child lang acquisition Flashcards
outline behavioural theory
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
Outline innateness/nativist theory
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.
Outline cognitivism theory
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
Outline social interaction theory
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
Define pre-speech
Stages of develeopment before a first word is produced. Biological noices>cooing>vocal play>babbling>melodic utterance
Define LASS + theorist
Language acquisition support system - a childs social support network; the caregivers and help they provide towards speech acquisition
Bruner
Define MKO + theorist
More knowledgeable other - anyone who interacts with a child who has more knowledge of speech
Vygotsky
Define CDS/ caregiver language
Child directed speech - linguistic features used to accomodate children
Define the baby talk register + theorist
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
Define The Motherese Hypothesis + theorists
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
Define LAD + theorist
Language acquisition device - instinctive mental capacity enabling acquisition and production of speech
Chomsky
Define Universal grammer + theorist
Set of principles upon which all languages build
Chomsky
Define virtous error+ theorist
A nonstandard utterance from a child based upon logical conclusions about grammer and morphology
Chomsky
Define receptive and productive vocabulary
Receptive - lexis a child can understand
Productive - Lexis a child can produce
Define holophrasis
Where a single word represents the meaning of a potentially longer utterance
Define over and under extension + theorist
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
What did Nelson say about Children’s first fifty words
She conducted a study of the first fifty words produced by 18 children, suggesting four categories for early lexis:
- Naming things or people: ball, Daddy, juice, milk.
- Actions or events: down, more, up.
- Describing or modifying things: dirty, nice, pretty.
- Personal or social words: hi, bye-bye. interjections
Define Stages of Child’s acquisition of vocabulary + theorist
Aitchinson
1) Labelling: linking sounds and objects 2) Packaging: understanding a word’s range of meaning 3) Network building: grasping conections between words
Define Taxonomy of Language Functions + theorist
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”.
Categories of Children’s speech functions (Dore) (9)
Categorissation of the speech functions of 12-18 month old children. Labelling/ repeating/ answering / requesting (action)/requesting (answer) / calling / greeting / potesting/ practising
defing FIs pheneomenon + theorists
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
Define telegraphic speech
Stage in children’s language develeopment where utterances are created without function words
Define word spurt
Highly productive phase of acquiring lexis triggered by a child’s newfounf ability to construct interrogative clauses
Define Stages of interrogative acquisition + theorists
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.
Define stages of negation + theorist
Bellugi
1. Firstly children use ‘no’ to begin an utterance
2) Negation (no/not) moves inside the clause
3) Child achieves standard form
Define The critical period hypothesis + theorist
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
Genie
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
Jim
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
Wug test = Theorist
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
Principles and Parameter thory + theorist
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.
Truth value vs reinforcement + theorists
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”
Reading meaning into a social situation + theorist
Macnamara
Rather than having an in-built language device, children have innate capacity to read into social situation, making them capable of learning language
Pre-speech interaction + theorist
Clarke-Stewart
Children whose parents talk to them a lot during pre-speech have larger vocabularies later on than other children
Sociodramatic play + theorist
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
Cruttenden 1979
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
Roger Brown (1973)
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’
The functional perspective
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.
Austin 1962
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
Evidence that the existence of particular sentence types, word order patterns, and certain kinds of expressions are motivated by interactive processes of language use
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’
Tomasello 2003
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)
