First Language Acquisition. How Englisch-speaking children acquire past tense structures

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel (Philosophische Fakultät - Englisches Seminar), course: From the Phoneme to the Word: Semantics, language: English, abstract: Linguists have long been intrigued with children¿s acquisition of their native tongue. But only since the 1970s, considerable attention has been paid to first language acquisition in research (Kuczaj & Barrett 1986: ix). First language acquisition is the study of when and how infants and children get a command of their native tongue (Goodluck 1991: 1). Even though there are a number of empirical studies and data, there is still a significant need for further research on children¿s language acquisition. The fact that children acquire implicit and productive knowledge of adult grammar¿even though they do not obtain explicit instruction in the linguistic rules of their specific language and their language input is severely restricted to the speech that they hear¿is called the logical problem of language acquisition (Goodluck 1991: 3). According to Goodluck, this logical problem is the reason why the notion of an innate and unconscious linguistic knowledge is quite common among (psycho)linguists (1991: 3). The assumption that the child is biologically equipped with fundamental linguistic knowledge can additionally be justified with the fact that deaf children babble (Goodluck 1991: 141). The study of first language acquisition is as complex as the process itself since there are different theories and approaches and, most importantly, because language acquisition differs cross-linguistically and individually. The paper explains how English-speaking children start to acquire past tense structures and elucidates the patterns in which regular and irregular past tense forms are acquired.This is particularly interesting because children¿s acquisition of relational terms like verbs has only recently been studied in greater detail (Behrens 2001: 451).