ACQUISITION
المؤلف:
John Field
المصدر:
Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P3
2025-07-22
617
ACQUISITION
The process of developing competence in a language. The term is used for infants acquiring their native language (first language acquisition) and for those learning a second or foreign language (second language acquisition). In this general sense, it is unproblematic; but researchers run into trouble when they apply the term to the mastery of a specific syntactic structure or lexical item. Here, ‘acquisition’ is often defined as having occurred when the target form is used with 90 per cent accuracy or in 90 per cent of contexts which require it. However, this fails to consider the relative gravity of the errors in the remaining 10 per cent, or instances of avoidance, where the speaker substitutes another word or grammatical form in order to avoid using the most appropriate one. Nor does it take account of:
systematic variation, where the infant or foreign learner uses a form which is different from that of the target language but uses it consistently;
U-shaped development, where the learner appears to have acquired a particular grammatical form, but later begins to make errors again;
category acquisition in vocabulary, where the acquirer may have mastered the form, but may not necessarily recognise the precise range of senses that the form represents;
task demands. A language user (especially a second language learner) may appear to have acquired a form while undertaking a relatively simple language task, but may not produce the form consistently in relation to a more challenging task.
See also: Syntactic development
Further reading: Ingram (1989)
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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