child language acquisition Flashcards
what is the prevocal stage?
0 – 3 months
Crying and cooing to express needs and needs met
Little control of muscles/ nervous system
Response to physical stimuli
Developing senses
During this stage, the baby can only make non-verbal sounds. The role of parents/guardians is essential to future language development. The carers’ responses motivate the baby to keep making sounds to communicate needs.
Although babies are physically not capable of producing voiced sounds at this stage, they are aware of the language around them
They can see and hear voices and faces as people speak to them
When they cry or coo and have these sounds responded to, it gives them their first sense of how conversation works
Responses to cries, gurgles and coos provide the motivation for a baby to continue producing the sounds they are capable of
what is the babbling stage?
3 – 12 months
Is the time which babies can start to make voiced sounds themselves
has to be studied in two parts, early babbling and late babbling
what is early babbling?
EARLY BABBLING is when a baby is simply making all of the sounds they are capable of as its throat and jaw and muscles control develop
They babble 100s of sounds and often do this as a lone activity (eg before they settle into sleep or when they wake up)
Early babbling is a universal feature of development
During this stage, the voice box is moving into position so a baby can now start to make vocalised sounds
what is late babbling?
LATE BABBLING is different. Babies gradually stop babbling so many sounds but reduce them down to sounds heard around them.
The more spoken language there is around a baby, the more easily and quickly a baby will do this
In an English-speaking home, a baby will reduce its babbles down to the 44 phonemes of English, or to the number of phonemes heard in a bilingual home
This means that later babbling is dependent on interaction of adults around the baby
what are mands?
MANDS are random sounds that a baby makes in early babbling.
what are tacts?
TACTS are when adults give these sounds meaning. For example, the baby says ‘ba’ and an adult smiles and says ‘that’s right, you said baba, you’re the clever baba aren’t you’.
what are echoic responses?
ECHOIC RESPONSES are developments of tacts, where a baby makes a sound such as ‘da’ and the adult repeats the sound, and the baby repeats the sound again and is rewarded with praise and smiles from the adult.
what is the holophrastic stage?
12 – 18 months
HOLOPHRASTIC refers to where one word equals a whole phrase
During this stage, babies start to link phonemes together to form protowords.
During this stage, babies often have difficulty in understanding how labels word, and so under extend or over extend
they develop their use of interjections.
Children form more interrogatives and imperatives (often just by adding prosodics and paralinguistics to one word).
what are protowords?
PROTOWORDS are when a baby starts to form what will eventually become a fully formed word.
what is under extension?
UNDER EXTENSION is when they don’t understand that a word can mean more than one type of the same thing, for example the word ‘apple’ can mean a picture of an apple, a toy apple, or a real apple.
what is overextension?
OVER EXTENSION is where the word used to label something is stretched to include things that aren’t normally part of the words meaning.
what is the two word stage?
Utterances consisting of two words, in which key concept words are used while grammatical function words are omitted.
what is the telegraphic stage?
Utterances consisting of three or more words, in which key content words are used while grammatical function words are omitted
what is the post telegraphic stage?
Utterances where grammatical words missing from the telegraphic stage start to appear, and clauses begin to be linked into longer
what are gestalt expressions
For example wassat, inthere.
They sound like one word and almost function as short sentences.
Probably because the child has yet to segment the sounds in separate words, so some elements of adult speech, such as ‘Shall we put your top on?’ or ‘Have you got your shoes on?’ become ‘topon’ and ‘shoeson’.
what is syntax?
Another name for word order. When we talk about a child’s development of syntax, we mean how he or she starts to put words together into patterns
what is Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)?
Used to analyse what children say
Used to work out the average length of children’s utterance, taking into account morphemes and individual words.
For example, in ‘I eating’ the child uses two words but three morphemes, meaning what was said is more complex than it appears
what was roger brown (1973)’s theory?
Noted that many of the patterns that expressions in the two-word stage fall into are linked to the semantic relationships between the words—the words’ meanings fall together into patterns:
Doer/agent + action, eg ‘I walk’, ‘Daddy go’
Action + affected (often takes the grammatical form of verb and object), eg ‘Eat dinner’, ‘throw stick’.
Entity (subject) + location, eg ‘spoon table’.
Possessor + possession (where the possessor and thing generally will be nouns/pronouns), eg ‘my shoe’, ‘mummy hat’.
Attribute + entity (attributes usually are adjectives), eg ‘naughty cat’, ‘big car’.
Negation, eg ‘no ball’.
what was george braine’s theory?
