First language acquisition. Many times we ask ourselves how a small kid learns or acquires a language.

But this is because it has to do with the environment the child lives, the age, biological aspects (brain) among others. So it is amazing how a child starts developing the language by babbling few words, repeating and trying to make sentences and depending on age the childs skill level oscillates and his or her ability to get the meaning across. It is said according to Chomsky that human being is endowed with this capacity to acquire any language and this is because of universal grammar. The universal grammar refers to all languages shares the same features such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc no matters what language may be and besides it is curious that any child learns to speak at the same average age no matter the sex or nationality . Therefore we are going to study these factors that affect the learning in the first language acquisition. Another factor is that acquiring a language is step by step first the kid listens then repeats this has to do with phonetics, phonology, morphology, semantics, etc so as the child grows he will be developing those stages. After this introduction we will be pointing out the main aspects of these facts and we are going to explain and mention few authors of these theories that will help us to understand clearer this topic.

As we have seen first language acquisition involve many things in order to take place such as the age, the correct function of the brain, input, the place where a person lives or where she/he grows up, the environment, and there are also some theories in which explain how a child acquires a language.

In the last 50 years many researchers have been interested about how this process occurs. Within these researchers we can mention to Noam Chomsky, is perhaps the best known and the most influential linguist of the second half of the Twentieth century, who has researched this important topic. He says that the language is innate faculty that is we are born with the capacity of acquiring any language with a set of rules about language in our heads which he refers to as the 'Universal Grammar'. This refers to every human being it does not matter, the nationality, the sex is able to learn a language. For example a Chinese kid who grows up in United States will be capable to speak as the same way as an American child does. According to Chomsky Children are exposed to very little correctly formed language.

When people speak, they constantly interrupt themselves, change their minds, and make slips of the tongue and so on. Yet children manage to learn their language all the same.

Children do not simply copy the language that they hear around them. They deduce rules from it, which they can then use to produce sentences that they have never heard before. They do not learn a repertoire of phrases and sayings, as the behaviorists believe, but a grammar that generates infinity of new sentences. Therefore we can say that a child learns a language not only by repeating but imitating what he/she hears. So we realized that the environment where a little child is born, grow, and develop play an important role in order for him/her to acquire the language. As we mentioned before a child acquires by repeating and imitating. They repeat over and over. At the beginning they produce sounds, then words after that sentence. A small child does not matter if he/she is using verbs, nouns, articles. They only use the

language; therefore, the way how a child learnt a language depends from the environment she/he grows. For example there are kids that by the time they are around three or four years old are capable to speak correctly, they can express by their own, they can say well structured sentences but there are others that cannot do it as the same way. This occurs due to the zone of approximant of development. I want to mention the experience that I had when we were asked to investigate and observe a childs speech. The child whom I observed is three years old; therefore, before a started my work I thought he was able to say at least not well structured sentences but understandable sentences. But it did not happened, the child has just started to say some words and it is almost impossible to understand what he said. He is not able to conjugate verbs in the right way, as well. He lacks of vocabulary. I got to the point that it happened due to he is the first child in his family. When his parents talk to him they pitch their voice in a lovely way so what the child hears are short words, therefore, that is the way he speaks.

After I finished my research I made a comparison between the child whom I observed and another one, they are the same age. The second child is already able to speak well not at all but he speaks better than the other one. But he lives with his siblings; he has a sister who is 10 years old and a brother who is 12 years old. He always speaks with his siblings and they set him right when he says something wrong. He is also exposed to talk to people who are older than him, so he is forced to improve and develop his speech. The thing that does not occur with the other kid.

Regarding to age we have studied and learnt that a person can acquire more easily a language in his/her first years of his/her life. It is because the brain is open and is like a sponge that store everything, therefore, the brains needs working well.

We also learnt in classes that every single part of the brain has a different and important function in order for the brain to work in a correct way like the part which is in charged of the language production, language comprehension, and the one that controls the movements of the muscles but there are people who are born with certain issues which do not allow them to develop the parts of the brain; therefore, these people are not capable to develop a language a certain level, we can take a child with down syndrome as an example, they are able to produce some sounds and sentences but it is a little difficult to understand them and is not the same with a child whose brain works well.

Talking about another theory we have the emergentist theories, according to MacWhinney's, competition model, says that language acquisition is a cognitive process that emerges from the interaction of biological pressures and the environment. According to these theories, neither nature nor nurture alone is sufficient to trigger language learning; both of these influences must work together in order to allow children to acquire a language. The proponents of these theories argue that general cognitive processes subserve language acquisition and that the end result of these processes is language-specific phenomena, such as word learning and grammar acquisition.

