6) Child language acquisition

Question 1

What two things are important while gathering data on language acquisition?

Answer 1

naturalness and representativeness

Question 2

Name three approaches to collecting child language data

Answer 2

parental diaries, observational studies, experimental studies

Question 3

What is the most famous parental diary?

Answer 3

four-volume of Werner Leopold’s daughter Hildegard (German and English), focuses on her first two years

Question 4

What is the problem of parental diaries?

Answer 4

it consists of only one observer who is taking notes on just one child - is that child a representative of all children?

Question 5

Which approach to collecting child language data is great in terms of data’s naturalness but limited in terms of representativeness?

Answer 5

parental diaries, observational studies as well

Question 6

What is the most famous observational study?

Answer 6

Roger Brown’s research project at Harvard University called A First Language: The Early Stages

Question 7

Why aren’t observational studies considered good in terms of representativeness?

Answer 7

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

Question 8

What is typical for experimantal studies?

Answer 8

they tend to have narrowly defined research questions (e.g. at what age can infants recognize their own name)

Question 9

What is HASP?

Answer 9

high-amplitude sucking paradigm

Question 10

Which form of collecting child language data has a higher chance of accurately representing the population under study?

Answer 10

experimental studies

Question 11

Name milestones in child language development

Answer 11

the first sounds, the first words, first sentences (morphological and syntactic development)

Question 12

Which ability is a critical skill that infants develop early in life?

Answer 12

speech perception

Question 13

Which sounds are babies able to discriminate between during their first months of life?

Answer 13

similar sounds, like b and p, both in their native language as well as in other languages

Question 14

Are infants born with the capacity to learn any language in the world?

Answer 14

yes, but the capacity to hear like a native fades very early on

Question 15

At what age infants start cooing?

Answer 15

from about second to fifth month

Question 16

At what abe infants begin to babble?

Answer 16

around four to six months

Question 17

What is holophrastic stage?

Answer 17

around first birthdays, infants tend to use single words to communicate, they begin to assign specific meanings to the sounds they produce

Question 18

What type of words children tend to use during their “first words phase”?

Answer 18

content rather than function, children learning English mostly nouns, Korean-learning infants often verbs

Question 19

What is overextending?

Answer 19

e.g. when a child uses the word “water” for more things like juice, soda, milk, etc.

Question 20

What is underextension?

Answer 20

e.g. using the word baby only to refer to an infant sibling and not the other babies, less common

Question 21

At what age children come to the two-word stage?

Answer 21

around age two

Question 22

What is vocabulary spurt?

Answer 22

when children’s productive vocabulary begins to develop rapidly, they add about two hundred words a month, around two years

Question 23

When the “multi-word stage” begins?

Answer 23

around 3,5 years

Question 24

Morphological and syntactic development is ________

Answer 24

predictable, all children follow similar patterns

Question 25

What is MLU?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

What does it mean when children “overgenerlize”?

Answer 26

they apply the regular rules of grammar to irregular nouns and verbs

Question 27

What is the outcome of the research on lexical and grammatical development?

Answer 27

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

Question 28

What is code-mixing?

Answer 28

a period in the life of bilingual children, they move back and forth between their two languages, seemingly without discrimination

Question 29

What is unitary system hypothesis?

Answer 29

bilingual child begins with just one grammar and lexical system that later becomes differentiated as the child learns to distinguish between the two languages

Question 30

What is separate system hypothesis?

Answer 30

bilingual child has two grammatical and lexical systems from the outset

Question 31

What are the different theories that try to explain how children acquire language?

Answer 31

behaviorism, nativism, connectionism, social interactionism

Question 32

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?

Answer 32

behaviorism

Question 33

Which theory thinks that language is an innate capacity, includes the poverty-of-input argument and believes that children create a rule-based system?

Answer 33

nativism

Question 34

What is LAD?

Answer 34

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

Question 35

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?

Answer 35

connectionism

Question 36

Whose models have been criticized for only adressing a small aspect of language acquisition?

Answer 36

connectionism

Question 37

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?

Answer 37

social interacionism