FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

First Language Acquisition

First Language Acquisition

A: Acquisition of Morphology in Children

Introduction

Language acquisition is the step by step process which includes different levels of language learning. In children this process is different from the adult second language learners. In children, first step is the learning of words or vocabulary after constantly listening to particular words. It is the beginning of lexical development which leads towards the language learning in children at in the first year. This is the initial stage which becomes more complex and involves learning of grammatical morphemes, which deals with the language acquisition (Goodluck, 1991, p. 34-60). This consist of learning genders, numbers, colour, figures and different other complex system.

Discussion

Morphological Development

Morphological development begins with listening, watching then analyzing different objects and identifying it from other things around (Goodluck 1991, 34-60). For example a child when first listen to the word “box” might not be able to identify it, but when listening to it again in different contexts and then analyzing and identifying it as a common word.

This provides that it is the initial stage of lexical development and after realizing it there are different other morphological development associated with it (Goodluck 1991, 34-60). For example, this is a box, toys are in the box, open the box, put your toys in the box.

All these different uses of the word “box” assist in identifying the object and then developing the understanding of noun, numbers, verbs and different other morphological units.

“a box” means (a single “box” different from “boxes”)

“put” “open” means (particular actions)

The actions performed will assist in understanding what the particular verb means and how one action is different from other. Later the prepositional development with the concept “in the box” will assist in understanding of different relations and use of prepositions. This occurs in the case of irregular morphemes. For example, in the use of irregular verb forms, there might be a pattern of regular verbs in the past tense like “putted in the box”. These patterns are also very common in the number as instead of using plural of “mouse” as mice, children use “mouses” (O'Grady, 2005, p. 9-11 ).

Types of Morphology

Derivational Morphology

Derivational morphology deals with the learning of new words at the early stage of development. This deals with the development of the lexical system. It involves different perspectives associated with the morphological system and syntactic level(Finegan, 2011, p. 510).

Inflectional Morphology

Inflectional morphology deals with the different learning stages and modification in the lexical system. It consists of different system of developing different aspects of involving complex syntactic structure with morphemes (Finegan, 2011, p. 510).

Inflectional Morpheme and Types

This can be understand with the example that there can be a simple word “Ball” which represent an object “ball”. This is derivational morpheme, but inflectional morpheme can be understand as adding “-ing” form with it and using the same object and a noun as a verb form to represent an action of ...