BABY TALK BY MARHAMAH (0743042020)

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
(BABY TALK)

Name : Marhamah
NPM : 0743042020
PS : S1.Pend. B.Inggris (NR)
Subject : Second Language Acquisitions
Lecturer : Hery Yufrizal, M.A., PH.D








TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION FACULTY
BANDAR LAMPUNG
2011

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION


According to Brown (1980), Children are known as “good imitators”. Two types of imitation behaviorist assume one type of imitation that is surface structure imitations, where a child repeats or mimics the surface string, attending to a phonological code rather than a semantic code. It is the level of imitation that enables an adult to repeat random numbers or nonsense syllables or to mimic unknown languages. As in the following:
Vivi is two years old. Her aunt invited her to do conversation in Sundenese language.
Aunty : Vivi.. Vivi teh tos timana, sayang..?
Vivi : Aki’..
Analysis
In the dialogue above, the aunty asked Vivi where she has been. Vivi answered the question by saying Aki’ (“grandfather” in sundanese language), it can be interpreted that Vivi was just back from her grandfather’s house. From the the way Vivi answered the question, we can conclud that children use simple word in their utterence.
Aunty : upami tos ageung Vivi hoyong janteun naon?
Vivi : dotol
Aunty : (laughing) janteun dokter.... emang bade nyuntik saha?
Vivi : emak..
Aunty : Bade nyuntik emak...
Vivi : he eh.. de ntik emaaak..
Aunty : gaduh panyawat naon kitu emak Vivi teh..?
Vivi : silah...
Aunty : naon?
Vivi : silaah..
Aunty : ooh.. nyeuri sirah..
Vivi : he eh..
Analysis
The children imitate what adult say to them, like Vivi’s imitation words when the aunty correct her sentence. For example, the question “emang bade nyuntik saha?” and Vivi answered it by saying “emak” or “Mom” in English and her aunt complete this word by saying “Bade nyuntik emak.,” that has meaning “i want to inject my Mom” then Vivi try to imitate this sentence by saying “de ntik emaak” it shows that the children is good imitators.
Also, children can say something they get in their daily life. For example, Vivi’s mother often says “nyeuri sirah..” (i have headache). So, when the Aunty asked Vivi about her mother’s disease Vivi answer “silah” or “sirah” it means that Vivi learns language indirectly in her daily life.
If we observe children speaking for the first time, we will find it very fascinating. One of the amazing things is that language emerges at about the same time in children all over the world.( Aitcison,2008). Why do childrren normally begin to speak between their eighteenth and twenty-eight month?

Surely it is not because all mother on earth initiate languge training at that time. There is, in fact no evidance that any conscious and systematic teaching of language takes place, just as there is no special training for stance or gait.(lenneberg, 1967:125)

Languge may be set in motion by a biological click, similiar to the one which causes kittens to open their eyas when they are a few days old, chrysalies to change into butterfliesafter several weeks, and human to become sexually mature at around 13 years of age. However, until relatively recently few people had considered language within the framework of biological maturation.

From 5 or 6 months onwards it can “ bable “ a number of sound needed in speech, before the age of 18 months children utter few words. They have to wait for some biological trigger. The “trrigger” aperas to be connected with brain growth.two-words utterences which are usually regarded as the beginning of “ true language” begin just as a massive activity in brain growth slows down.

When one says that direct teaching is a failure. People smile and say, of course-whoever tries to teach a child to speak? Yet many parents often without realizing it, try to persuade their children to imitate them. They do this in two ways:
1. By means overt correction
2. By means of unconcious expansions.

It can be seen forcing children to imitate is likely to be a disastrous failure. Children cannot be trained like parrots. And repeat complaining corrections may even hinder a child’s progress. However, Aitchison (2008) states that the matter is not quite as simple as first sight. The now famous “ meng-ga”. Dialogue show that corrections are unhelpful if the child’s attention is focused highly on matters other than the language. Later work has shown that kindly made corrections from a sensitive caregiver can enable a child to learn language faster.

