Q: What is First Language Acquisition (FLA)?
A: The study of how children naturally acquire their first language, including phonology, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and semantics.
Q: Why is FLA different from second language acquisition?
A: FLA happens quickly and effortlessly, while second language learning is slower and often imperfect.
Q: What does it mean to “acquire” a language?
A: To develop a mental grammar that allows infinite novel sentences.
Q: Why can’t language be learned through memorization alone?
A: Because speakers produce and understand unlimited new sentences.
Q: What is overgeneralization?
A: Applying regular rules to irregular forms (e.g., goed, runned).
Q: What do children’s errors show?
A: Children create rules and revise them, not just imitate adults.
Q: What are naturalistic studies?
A: Observations of spontaneous child speech, often longitudinal.
Q: One disadvantage of naturalistic studies?
A: Speech samples are incomplete and rare structures may not appear.
Q: What are experimental studies?
A: Controlled tasks testing specific language knowledge, usually cross-sectional.
Q: What speech abilities do newborns have?
A: Prefer human voices, recognize mother’s voice, distinguish phonemes.
Q: Why is babbling important?
A: It helps develop speech; lack of babbling can delay speech.
Q: What is babbling?
A: Practice producing speech sounds (starts ~6 months).
Q: Which sounds appear earliest cross-linguistically?
A: p, b, m, t, d, n, k, g.
Q: Which comes first: perception or production?
A: Perception.
Q: What is syllable deletion?
A: Dropping unstressed syllables (hippopotamus → pas).
Q: What is syllable simplification?
A: Removing clusters or final consonants (spoon → pun).
Q: What is stopping?
A: Replacing fricatives with stops (sing → ting).
Q: What is fronting?
A: Moving sounds forward in the mouth (ship → sip).
Q: What is gliding?
A: Liquids become glides (look → wook).
Q: What is denasalization?
A: Nasals become oral stops (room → wub).
Q: What is assimilation?
A: Sounds become more similar to neighbors (pig → big).
Q: How many words by 18 months?
A: About 50.
Q: Vocabulary size by age 6?
A: About 13,000 words.
Q: By age 17?
A: About 60,000 words.
