child language Flashcards
pre-verbal communication
•babies learn to communicate long before they are able to express words or use language as adults would
•types of non verbal communication:
-facial expressions/eye contact (shows interest/focus)
-cooing + babbling
-physical movement
-crying
-moving mouth
•0-12 months
cooing and babbling
•cooing- usually vowels (screeching, screaming, aah)
•babbling- reduplicated babbling (same consonants & vowel repeated e.g babababa) or variegated babbling (variety of consonants & vowels e.g manamoo)
•practicing key sounds
•way of communicating as they cannot use words at this stage- communicative functions, expressing needs & feelings
•mimicking
stages of development
•holophrastic
-12-18 months
-will begin to use one word utterances to convey meaning, concrete nouns
-rely on the context in which they are said
-plosives are easier to produce- not phonologically challenging (cvc structure)
-assimilation, substitution, deletion, consonant cluster reduction
•two- word
-around 18 months- 2 years
-usually in a grammatically correct sequence
-when a child tries to repeat what is said, it will miss out part of a sentence but what remains is grammatically correct
•telegraphic
-around 2 years
-use words that are most important to conveying meaning
•content words- semantic value, vital to conveying meaning
-grammatical words- necessary for a structural accuracy
•post telegraphic
-around 3 years
-grammatical words omitted during tele stage will appear more regularly
-formulate more complex syntax structures
•Bellugi theorised: negative formation, question formation
case study: Genie
•in LA 1970, a social worker made a routine visit to the home of a blind woman who made an appeal for public assistance
•sw discovered the woman & her husband had kept their 13 year old daughter Genie locked away
•she could not speak or stand upright- spent everyday bound naked to a child’s potty seat and could move only her hands & feet, at night she was placed in a straight jacket & caged in a crib
•is she made noise her father beat her, he never communicated to her with words only growling & barking
•after she was rescued, she spent a number of years in excessive rehabilitation programs including speech & physical therapy- eventually learned to walk & use the toilet, learned to recognise many words & speak in basic sentences, eventually able to string together two word combinations
•didn’t learn to ask questions & didn’t develop a language system that allowed her to understand English grammar
•four years after she began stringing words, she is still unable to speak fluently- short, mangled sentences
•shows children who are abandoned, abused & not exposed to language rarely speak normally
skinner behaviourism
•children learn by imitation and through positive and negative reinforcement- listen to words around them & eventually learn to imitate what adults say
•positive & negative reinforcement
•learn some social & pragmatic aspects of language in this way
•no complicated internal mechanisms
•plays a large part in semantic and phonological development
negative evidence
•David McNeill
•even when it is offered, a child cannot use it
•Brown and Hanlon (parents approval or disapproval of their child’s utterances was not contingent on the well-formedness of that utterance, semantic value)
•expansion
-Saxton
-children learn from this because they are given an immediate contrast between their own incorrect speech and the correct adult utterance
Chomsky inateness
•babies are born with an innate knowledge of the structure of language, speeds up their learning of their native language
•ability to develop
•language acquisition device (LAD)- child knows that the speech it hears is the product of a system which generates sentences, words and so on, don’t have to ‘learn’
•grammar couldn’t be learn without universal grammar
•poverty of stimulus- grammar is too complex to acquire through normal learning mechanisms
•linguistic creativity
•virtuous error- applying rules of grammar, even though they produce forms which adults do not produce
piaget cognitive development
•cognition means thought, understanding & reason
•children need to use play to explore the world around them- as children’s cognition switches from the more physical to the more abstract so does their language
•they need a conceptual understanding before being able to use language to articulate it e.g concept of cause & effect, object permanence- understanding of language is constrained by intellectual development
•a child would not be able to use language to describe something without first understanding the concept
•language acquisition is a product of this ability to acapite language tied to broader intellectual growth
•lang is an outward expression of a child’s evolving mental structure
•his theories are sometimes called ‘maturational’ and he outlines 4 periods of maturity- sensori motor stage (birth-2y, don’t realise they can control their bodies, saw language skills as basically physical, extreme egocentrism), pre operational stage (2-7y, the defining feature is egocentrity, self centred view of the world, generalised, classification, symbolic), concrete operational stage (7-11y, seriation occurs which is the ability to rank things in order, specific & concrete facts, reason logically), formal operational stage (11+, can deal with abstract ideas that don’t rely on any existence in the real world)
