Acumen:
International Journal of
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ISSN: 3060-4745
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NOTICING PRAGMATIC DIFFERENCES BETWEEN L1 AND L2
COMMUNICATION
Teshaboyeva Nafisa Zubaydulla qizi
Jizzakh branch of the National University of Uzbekistan
named after Mirzo Ulugbek
The Faculty of Psychology, the department of Foreign languages
Philology and teaching languages
Igor Chekulay Vladimirovich
Professor of the Department of English Philology and Intercultural Communication,
Belgorod State National Research University, Belgorod, Russian Federation.
Student of group 103-23: Po’latova Guli Nuriddin qizi
Abstract
This paper reviews the literature on similarities and differences between first
.
and second language lexical acquisition. After a brief discussion of differences in input,
we go on to early lexical development, considering both the speed of acquisition as
well as possible reasons for more efficient lexical learning in first language acquisition
as compared to second language acquisition. We discuss the role of phonological
representations in facilitating the extraction of units from incoming speech. We
continue with a discussion of unanalyzed units, arguing that their role as a stepping
stone into language is much the same in first and second language acquisition. Finally,
we review methods for investigating the first and second language lexicons.
Keywords
: lexical acquisition, L1 & L2 similarities and differences, input, methods,
usage-based theory, chunking, phonological representation, constraints.
Introduction
It is relatively easy to list the differences between the acquisition of
first and
second languages. In the first language, acquisition children are acquiring knowledge
about the world at the same time that they are acquiring language. Second language
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International Journal of
Multidisciplinary Research
ISSN: 3060-4745
IF(Impact Factor)10.41 / 2024
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learners bring knowledge of the world to the task of learning new ways to talk about
the world. Exposure to the target language for second language learners varies, both in
quantity and in quality, depending upon whether the learner is a child in a multilingual
family, a pupil in a classroom, an immigrant at a workplace, a spouse in a new country
or a student in a foreign university, etc. Children are predisposed to become native
speakers of the language(s) spoken around them. The outcome of second language
learning depends on a myriad of factors – age, input, L1 and L2 proximity or distance,
motivation, individual differences in memory, in personality, etc. However, both first
and second language learners are faced with the same problem – how to map form and
function to produce meaningful utterances based upon their language experiences ,
which, for an L2 learner are diverse depending both upon the individual learner and
the learning situation1 . Recent accounts of language learning have emphasized that
learners build language based upon ‘usage events’ - particular utterances in particular
contexts .Nativist views of language acquisition propose that learners bring innate
abstract grammatical knowledge (Universal Grammar) to the task of language learning.
In contrast, usage-based approaches argue that it is only after considerable exposure
and practice with language that abstract grammatical representations emerge. The
change in theoretical perspective from positing that abstract grammatical knowledge is
innate to positing that abstract grammatical knowledge emerges from language use has
enriched the interaction between researchers in first and second language learning. In
the overview of the literature comparing the acquisition of first and second languages,
we are particularly interested in the lexicon. It has been an established fact for years
that the size of vocabulary is a major predictor of language proficiency in first language
acquisition. In the 50s and 60s lexical development was widely studied in second
language acquisition. However, with the impact of rule-driven grammars and a major
paradigm shift in linguistics, introduced by Noam Chomsky, the interest in second
language lexicons decreased. Over the last decades and with the influence of usage-
based learning models, the boundary between the lexicon and syntax has weakened,
and the lexicon has been attributed a major role in determining language proficiency.
Lexical specifications include not only the meaning of words, but also
information concerning the constructions in which the word can 1. L2 age of onset in
particular is reputed to play a role on L2 proficiency attainment. This approach has
resulted in a resurgence of research concerning vocabulary in both first and second
language acquisition (Hilton 2007) and its role as a foundation for subsequent language
development. We will begin with a brief discussion of the differences in input for
learners of first and second languages. We then go on to discuss early lexical
Acumen:
International Journal of
Multidisciplinary Research
ISSN: 3060-4745
IF(Impact Factor)10.41 / 2024
Volume 2, Issue 4
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development, considering both the speed of acquisition as well as the possible reasons
for more efficient lexical learning in first language (L1) acquisition as compared to
second language (L2) acquisition. In particular we will highlight the role of
phonological representations as a major milestone in both L1 and L2 learning.