But that perhaps on over simplification. Correction can help, if the young learner is currenly thinking through the problem corrected. Youngsters “ tune in” to different aspects of their language as the progress. If a child is tussling with so called reflexives. And its parents are sensitive enough to notice that, then correction may be worthwhile as in the following dialogue above:

According to Brown (1980) the earliest stages of child language acquisition may manifest a great deal of surface imitation, because the baby may not posses the necessary semantic categories to assign “meaning “to utterances. But as the child perceives the importance of the semantic level language, he attends primarily to the meaningful semantic level,i.e the deep structure of language. in fact the imitation of the deep structure of language can literally block his attention to the surface structure, therefore on the surface structure, he becomes poor imitator. Let’s have a look at the following conversation:

Child : Nobody don’t like me.
Mother : No say “ nobody likes me”
Child : Nobody don’t like me.
(eight repetitions of the this dialogue)
Mother : No, now listen carefully: say “ nobody likes me”
Child : oh!Nobody don’t like me

How frustrated both mother and child are! for the mother was attending to a rather technical, surface grammatical distinction. However the child sought to derive some meaning value. At the end, the child understood some sort of surface distinction between what he was saying and what this mother was saying and made what he thought was an appropriate change.
Bloom (1976:37)noted that “ an explanation of language development depend upon an explanation of the cognitive basses of language : what children know will determine what they learn about the code for both speaking and understanding messages” according to Piaget,
1. the overall cognitive development of a child is an the result of his interaction with his environment
2. his interaction is accompanied with complementary interaction between the child’s developing perceptual cognitive capacities and his linguistic experience
3. What the child learns about language is determined by what the child already knows about the words. Dan Slobin (1971) advocates (1) that in all language, semantic learning depends on cognitive development and (2) that sequences of development are determined more by semantic complexity than by structural complexity.

Children use the language creatively, since they use utterances, which they can never have actually heard. Los bloom (1970) found that sentences containing two nouns were used to express five kinds of relationships depended on her observations of the child in an actual conjunctions:
1. Conjunction
2. Description
3. Possession
4. Location
5. Agent object
And Dan Slobin(1979) found seven many types of communicative functions. They are: locating or naming, demanding or desiring, negating, describing an event, indicating possession, describing a person or thing and questioning.
Children are in the process of mastering inflections and function words. In the relevant studies, these small items are usually referred to as morphemes.
At the same time as children are increasing their mastery of grammatical morphemes, they are also increasing their ability to carry out transformations on the sentences structure, in order to produce more complex utterances. The development of negatives and interrogatives has attracted particular attention. For both of this structures. children seems to follow similar sequences of development as in the following:
1. First, the negative element is not part of the structure of the sentence
2. The negative element is inserted into the sentences
3. Children begin to produce the appropriate part of do, be or the modal verbs
The development of these transformations provides interesting evidence that grammatical development is partly a matter of growing competence and partly a matter of increasing performance capacity. Ursulla Klima (1968) found the following progressions in the child’s ability to carry out more than one transformations in a single utterance.
1. The child can either invert subject and verb or propose questions word, but do not do both. We thus find inversion in yes/no questions
2. The child is able to combine boyh perations.
3. This limitations goes and the child is able to perform all three operations in the sane utterance prepose a question word, invert and negate.
Linguistic development has been the subject of less intensive study than that of the early year. Some subtle grammar distinctions may be mastered much before the age of ten.
Caretaker speech is a number of observational studies of the language addressed to small child aby mothers, other adult or older children. Caretaker speech has a number of characteristics which distinguish it from typical speech between adult. Caretaker speech seems particularly well suited to helping the child to learn the rules and meaning of the language. Caretaker speech more suitable as a model for imitation. However, the role of imitation in the acquisition process is not clear