There are also people who have damage to the arcuate fascilicus, which results in an aphasia known as conduction aphasia. These people have it a bit better than other aphasias: They can understand speech, and they can (although with difficulty) produce coherent speech, they cannot repeat words or sentences that they hear.
Reading and writing are a part of language as well, of course. But since these skills have only been around a few thousand years, they are not as clearly marked in terms of brain functioning as the basic comprehension and production areas. But there is an area of the brain called the angular gyrus that lies about halfway between Wernicke's area and the visual cortex of the occipital lobe. It was discovered, after a young patient with reading problems died and his brain was examined during autopsy. The angular gyrus showed significant abnormalities.
The angular gyrus has been implicated in problems such as alexia (the inability to read), dyslexia (difficulties with reading), and agraphia (the inability to write). In research involving the use of PET scans on people with these problems, the angular gyrus is not as active as it is in other people while engaged in reading or writing. However, problems such as dyslexia also can involve other areas of the brain, or not involve brain disorders at all.

REFERENCES

Baum, W. M.2005. Understanding behaviorism: Behavior, Culture and Evolution. Blackwell.
Chomsky, Noam. 2000. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ellis, D. G. 1999. From language to communication. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hierro S. Pescador, J. 1986. Principios de filosofía del lenguaje [Principles of philosophy of language]. Madrid: Alianza.
Goddard, Cliff and Wierzbicka, Anna (eds.). 1994. Semantic and Lexical Universals - Theory and Empirical Findings. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Goddard, Cliff .2002. 'The search for the shared semantic core of all languages'. In Goddard & Wierzbicka (eds.) Meaning and Universal Grammar - Theory and Empirical Findings volume 1, pp. 5-40, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (ed.) (1963) Universals of Languages. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (ed.) (1978a) Universals of Human Language Vol. 4: Syntax. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (ed.) (1978b) Universals of Human Language Vol. 3: Word Structure. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Heine, Bernd (1997) Cognitive Foundations of Grammar. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
http://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/genetics/behavior/learning/behaviorism.html
http://locke.citizendium.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics"
http://www.wikipedia.com/Theory_of_cognitive_development.htm
http://www.wikipedia.com/Psycholinguistics.htm
http://online.nph.net/cgi-bin/site.pl?10210&articleID
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2088084 (JSTOR)
http://web.media.mit.edu/~nitin/ethno/DomesticEthno.pdf
Tappe, Heike. (2007). Introduction to Language Study: Psycholinguistics. Room MTB/G108
Rosch, E. & Mervis, C.B. & Gray, W.D. & Johnson, D.M. & Boyes-Braem, P. (1976) 'Basic Objects In Natural Categories', Cognitive Psychology 8-3, 382-439.
Wilkins, David P. (1993) ‘From part to person: natural tendencies of semantic change and the search for cognates’, Working paper No. 23, Cognitive