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Language Acquisition Patterns: A Case Study of a Child Acquiring Sinhalese as the First Language

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dc.contributor.author Weerawardhana, V.
dc.date.accessioned 2016-09-02T05:46:25Z
dc.date.available 2016-09-02T05:46:25Z
dc.date.issued 2016
dc.identifier.citation Weerawardhana, V. 2016. Language Acquisition Patterns: A Case Study of a Child Acquiring Sinhalese as the First Language. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2016, 25th August 2016, Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. pp 120. en_US
dc.identifier.issn 2513-2954
dc.identifier.uri http://repository.kln.ac.lk/handle/123456789/14344
dc.description.abstract Child language acquisition is an innate strategy which reveals the psychological base of human language. Innate hypothesis is the pre-knowledge of the language. Human beings are born with this ability of internalising the first language with the help of language Acquisition Device (LAD). Children acquire structural regularities of their mother language (L1) from their environment. This happens in the critical period of the language development which is identified as the period from first six months to three years. This research is a case study focusing on the nature and the patterns of acquiring the Sinhalese language as L1. The child was in its critical period of language acquisition and data was collected using electronic and manual transcription. Structural linguistic analysis and theoretical concepts of Transformational Grammar on language acquisition such as competence and performance, generalisation, simplification, deep structure and surface structure are employed as the methodology. Accordingly, the gradual development of L1 acquisition from 6 months to 24 months are discussed. Babbling, sound acquisition and patterns of one word utterances, two word and three word utterances are among the findings. A comparison with the previous studies reveal that the patterns of above utterances, generalisation and simplification are commonly visible in the acquisition period. Also, the child often proves that competence is greater than performance. The results of the study further highlighted some semantic, syntactic and morphological overgeneralisations. Thus, this study and its findings are of significant importance to psycholinguists, language therapists and to researchers interested in studying child language acquisition process. en_US
dc.language.iso en en_US
dc.publisher Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka en_US
dc.subject child language acquisition en_US
dc.subject first language en_US
dc.subject overgeneralisation en_US
dc.subject patterns en_US
dc.subject simplification en_US
dc.title Language Acquisition Patterns: A Case Study of a Child Acquiring Sinhalese as the First Language en_US
dc.type Article en_US


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