child lang acquisition

Question 1

outline behavioural theory

Answer 1

Skinner
Children learn lang from their environment
Humans born as a “blank slate” - “tabula rasa”
Mimic lang - positive reinforcement
Taboo lang/accent/dialect/familect
Test-rats and birds- could be taught task through encouraging
Problems- Children may over apply rule- virtuous erros + children often unable to repeat adults lang

Question 2

Outline innateness/nativist theory

Answer 2

Chomsky
‘Poverty of the stimulus’
Inbuilt knowledge- lang acq device (LAD)- universal grammer/pattern
relates to Pinker thoery - prinicples - setting the parameters
Virtuous errors- words not learnt from environment shows rule based learning
Problems - His work was theoretical, he didn’t study real children.

Question 3

Outline cognitivism theory

Answer 3

Piaget
Mental cognitive development =1st then lang forms
Child must understand the concept before using the language
eg, seriation - child is able to compare objects in regards to size. After they are capable of this - can use comparative adjectives “bigger” and “smaller” according to Piaget signalled by the inflectional bound morpheme -er
Over/under extension
Receptive> productive lang - fis phenomenon berko gleason
Naming insight causes word spurt
However lack of evidence as hard to know what a young child actually knows

Question 4

Outline social interaction theory

Answer 4

Brumer and Vygotsky
ZPD( Zone proximal development) and MKO (more knowledgeable other) key to child speech acquisition
Lass ( Language acquisition support system) - scaffolding
Evidence - Accommodation (convergence) in motherese/parentese in CDS (child directed speech)
Problems - MKO focused
Aitchison proposed CDS ‘ hinders’ child language development

Question 5

Define pre-speech

Answer 5

Stages of develeopment before a first word is produced. Biological noices>cooing>vocal play>babbling>melodic utterance

Question 6

Define LASS + theorist

Answer 6

Language acquisition support system - a childs social support network; the caregivers and help they provide towards speech acquisition
Bruner

Question 7

Define MKO + theorist

Answer 7

More knowledgeable other - anyone who interacts with a child who has more knowledge of speech
Vygotsky

Question 8

Define CDS/ caregiver language

Answer 8

Child directed speech - linguistic features used to accomodate children

Question 9

Define the baby talk register + theorist

Answer 9

A list of typical CDS features
Ferguson
Prosodic features - High pitch , slow raate
Grammar - short utterances, telegraphic style- omission of closed word classes (pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and prepositions)
Lexis- kin terms “mummy”, Infant games ‘peekaboo’, pet names and terms of endearment (hypocarism)
Phonetics - cluster reduction ( when a child simplifies a cluster of consonant sounds into a single sound or a more manageable combination of sounds. (e.g. “poon” for “spoon”, “tuck” for “truck”) ), reduplication (dog-dog)
Discourse- Questions, repetition

Question 10

Define The Motherese Hypothesis + theorists

Answer 10

Newport, Gleitman and Gleitman
The idea that the special restrictive properties of caretaker speech play a casual role in language acquisition
- not generally accepted today

Question 11

Define LAD + theorist

Answer 11

Language acquisition device - instinctive mental capacity enabling acquisition and production of speech
Chomsky

Question 12

Define Universal grammer + theorist

Answer 12

Set of principles upon which all languages build
Chomsky

Question 13

Define virtous error+ theorist

Answer 13

A nonstandard utterance from a child based upon logical conclusions about grammer and morphology
Chomsky

Question 14

Define receptive and productive vocabulary

Answer 14

Receptive - lexis a child can understand
Productive - Lexis a child can produce

Question 15

Define holophrasis

Answer 15

Where a single word represents the meaning of a potentially longer utterance

Question 16

Define over and under extension + theorist

Answer 16

Rescorla
Over- overly broad (mis)use of a lexeme based on percieved similarities/relationships; divided into categorical, analogical and mismatch statements eg all animals known as sheep
Under- overly narrow (mis) use of a lexeme eg the family dog may be known as “dog” but not other dogs

Question 17

What did Nelson say about Children’s first fifty words

Answer 17

She conducted a study of the first fifty words produced by 18 children, suggesting four categories for early lexis:

1. Naming things or people: ball, Daddy, juice, milk.
2. Actions or events: down, more, up.
3. Describing or modifying things: dirty, nice, pretty.
4. Personal or social words: hi, bye-bye. interjections

Question 18

Define Stages of Child’s acquisition of vocabulary + theorist

Answer 18

Aitchinson
1) Labelling: linking sounds and objects 2) Packaging: understanding a word’s range of meaning 3) Network building: grasping conections between words

Question 19

Define Taxonomy of Language Functions + theorist

Answer 19

Halliday (1978) proposed that there are 7 functions of a child’s speech. These are as follows.

Instrumental - used to express the needs of the speaker. For example, “I’m getting hungry”.

Regulatory - used to tell other people what to do. For example, “Take the dog for a walk”.

Interactional - used to form social relationships. For example, “Thank you for helping me with my homework”.

Personal - used to express opinions and feelings. For example, “I can’t stand country music.”

Heuristic - used to ask questions. For example, “Why is the sky blue?”

Imaginative - used to express creative language. For example, stories and jokes, “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.”

Representational - used to communicate information. For example, “I ate the food in the fridge”.