Phonological representations have been argued to facilitate the extraction of units from
incoming speech – be they a word or a multi-word sequence. We will continue with a
discussion of the role of unanalysed units arguing that they provide a foundation for
subsequent development and for facilitating language processing. Finally, we will
discuss methods for investigating L1 and L2 lexical learning.
Differences in input
Differences between input for L1 and L2 learners are quite numerous and
concern both quantity and quality. It has been estimated that a 2- to 3-year-old child in
an English speaking environment is exposed to about 5,000 to 7,000 utterances a day
(Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven & Tomasello 2003). Pearson, Fernández, Lewedeg &
Oller (1997) were able to establish clear correlations between amount of language
exposure and lexical development in bilingual children. Quantity of input differs, but
so does quality of input. Child-directed speech (CDS) is highly repetitive and fi lled
with child-centred questions and comments. CDS, in comparison to adult-directed
speech, is described as being syntactically simpler, more grammatical, limited in
vocabulary as well as in complexity, more fluent, fi ne tuned and geared to the child’s
particular interests. Although variability is observed across languages and cultures for
L1 learners (Ochs & Schieffelin 1994), this variability is not as important as it is for
L2 learners whose learning environments are extremely diverse, depending upon, for
example, whether the learner is immersed in the target language environment or is
learning in a classroom or alone with a book or a computer. After a period of little
interest in the study of CDS initiated by Chomsky’s (1965) argument of the poverty of
the stimulus, many studies have examined the quality of CDS .The impact of CDS on
language acquisition has undergone considerable scrutiny. In particular, frequencies of
items and of structures are hypothesised to influence what is learned by children. For
example, Chenu & Jisa ,using naturalistic data of 2 French-speaking mother-child
dyads, showed an important correlation between verbs used by the mothers and the fi
rst verbs produced by their children. In addition their study reveals a specificity in CDS
by comparing frequencies of different verbs in their mother-child data with those
obtained from the Gougenheim corpus . Verbs that are significantly used more by the
mothers as compared to GC are also those which are produced frequently by the
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ISSN: 3060-4745
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children, including verbs used to establish joint attention, to negotiate intentions and
activities and verbs encoding motion and caused motion. Even if some L2 learners may
receive as much input as L1 learners, the quality is very different, given that it does not
directly address the learner’s communicative goals and intentions. Hatch (1978), for
example, compares interactions between L1 learners and adults with interactions
between L2 learners and adults, and finds that in the second type of interaction
exchanges are initiated overwhelmingly by the native speaker adult, and thus challenge
the L2 learner with identification of the topic). This is very different from child-mother
dyads in which most topics are child-initiated. CDS is not uniform across cultures, but
generally speaking a child is more likely to have access to specifically tailored input
than is an adult L2 learner. An L1 learner has an advantage in the quality of input, but
an L2 learner also has an advantage in that s/he brings considerable linguistic and
nonlinguistic knowledge to the learning task.
Early lexical development
Children’s early lexical development is relatively slow in the beginning. In
general, first words are acquired by the end of the first year of life and, over the course
of several months, the pace at which new words enter the toddler’s repertoire is slow,
but steady until the size of the lexicon reaches about 50 items .Subsequently, for most
children, a lexical spurt is observed. The lexical spurt has a long history in L1 literature
and is characterized by an increase in the rate of word acquisition. It has been greatly
documented for English, but has been reported on for a variety of other languages.
