Child Language Acquisition Flashcards
What are the 7 approaches of child language acquisition?
- Innate
- Cognitive
- Behaviourism
- Social interaction
- Rule based
- Creative
- Functional/usage
Who suggested the cognitive approach?
Piaget
What does the cognitive approach suggest?
- Viewing speech acquisition in relation to a child’s mental and emotional development
- Language reflects thought processes
- Directly links language acquisition to intellectual development
What are the 4 stages within the cognitive approach, when do they occur, and what are they?
- Sensorimotor stage (up to age of 2)- learning about the physical world; developing motor skills
- Preoperational stage (ages 2-6)- developing ability to think of symbols and form words from ideas
- Concrete operations stage (ages 7-12)- develop logic and reasoning and begin to consider others’ ideas
- Formal operations stage (up to age 15)- complex language system develops fully
Who proposed the behaviourist approach?
Skinner
What does the behaviourist approach suggest?
- Emphasises the role of environmental factors in influencing behaviour
- Language learning is cause and effect (stimulus and response)
- Involves imitation
- Caregivers reinforce and ‘correct’ children’s utterances
What can the behaviourist approach be used to explain?
- Lexemes that children pick up from their environment (e.g. swear words)
- Regional accent features
What view do behaviourists maintain?
When we are born our mind is a ‘tabula rasa’ (blank slate), therefore we must mimic the speech we hear, reinforced by caregivers
Who proposed the innate approach?
Chomsky
What does the innate approach suggest?
- Children are born with an inbuilt capacity for language development
- The brain has a language acquisition device that’s biologically programmed for speech and provides us with an innate understanding ability
Who proposed the social interaction approach?
Vygotsky and Bruner
What does the social interaction approach suggest?
Caregivers will design speech for children, giving them the opportunity to partake in positive communicative relationships which form the basis for future meaningful communication
What does Vygotsky’s sociocultural model suggest and what approach does it support?
- Supports social interaction approach
- Cultural development happens when children observe others interacting, the child is then able to develop the behaviours to communicate this way
- Children learn best when interacting with others during problem solving
- Interaction between adult and child begins as adult led, the child then emerges as the communicator in their own right and goes from gurgling to producing full standard utterances
What does Bruner’s learning development theory suggest and what approach does it support?
- Supports social interaction approach
- Learners learn best when they discover knowledge for themselves
- Interaction between adult and child builds the structure of knowledge and language long before the child can speak
What does the functional/usage based approach suggest?
- The structure and organisation of a speakers linguistic knowledge is the product of language use
- We have words like ‘this’ and ‘that’ because we interact with others for context
- We have interrogatives because language functions as a tool to gain information
- Children have an innate ability to understand the goals/intentions of mature speakers when they use language
What are some of the criticisms of the functional/usage based approach?
- Cannot explain the complex grammatical constructions
- Doesn’t deal with the poverty of the stimulus
- Cannot conclude whether the cognitive processes are really universal
What does the creative approach suggest?
- A child should be allowed to experiment creatively with language, without struct correction, using trial and error
- Advocates suggest that, by not focusing primarily on accuracy, we make children less afraid of making mistakes, raising their enjoyment and self esteem
What does the rule based approach suggest?
When a child understands the conventions of writing (rules of spelling, punctuation and grammar), progress will be more rapid and they will move on quickly to producing understandable texts
Who suggested the motherese hypothesis?
Newport and Gleitman
What does the motherese hypothesis suggest?
Those special restrictive properties of caretaker speech play a casual role in language acquisition
Why is the motherese hypothesis not generally accepted today?
- Children couldn’t learn adult language if they only hear parantese
- Parents may imitate babies rather than vice versa
- Parantese appears to structure interaction rather than teach language
- Babies hear all audible language in the environment, not what’s directed to them
- Parents aren’t the only influential figures in a child’s life
What is pre speech?
Stages of development before a 1st word is produced
What are the stages of pre speech and when do they occur?
- Stage 1- biological noises (0-8 weeks)
- Stage 2- cooing (8-20 weeks)
- Stage 3- vocal play (20-25 weeks)
- Stage 4- babbling (25+ weeks)
- Stage 5- melodic utterance (40+ weeks)
What happens in stage 1 of pre speech and when does it occur?
- Occurs 0-8 weeks
- Biological noises- burping, hiccuping, coughing
- Produce reflexive cries: a series of 1 second pulses with a falling intonation
- Practice moving organs of the vocal tract and controlling airflow
What happens in stage 2 of pre speech and when does it occur?
- Occurs 8-20 weeks
- Cooing
- Segments of sound get shorter: 0.5 seconds
- Velar sounds are produced: /g/, /k/, [x]
- Uvular /r/ is produced
- Long vowels such as /u:/ are produced and eventually more varied diphthongs /aʊ/
- Laughing begins
What happens in stage 3 of pre speech and when does it occur?
- Occurs 20-25 weeks
- Vocal play
- Front nasal phoneme /m/ and /n/ produced
- Intonation from high to low on vowels
- Greater repetition of sounds
- Fricative /f/ produced
- Raspberries
What happens in stage 4 of pre speech and when does it occur?
- Occurs 25+ weeks
- Babbling
- Begins with reduplicated babbling: small number of sounds, greater frequency and stability
- Begins with reduplicated velar plosives /k/ and /g/
- Back sounds are replaced by bilabial plosives /p/ + /b/ and alveolar /d/
- After 40 weeks, babbling moves to less fixed patterns known as variegated babbling
- Alveolar fricatives produced
- Consonant>vowel rather than vowel>consonant
- Babies from all speech communities babble using the same sounds
- Deaf babies will also babble as it’s not a reaction to environmental sounds
What happens in stage 5 or pre speech and when does it occur?
- Occurs 40+ weeks
- Melodic utterances
- Prosodic patterns of the language are acquired- spoken melody develops
- Often known as scribble talk
- Babies from different speech communities will now sound different
What is a criticism of pre speech?
All children develop at different rates, so the ages of entering stages are very generalised- babies are their own individuals
Who proposed the language acquisition support system (LASS)?
Bruner
What is the language acquisition support system (LASS)?
A child’s social support network; the caregivers help and provide towards speech acquisition
Who suggested the more knowledgeable other?
Vygotsky
What is a more knowledgeable other?
Caregivers, parents, older siblings- anyone who interacts with a child who has more experience of speech
What is child directed speech?
Linguistic features used to accommodate children
What is the baby talk register?
Typical child directed speech features
Who proposed the language acquisition device (LAD)?
Chomsky
What does the language acquisition device (LAD) do?
Provides us with an instinctive mental capacity with enables the acquisition and production of speech
What is universal grammar?
A set of principles upon which all languages build
Who proposed universal grammar?
Chomsky
Who proposed virtuous errors?
Chomsky
What are virtuous errors?
- A nonstandard utterance from a child based upon logical conclusions about grammar and morphology
- E.g. thrower
What are the 2 types of vocabulary?
- Receptive
- Productive