Question 20

Categories of Children’s speech functions (Dore) (9)

Answer 20

Categorissation of the speech functions of 12-18 month old children. Labelling/ repeating/ answering / requesting (action)/requesting (answer) / calling / greeting / potesting/ practising

Question 21

defing FIs pheneomenon + theorists

Answer 21

Concept of phoneme perception occuring earlier than the ability of the child to produce those phonemes.
It comes from an account of a child who called his plastic fish a fis but refused to accept this pronunciation from adults and was satisfied only when they called it a fish
Berko + Brown

Question 22

Define telegraphic speech

Answer 22

Stage in children’s language develeopment where utterances are created without function words

Question 23

Define word spurt

Answer 23

Highly productive phase of acquiring lexis triggered by a child’s newfounf ability to construct interrogative clauses

Question 24

Define Stages of interrogative acquisition + theorists

Answer 24

Kilma and Bellugi
Stage 1 – Use of intonation to express a question being asked.
Stage 2 – The use of interrogative lexemes such as “what?” “where?” and after these “why?”.
Stage 3 – Changing the syntax to create more detailed questions.

Question 25

Define stages of negation + theorist

Answer 25

Bellugi
1. Firstly children use ‘no’ to begin an utterance
2) Negation (no/not) moves inside the clause
3) Child achieves standard form

Question 26

Define The critical period hypothesis + theorist

Answer 26

Lenneberg
Lenneburg, who worked as Chomsky’s colleague added to the LAD theory stating that there must also be a ‘critical period’ when the LAD needs to be ‘activated’ with a sufficient amount of input, or the child’s language development may be impaired. - Genie

Question 27

Genie

Answer 27

Case name for a girl kept in social isolation. DIscovered at age 13, linguistics explored whether she could still acquire speech outside the Critical Period. She never fully acquired the grammatical structures of English

Question 28

Jim

Answer 28

Case name for the son of deaf parents (studied by Bard and Sachs) whose speech develeopment was severly limited until attending speech therapy, indicating the importance of verbal interaction

Question 29

Wug test = Theorist

Answer 29

research tool designed to test acquisition and application of the morphological system
Very young children are baffled by the question usually responding “two wug” whilst children aged 4 to 5 can usually deal with the /z/ after a voiced consonant, and generally say that there are two wugs with a /Z/
Berko Gleason

Question 30

Principles and Parameter thory + theorist

Answer 30

Pinker
Nativist - built upon Chomsky’s work
By hearing the principles and parameters of the individuals native language, the rules become fixed.
Once the parameters are defined through hearing speech, the principles become defined and are retained.

Question 31

Truth value vs reinforcement + theorists

Answer 31

Brown, Cazden and Bellugi)
Parents often respond to the truth value of what their child is saying, rather than how standard the grammar is. For example, a parent is more likely to respond to “there doggie” with “Yes, its a dog!” than “No, it’s there is a dog”

Question 32

Reading meaning into a social situation + theorist

Answer 32

Macnamara
Rather than having an in-built language device, children have innate capacity to read into social situation, making them capable of learning language

Question 33

Pre-speech interaction + theorist

Answer 33

Clarke-Stewart
Children whose parents talk to them a lot during pre-speech have larger vocabularies later on than other children

Question 34

Sociodramatic play + theorist

Answer 34

Garvey
Children often adopt roles and identities, acting out storylines, practising negotiation and social interaction. Dramatic play has expilicit rules and refects real world behaviour

Question 35

Cruttenden 1979

Answer 35

Divided the acquisition of inflections into the following three

Stage1. Children memorise words on an individual basis
Stage2. Children show an awareness of the general rules of inflections. They observe that past tense forms usually end in -ed so say “runned” instead of “ran” -This kind of error is known as Overgeneralisation. link to virtuous errors
Stage3. Standard inflections are used

Evidence for innateness theory - evidence children are learning same way and looking for rules
Children develop syntactic rules without explicit instruction

Children apply morphological rules creatively:
Overgeneralisation of rules
Berko (1958) - Wugs

Question 36

Roger Brown (1973)

Answer 36

Longitudinal study on three children
He found 14 grammatical morphemes started to appear at MLU=2.0 and through to MLU 4.25 and beyond
He found that a similar order of acquisition for all three children
(MLU= mean length of utterance)

Brown also found the following sequence of the acquisition of morphemes between the ages of 20 and 36 months
1. -ing
2. plural -s
3. Possessive -s
4. ‘the’, ‘a’
5. Past tense -ed
6. third person singular verb ending “she climbs”
7. Auxiliary ‘to be’

Question 37

The functional perspective

Answer 37

The concept of the functional basis of language is that language acquisition is based on mastering social functions rather than mastering grammatical structures and specific linguistic features.

Question 38

Austin 1962

Answer 38

Language is an instrument of communication: People use language to share information, to ask questions, to make promises, to direct other peoples actions, or to express emotions

Question 39

Evidence that the existence of particular sentence types, word order patterns, and certain kinds of expressions are motivated by interactive processes of language use

Answer 39

Interrogatives - ask questions
Dexis such as ‘this’ and ‘that’ because we interact with others, without sharing context we would not need context bound words
Imperatives ‘Get down from there’

Question 40

Tomasello 2003

Answer 40

Proposes a usage-based theory of language acquisition which states that children come to the process of language acquisition at around one year of age equipped with two sets of cognitive skills, both evolved for other, more general functions before linguistic communication emerged in the human species
Intention-reading (functional dimension) - knowing the goals and intentions of more mature speakers
Pattern finding (grammatical dimension)