6) Child language acquisition Flashcards
What two things are important while gathering data on language acquisition?
naturalness and representativeness
Name three approaches to collecting child language data
parental diaries, observational studies, experimental studies
What is the most famous parental diary?
four-volume of Werner Leopold’s daughter Hildegard (German and English), focuses on her first two years
What is the problem of parental diaries?
it consists of only one observer who is taking notes on just one child - is that child a representative of all children?
Which approach to collecting child language data is great in terms of data’s naturalness but limited in terms of representativeness?
parental diaries, observational studies as well
What is the most famous observational study?
Roger Brown’s research project at Harvard University called A First Language: The Early Stages
Why aren’t observational studies considered good in terms of representativeness?
because these studies often include only small numbers of child participants - it is not clear to what extent the few participants are representative of the wider population
What is typical for experimantal studies?
they tend to have narrowly defined research questions (e.g. at what age can infants recognize their own name)
What is HASP?
high-amplitude sucking paradigm
Which form of collecting child language data has a higher chance of accurately representing the population under study?
experimental studies
Name milestones in child language development
the first sounds, the first words, first sentences (morphological and syntactic development)
Which ability is a critical skill that infants develop early in life?
speech perception
Which sounds are babies able to discriminate between during their first months of life?
similar sounds, like b and p, both in their native language as well as in other languages
Are infants born with the capacity to learn any language in the world?
yes, but the capacity to hear like a native fades very early on
At what age infants start cooing?
from about second to fifth month
At what abe infants begin to babble?
around four to six months
What is holophrastic stage?
around first birthdays, infants tend to use single words to communicate, they begin to assign specific meanings to the sounds they produce
What type of words children tend to use during their “first words phase”?
content rather than function, children learning English mostly nouns, Korean-learning infants often verbs
What is overextending?
e.g. when a child uses the word “water” for more things like juice, soda, milk, etc.
What is underextension?
e.g. using the word baby only to refer to an infant sibling and not the other babies, less common
At what age children come to the two-word stage?
around age two
What is vocabulary spurt?
when children’s productive vocabulary begins to develop rapidly, they add about two hundred words a month, around two years
When the “multi-word stage” begins?
around 3,5 years
Morphological and syntactic development is ________
predictable, all children follow similar patterns
What is MLU?
mean length of utterance = a widely used measurement of the complexity of children’s language, is calculated from the average number of morphemes per utterance
What does it mean when children “overgenerlize”?
they apply the regular rules of grammar to irregular nouns and verbs
What is the outcome of the research on lexical and grammatical development?
onset times appear very similar across languages for both word comprehension (eight to ten months) and word production (eleven to thirteen months), but there is wide individual variation within each language concerning the pace and size of vocabulary growth
What is code-mixing?
a period in the life of bilingual children, they move back and forth between their two languages, seemingly without discrimination
What is unitary system hypothesis?
bilingual child begins with just one grammar and lexical system that later becomes differentiated as the child learns to distinguish between the two languages
What is separate system hypothesis?
bilingual child has two grammatical and lexical systems from the outset
What are the different theories that try to explain how children acquire language?
behaviorism, nativism, connectionism, social interactionism
Which theory believes that language is essentially a habit, a behavior like any other and tends to focus on observable behaviors rather than internal processes?
behaviorism
Which theory thinks that language is an innate capacity, includes the poverty-of-input argument and believes that children create a rule-based system?
nativism
What is LAD?
language acquisition device, the result of a fact that language is uniquely human cognitive capacity; there is however a time limit (critical period, typically around period), after that a complete acquisition of a first/second language becomes difficult, if not impossible
Which theory challenges the argument of nativists, is connected with parallel distributed processing (PDP) approach and claims that general learning mechanisms are sufficient for at least some aspects of language acquisition?
connectionism
Whose models have been criticized for only adressing a small aspect of language acquisition?
connectionism
Which theory on child language acquisition points to the importance of child-caregiver interactions in the language acquisition process and is criticized for inadequate focus on how children learn the structure of language?
social interacionism