Some discrepancy is reported concerning the age at which children show a lexical
spurt, e.g. at approximately 17 to 19 months for English speaking children (Nelson
1973; Benedict 1979; at about 25 months for French-speaking children .Differences
have also been observed in the types of words observed .Considerable L1 literature has
also highlighted major differences depending upon whether or not comprehension as
well as production is measured .And, it should be mentioned that some studies question
the existence of such a spurt in children. To our knowledge, a lexical spurt has not been
reported for adult L2 learners but has been observed in early L2 acquisition .Instead,
the literature in L2 concerning adolescents and adults mentions successive plateaux
and spurts in lexical growth. In a study of French as a foreign language Milton suggests
that, even for the best learners, a period of stagnation in vocabulary growth can last
several years. Why do children learn words so quickly? As Gayraud & Kern point out,
different types of explanations have been advanced to account for the lexical spurt. It
has been associated with the emergence of categorization abilities and the awareness
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International Journal of
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ISSN: 3060-4745
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that these categories bear names .It has also been suggested that the word spurt could
result from an increase in short term memory capacity and from phonetic and
phonological development. Development of communicative skills during an intense
period of socialization in the young child’s life could result in an increased motivation
to learn labels. And finally, a vast div of research focuses on the discovery of
constraints on word learning, the result of which is ‘fast mapping’ isolate word-forms
in the input, 2) induct their meanings, and 3) map those meanings onto word-forms and
then store that association. ‘Fast mapping’ refers to the fact that a human being can
establish a correspondence between word form and the meaning that the word encodes
based upon very few if not only one single exposure(s). Children as young as 18 months
give evidence for fast 22 Florence CHENU & Harriet JISA mapping and since the
capacity to rapidly establish sound-meaning correspondences occurs around the time
of the lexical spurt, the capacity for fast mapping is proposed as a prerequisite for the
lexical spurt. A major issue that has been identified revolves around the ‘induction
problem’ (Quine 1960) i.e., given the multitude of possibilities for a word’s meaning,
how does the child manage to select the appropriate one? In an attempt to resolve this
problem, Markman and her collaborators postulate three lexical principles which guide
early word learning: the whole object assumption, the mutual exclusivity assumption
and the taxonomic assumption. On the basis of the whole object assumption children
would tend to associate labels to whole objects rather than to parts of objects. The
mutual exclusitivity assumption would lead children to assign one label to one object.
And on the basis of this assumption, if a novel word-form is encountered, the child
would prefer to associate it to an object for which he has no name yet. Finally, the
taxonomic assumption would guide children to label with the same word-form objects
of like kind, i.e. to focus on taxonomic rather than thematic relations for labelling.
However there is not a general consensus concerning the role of such constraints in L1
lexical acquisition .Approaches that emphasize the role of social interaction such as
Clark & Wong show that the adult speech directed to six English-speaking children
contains considerable violations of the constraints. For example, in contradiction to the
mutual exclusitivity constraint, adults use many different words to refer to the same
object i.e. dog, pet, animal, or Rover. In addition, when adults talk to children they
provide pragmatic directions for word usage. In answer to a child’s utterance That’s a
snake the mother repairs with It looks like a snake, doesn’t it? It’s called an eel. It’s
like a snake only it lives in the water .Clark & Wong argue that « analyses of the content
of child-directed speech strongly suggest that pragmatic directions about language use
play a critical role in getting lexical learning off the ground in the earliest stages of
acquisition. L1 adult discourse directed to children is very rich in feedback concerning
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appropriateness of word usage and moreover children learn from adult reformulations
. Some studies have shown that L2 interlocutors tend not to correct L2 learner errors
but this would seem subject to great variation depending upon the conversational
situation, the status of the interlocutors, the culture, etc.
REVIEWING SOME SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN L1 AND L2
LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT
Whereas L1 learners are acquiring words and knowledge about the world
simultaneously, the links between words and the world for L2 learners are largely a
function of the age of the learner. L2 language learners can potentially take two paths.
On the one hand L2 learners can associate the new word directly to the intended
referent just as one would in L1 learning. And on the other hand, L2 learners can
establish translation equivalents between L1 and L2. MacWhinney (2008) argues that
in early stages adult L2 learners simply treat a word in their second language, such as
chien, as another way of saying dog in their first language. Thus, it has been argued
that the lexicon in early L2 acquisition has no separate conceptual structure.
Establishing translation equivalents, of course, can be very useful for languages with
many cognates. However, going beyond the names for concrete objects, such as chair
and chaise, can be problematic. For example, the English verb know corresponds to
two verbs in French, savoir . French apprendre corresponds to English teach and learn.
It is easier to relabel, or to merge two existing categories, as is the case for exact
cognates) than to create an L2 category with no L1 equivalent.