The findings of many empirical studies support the predictions of these theories, suggesting that language acquisition is a more complex process than many believe. We have other theories that talk about the same topic and every each one have different opinions how a person acquire a language. So, we can say that the first language acquisition depends on different stages as Piaget says in his cognitive approach. Now in first language acquisition is said according to Piaget that learning language goes through developing stages such as Sensory motor that goes to age 0 to 2 and this is when the kid starts learning what is around him and he uses all his senses to acquire as much the baby can. The other sage is the pre-operational that goes from 2 to 7 and this when the child as the time goes by he starts to comprehend the symbols(writing and reading) then the concrete operational is when the kid is able to create his own statement and capable to use a better use of the language. For last stage is the formal-operational and is when now the person is capable to understand abstract meanings. So is kind of funny because when we made the project of observing a childs speech we could fund that how a child depending the age his or her uttering is clear or have different problems such as phonological problems or semantics. We could see that the kid and as the time wears on he learns many words but next day he forgets easily and this may be it has to do with the brain plasticity because the brain is still setting patterns and cannot focus on language only; it has other function to set. Another factor could be that if the kid has a biological impairment and this problem affects the language acquisition. Thus first language acquisition involves many factors and it is important to point them out.

Another factor is the critical period and for us is one of the most interesting topics related to firs language acquisition and this is because it is said that if a person do not acquire the language before this period the person will not be able to develop the language or will have problem in the language. A example of this was Genie that she was found and the scientists thought that she was retarded but the reality was that she had over passed this critical period and added to all this she was not exposed to stimuli either and this affected Genie. So Genie learned just few words but she was not able to create complex sentences and this showed that the theory of critical period was true. So we can say that if we over pass the critical period and if we do not receive the stimuli necessary it would be hard for a person to acquire the language for the factors previously mentioned. Now we are going to talk about the behavioursits that they say first language acquisition is about practice and imitation and part of this true for us. It is true because if a child is in constant exposure of a language this is going to trigger the language acquisition. Imitation takes place because babies imitate all what they hear and start babbling (practice the phonemes) and so the adults correct the baby if he/she is wrong. For example if a baby is in constant exposure to bad words is obviously that the baby is going to repeat those words even though the baby does not know the real meaning of those words. According to Braine he says that first learning acquisition is a remarkable process and is sophisticated and is regarded to different circumstances. He also says that exposure is not enough for acquiring the language it takes something more he states that is required the interaction because will trigger the language to flourish and become stronger. He also mentions the caregiver speech and this is kind of funny and is about

someone who spends many time interacting with young children and this speech is use with exaggerated intonation and slower tempo in the speaking. When children get to a stage where they have developed a great level of cognition is amazing the use of the language they can have. For example there is a big difference between the age 3 and 7 and for our experience we had was that the three year old children have pronunciation problems and maybe some semantics problems. With the seven year old children they have a better cognition about the language and they can speak fluency without any problem; they are more capable to express their ideas. So it is interesting how the first language acquisition take place and gets stranger as the time goes by. Thus we can say that acquiring a language as we saw, depends on the environment the kid is and on the interaction, motivation and stimuli the child receives. But as Chomsky said that the language innate and has to do with the universal grammar. All those features give an explanation for the first language acquisition. Another thing that we found interesting was that no matter the nationality the children learned at the almost same age and this give a fact to what the authors have sated. For us was interesting to indorse that this is a fact because of the research we made, we could prove all those stages level all mentioned before. According to Chunking theories of language acquisition constitute a group of theories related to statistical learning theories in that they assume that the input from the environment plays an essential role; however, they postulate different learning mechanisms.

The central idea of these theories is that language development occurs through the incremental acquisition of meaningful chunks of elementary constituents, which can be words, phonemes, or syllables. Recently, this approach has been highly successful in simulating several phenomena in the acquisition of syntactic categories[28] and the acquisition of phonological knowledge. Some language acquisition researchers, such as Elissa Newport, Richard Aslin, and Jenny Saffran, believe that language acquisition is based primarily on general learning mechanisms, namely statistical learning. The development of connectionist models that are able to successfully learn words and syntactical conventions supports the predictions of statistical learning theories of language acquisition, as do empirical studies of children's learning of words and syntax.

REFERENCES

* -Retrieved on (December 15) )http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/nimbolter/cdoshawa/281H_2006FA_OSH_L4_6Slides.pdf * -Retrieved on (December 15) http://books.google.com.mx/books? hl=es&lr=&id=wlYTbuCsR7wC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=innatist+theory&ots=_E6E6uIvJ K&sig=8PkhEWvL_1_7KAM4VGIuRw3yf9c#v=onepage&q=innatist%20theory&f. * -Retrieved on (December 15) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition * -Retrieved on (December 15) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition * -Retrieved on (December 17) http://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/LangTeach/Licence/CM/OldLectures/L1_I ntroduction.htm

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