•problems- some children with cognitive problems still manage to use language beyond their apparent understanding, failed to consider the effect that the social setting & culture may have)
Bruner social interactionism
•focuses on the role of the adult and caregiver in assisting children’s language development
•LASS- lang acquisition support system
•1- scaffold 2-format 3-joint attention 4-CDS 5-interactive learning
•through children’s interactions with adults & other social experiences that assists them with learning language
•adults usually question, encourage and support
vygotsky/ZPD
•social interaction is crucial for cognitive development_ the child’s learning always occurs in social context in cooperation with someone more skillful (MKO)
•language is the foundation of thought- we cannot think something we don’t have words for
•zone of proximal development
-out of reach
-zone of proximal development, learn through scaffolding
-current understanding, can work unassisted
1.actual development level- what a child can do on their own
2. potential development level- what the child can do with support or guidance from a more knowledgeable person
Kaluli tribe in New Guinea
•the Gusii of Kenya believe that if you talk too much to your children they end up self centred
•immersed in adult conversation but are not talked to or taught to talk
• have no lilting ‘motherese’
•taught to speak clearly through adults modelling correct speech, might speak for the baby
•expect children to fit into adult speech patterns
Czech twins 1976
•Andrei and Vanya are identical twin boys born in 1960
•they lost their mother shortly after birth and were cared for by social agency for a year & then fostered by a maternal aunt for a further 6 months- their development was normal
•their fathers new wife was cruel, banishing them to the cellar for the next 5 and a half years & beating them- the father was for the most time absent
•on discovery at the age of 7, the twins were dwarfed in stature, lacking speech, suffering from rickets and did not understand the meaning of pictures- the doctors who examined them predicted permanent physical & mental handicap
•first underwent a programme of physical remediation & entered a school for children with severe learning difficulties
•they caught up with age peers & achieved emotional and intellectual normality
•after basic education they went on to technical school, training as mechanics & later undertook further education
•they are said to be entirely stable, lacking abnormalities & enjoying warm relationships
Nicaraguan Sign language
•prior to late 1970s there were only a few private clinics where children received education & they were focusing on reaching the children to understand and use written & spoken spanish
•children were not free to communicate among themselves
•this changed when the program for the deaf at the Centre for Special Education in Managua was expanded in 1977-78
•resources to make use of children’s residual hearing were not available
•teachers did not prevent children from gesturing or signing to each other- the first stage of the language (NSL) take hold in the interaction of those children
•the fathers did not know about sign language- no pre-existing sign language or deaf community there
•sign language is not taught- in deaf families they are as they learn from their parents. You might be exposed to it in school. Members of community that did not have a way of communicating naturally settled on a system that worked for them
•for the first time there were deaf children in close proximity- gave birth to this language
•new children came in every year- key to development
•children were isolated before
•idiosyncratic systems called ‘home sign systems’- those gestures vary
•primary communication (gestures)- different ways merge & they settle in a from which is easiest to understand & produce
•signs start to become conventionalised
child directed speech (CDS) /baby talk/ motherese
•higher or more melodic pitch (positive reinforcement?)
•more frequent or longer pauses (less developed cognitive function)
•slower, cleaner speech (less developed cognitive function)
•repetition (less developed cognitive function)
•grammatically simpler sentences (scaffolding based on child’s current ability)
•more questions like ‘tag questions’ & ‘known answer questions’
•use of diminutive (affection)
•nouns rather than pronouns (clearer for child & avoids unnecessary ambiguity)
•expansions (develop to make it more grammatically complete)
•recast (scaffolding, negative reinforcement)
•politeness features (pragmatics)
•mitigated imperative (positive reinforcement)
•link to Bruner, Vugotsky & Skinner
•Kaluli tribe would criticise it
politeness features
•IRF structure- adult asks question, child provides response, adult praises
•Grice’s Maxims
-need to learn more advanced pragmatics to be able to take part in more complex communication