Methods of lexical assessment
In L1 studies one can distinguish between two major types of methods for the
assessment of early vocabulary development: parental questionnaires and the analysis
of spontaneous speech. The advantage of parental questionnaires over spontaneous
speech is that the lexical items observed do not depend on one particular moment in a
child’s life. On the other hand, spontaneous data avoid bias related to parents’
subjectivity and are more ecological in the sense that they allow the analysis of
linguistic items in their linguistic and extralinguistic environments. Spontaneous data,
then, provide more information about the knowledge of particular items a child uses.
Few studies have actually documented the reliability of parental reports by
systematically comparing results obtained by parental reports with those observed in
spontaneous data .The few studies that do exist, however, report high reliability.
Parental reports are used essentially in the investigation of very early language
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International Journal of
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development. For children over 3 years of age, spontaneous speech is analysed and
vocabulary is assessed through measures of lexical density or lexical diversity. The
most reliable calculation method recognized for lexical diversity is the VOCD .A
number of experimental paradigms have also been developed to examine lexical
learning abilities in young children .Despite considerable efforts to gather data under
ecological conditions (Perdue 1984), research in naturalistic/spontaneous L2 lexical
acquisition is still in its infancy. Assessment methods in adult L2 focus on vocabulary
size, as this measure has been recognized as a reliable indicator of language
proficiency. Two major approaches can be identified: questionnaires or analyses of
lexical diversity in elicited text production. The methods for measuring lexical
diversity in L1 and L2 research are essentially the same. Methods for studying
vocabulary size, however, differ. To evaluate vocabulary size in L2, two types of
techniques have been widely used: multiple choice questionnaires and lexical decision
tasks, the latter being argued as more reliable given that the number of items presented
in one session can be increased. Kempe & MacWhinney report on Anderson &
Freediv) who compare the results obtained using a lexical decision task in which L1
subjects were asked whether a word was familiar or not with those obtained using a
multiple choice vocabulary test in which subjects were asked to choose between
different meanings. The authors report a strong correlation between the two tests and
show that subjects were more likely to really know the meaning of words which were
indicated as familiar in the lexical decision test than they were to know the meanings
of words for which they selected the correct alternative in the multiple choice test.
Meara, Milton and collaborators (been developing similar vocabulary assessment
instruments for L2. Most of the instruments available for assessing L2 lexicons in
teenagers and adults are based on the written form of words but some attempts have
been made to take into account the spoken modality .30 Florence CHENU & Harriet
JISA A major issue in lexical assessment is how to measure depth of vocabulary
knowledge. There is much more about a word to acquire than just the association of a
form to a meaning, including for example, knowledge about morphological inflexions
and derivations, syntactic function, syntactic construction, register, as well as
knowledge about how to use the word appropriately. Initiatives have been conducted
to test the depth of vocabulary knowledge, but there is much less consensus concerning
the assessment of depth than there is concerning the assessment of vocabulary size.
There is, however, a general agreement concerning the fact that one cannot test all
aspects of word knowledge. Some of the tests proposed are built upon the concept of
word associations: L2 learners are given a target word and six or eight other words
(half of them are semantically or collocationnally related to the target word and are
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asked to associate them. Other measures of deep word knowledge combine self-
evaluation as well as word knowledge evidenced by synonyms or use in a sentence
Conclusion
Our comparison of lexical acquisition in L1 and L2 learners has attempted to
outline how language learning is the same or different in the two situations. L1 learners
are obliged to discover the world at the same time as they are discovering how to talk
about the world. In this respect, adult L2 learners have a cognitive advantage in that
they know what languages and grammars do and they know how their first language
maps out the world. L2 learners, however, must discover the specificities of how the
target language maps meaning onto words, which can either correspond or not to the
L1. Infant L1 learners begin the process of extraction of word forms from an ongoing
speech signal without initially searching for meaning. L2 learners search for meaning
from the beginning. Infant L1 learners set the features which are relevant for prosodic
bootstrapping into their language based on countless hours of exposure. L2 learners
not only have to discover the features relevant for segmenting the target language but
they also have to inhibit the prosodic bootstrapping mechanisms set by their first
language based on much less auditory experience. However, both L1 and L2 learners
build language based on particular utterances in particular contexts. Usage-based
approaches to language development offer new and interesting questions that we hope
will inspire more collaboration between research in L1 and L2 acquisition. The authors
wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for their useful and enriching comments and
questions.
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