Child Language Acquisition Flashcards
Behaviourist Theory
Behaviourist Theory -B.F. Skinner
Behaviorist theory suggests:
Children are conditioned to imitate certain patterns through positive reinforcement.
Children are a blank slate onto which behaviour is imprinted.
Children use words (or even whole phrases) they hear others use and pick up intonation patterns and
pronunciation.
Evidence:
Adult modelling
Child repetition or imitation
Adult positive reinforcement of child’s utterances
Problems:
Children seem to follow observable patterns of acquisition regardless of how much reinforcement
they get from their parents.
Children do seem to generalise rules to produce utterances they wouldn’t hear elsewhere.
Children can understand and produce utterances for a greater number of situations than those
they’ve had prior exposure to - they can apply what they ve learned to new contexts.
Behaviourism is now largely discredited.
Interactionist Theory
Interactionist Theory - J. Bruner
Interactionist theory builds upon nativism.
Bruner believed in an innate ability to acquire language but also suggested:
Assisted by the carefully-constructed input given by care-givers
This language is referred to as motherese/parentese care-giver language / child-directed speech
Evidence: Language embedded in the present Simplified sentences Repetition and slower speech Diminutive words (e.g. blanky, doggie) Rising intonation - looking for feedback
Problems:
Children produce language that is not merely repeated from interaction with care-givers.
Language reflects independent thought and speech events about things not in the immediate
environment.
Despite parentese, children cannot acquire language at a rate beyond their OWN pace.
Nativist/Innativist
Nativism/Innatist Theory - N. Chomsky
The innatist theory suggests:
The ability to acquire language is innate.
The brain contains an LAD (Language Acquisition Device) which essentially indicates the brain is ‘hard-
wired’ to acquire language, as long as there is enough exposure to it.
Evidence:
Children use rules to create their own utterances
They cannot always be corrected
Acquisition occurs without carefully planned examples of language
Problems:
Chomsky focused more on the fact that children were hard-wired for language than on how they
actually developed language.
While he accepted that interaction had an important role to play, he didn’t say much about features
of it.
He never did any practical experiments, relying on hypothesis; however, others have done further
work to support his theorising.
Cognitive Theory
Cognitive Theory - J. Piaget
Cognitive theory suggests:
Child language acquisition is part of a child’s wider development
Language comes with understanding
Evidence
A child cannot linguistically articulate concepts the do not understand
Children talking to help themselves make sense of something
Children avoid language related to concepts the don’t understand
Problems:
There is evidence of children with severe learnine difficulties and cognitive problems, who still
manage to use language far bevond their actual understanding.
This suggests that the link is not as strong as Piaget thought.
Language is unique in many ways, which makes it distinct from other areas of development.
Zone of Proximal Development
Lev Vygotsky
He emphasised the importance of the wider social environment (as well as cognitive
development)
Adults and’more knowledgeable’ children play an important role in a child’s language
development.
The ZPD is where a learner can do something with guidance.
Evidence
Children can correct their utterances with adult guidance
Adult input prompts development
Children repeat older siblings
Pre-Verbal Stage (<3 Months)
Pre-verbal - refers to anything a baby says or does betore meaningtul words are used.
Vocalisation - refers to sounds made using the voice but which can not be described as words
Babies’ vocal and body responses are different when their primary care givers are talking to them.
Mothers (usually the primary care giver and babies begin to engage in turn-taking skills, that reflect turns in
conversation.
Crying allows babies to recognise the importance of language and communication
babes car
tell speech sounds from other sounds.
Babies experiment with the articulators in their mouth.
Babies produce different cries for different meanings.
All this is done subconsciousty.
Babbling (3-12 Months)
Babies start to deliberately combine sounds.
CV patterns are commonly reduplicated.
Intonation and pitch are experimented with.
Babies engage in turn-taking interaction.
(~3 months):
Baby produces a range of speech sounds, mostly vowels.
Sounds are used to communicate contentment or discomtort.
Babies respond to changes in tone and may recognise ‘no’.
Babies engage in ‘vocal play’, where babbling sounds like they are ‘talking.
Babies can produce an ‘urgent’ tone in their voice and may be producing voiced bilabial sounds, such as /p/,
/b/, and /m/.
Stoos and nasals are the most common consonant sounds
Reduplication is common ‘ba ba ba’.
Meaning is not yet assigned to sounds
The connection between meaning & words is emerging, recognition of objects.
Babies can respond to a direction.
One Word/Holophrastic (~12-18 Months)
Children are naming lots of things in their immediate environment.
Content words, especially nouns and verbs, make up the bulk of their lexicon.
They also use adverbs ‘yes’ and ‘no’ with deliberate force.
Recegnisable lexemes are accompanied by ‘nonsense’ words and sound experimentation continues.
Children are discovering connections between sounds and meaning.
One word takes the place of a phrase or sentence.
Children choose words which give the most information - usually nouns or verbs.
Naming comes before asking.
Children are learning the names of familiar objects and people.
Children become aware of the social value of speech and its role in interaction.
Two Word Stage (~18months-2years)
This is all about demonstrating the relationships between words.
By around 18 months, children begin to form two-word utterances by combining words.
Rev on open-class words
Typically: subject-verb, verb-object, adjective-noun
Agent + action = mummy sit
Agent object = dada car
Verb + object = ‘eat (ba)nana’
Verb + object (indirect) = ‘go park’
Agent + object (indirect) = ‘teddy floor
Possessor-possessed
Children usually have a productive vocab of 50-200 words.
The ordering of subjects and objects conforms to Standard word order.
Children tend to omit inflectional morphology (e.g. -ed, -ing), articles, prepositions, ‘to be’, auxiliary verbs.
Multi Word or Telegraphic (~2-3years)
This is all about demonstrating the relationships between words.
By around 18 months, children begin to form two-word utterances by combining words.
Rev on open-class words
Typically: subject-verb, verb-object, adjective-noun
Agent + action = mummy sit
Agent object = dada car
Verb + object = ‘eat (ba)nana’
Verb + object (indirect) = ‘go park’
Agent + object (indirect) = ‘teddy floor
Possessor-possessed
Children usually have a productive vocab of 50-200 words.
The ordering of subjects and objects conforms to Standard word order.
Children tend to omit inflectional morphology (e.g. -ed, -ing), articles, prepositions, ‘to be’, auxiliary verbs.
Later Multi-word (~3-4 years)
Sentences are becoming longer.
Speech is usually fluent and reasonably clear so that ‘other people’ can understand.
Can use language creatively in play, engage in make-believe.
Pronouns I, you and me are generally used according to the Standard.
A range of plural and past tense forms are evident.
Sentences are becoming longer, combining tour or more words.
They can talk about things not in their immediate environment.
Has a vocabulary of ~900-1000+ words.
Can repeat number sequences.
