First Language Acquisition Case of a Dabawenyo Bisaya Three-Year-Old Child

Abstract

This research intends to track the first language acquisition descriptions of a three-year-old child speaking the Cebuano (Dabawenyo Bisaya) language in the Philippines. This research used naturalistic observations and interviews to gather data. The descriptive qualitative approach is the methodology employed in this study. Some important characteristics of the child’s language development were revealed. The child acquired the language through the principle of language innateness coupled with socio-factors. The exhibition of linguistic and communicative inputs of the child was derived from the representation of environmental sounds and speech intelligibility from the adult speeches. Primarily, the child used modeling and imitation to acquire language inputs used in household-level interactions. Cognitive, affective, competence, and performance factors were demonstrated to be enablers of the first language development of the child. However, there were also factors that inhibited the child from forming comprehensible language inputs such as phonological errors, and incorrect utterances, among others. The child also showed features of comprehension through the framework of sentential levels of adult speech. Clearly, a child’s earliest years are greatly influenced by nature and the surroundings. Language learning development is crucial in the earliest years so parents and early childhood educators ought to have crucial roles as vehicles in the formation of speech and comprehension of the children.