Noted that at the two-word stage, children use patterns that tend to revolve around certain keywords that he called ‘pivot words’. For example, ‘allgone’ would be a pivot word: allgone milk, allgone dinner, allgone daddy etc.
what did David Crystal summarise about question development?
Summarises Bellugi and McNeill’s three stages of question development as follows:
The use of intonation to signal a question
The use of question words, such as what, why, where and when– ‘where Daddy?’, ‘When dinner ready?’.
The manipulation of syntac to create longer and more detailed questions, eg where is Mummy going, when is dinner ready? Etc
what are the stages in negative developments (Crystal)?
- The use of a negative word (no or not)
- Combining a negative word with other words—no bed, not eat it
- Using the negative word in the middle of an utterance—me no like that, I not want apple
- Increased accuracy of negative words, often using auxiliary verbs—I don’t want another
- Increased complexity and range. E.g. I haven’t got any. I hardly spoke to
him.
6.Saying no without no – adults often use this with children and they pick it
up.
what is a morpheme?
smallest unit of grammatical meaning
what is a free morpheme?
a unit that can stand independently and be meaningful on its own
what is a bound morpheme?
a morpheme that can only have meaning when attached to a free morpheme
what is a virtuous error?
When a child applies a rule to a word that is irregular and so does not follow this rule. The child shows understanding of the concept, but does not yet possess the knowledge to distinguish between irregularities.
For example, children can show that they understand past tense by adding the bound morpheme –ed to a word, but they may do this to irregular verbs as they don’t understand about irregular verbs until later in their development. Eg they may say I falled down instead of I fell down (simple past) or I have fallen down (present perfect).
What was Nelson’s theory about first words?
Identified 4 categories of a child’s first words:
- NAMING (she found this to be the largest category)
- ACTION
- SOCIAL
- MODIFYING
said that nouns make up 60% of a child’s first words
what did Bloom say about Nelson’s theory on first words?
argued that Nelson’s proposed noun bias was because the frequency of nouns was higher (a ratio of about 5:1 in most dictionaries)
what was Rescorla’s theory on the types of overextensions?
CATEGORICAL OVEREXTENSION– eg ‘apple’ used to refer to all types of fruit, so the hyponym apple stands for the hypernym fruit
ANALOGICAL OVEREXTENSION– where the word is related to a perception or function of an object eg a fluffy scarf might be a cat as the child is stroking it
PREDICATE OR MISMATCH STATEMENTS– found that these account for around 25% of the overextension in her study. These convey some kind of abstract information, eg a child points to an empty cot and says ‘doll’ because the doll is usually there, or that is where it should be
what did aitchison have to say about labelling, packaging and network building? (1987)
LABELLING– linking words to objects etc
PACKAGING– explore what labels apply to (over/under extension happens as they test out the range of a word’s meaning)
NETWORK BUILDING– making connections between words– understanding similarities and opposites for example (antonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms)
who proposed the idea of a naming explosion?
aitchison
what did hymes say about communicative competence?
children have to learn about implicatures, the appropriate register, and language in different social contexts in order to attain communicative competence
what were michael halliday’s seven functions of language?
These first four help the child to satisfy its physical, emotional and social needs:
INSTRUMENTAL: when the child expresses its needs eg ‘want drink’
REGULATORY: using language to tell others what to do eg ‘go away’
INTERACTIONAL: using language to make contact with others and form relationships eg ‘love you daddy’
PERSONAL: the use of language to express feeling, opinions and individual identity eg ‘me good girl’
The next two help the child to come to terms with its environment.
HEURISTIC: language used to gain information about the environment, eg ‘what tractor doing’?
IMAGINATIVE: language used to tell stories and jokes, and to create an imaginary environment
Lastly:
REPRESENTATIONAL– use of language to convey facts and information
what was bancroft’s (1996) theory?
considered the importance of games like peakaboo as it has the structure of turn taking. Although the child might not understand its part in the game the adult acts as if it does. The child and adults respond to each other and have fun doing it
what is a hypernym?
a word with a broad meaning constituting a category into which words with more specific meanings fall
what is a hyponym?
a word of more specific meaning than a general or superordinate term applicable to it. For example, spoon is a hyponym of cutlery
what is implicature?
what is said does not always correspond to what is meant
a child has to grasp implicatures including metaphors etc when they are learning language
what was skinner’s theory?
his theory on behaviourism suggests that children are conditioned to learn lang (1957)
Skinner viewed babies as ‘empty vessels’ which
language had to be ‘put in to’. He said children
learn language from their environment and
consequences of their actions.
Skinner would say that a child learns language
through positive reinforcement. His basic
explanation for the development of speech was
that parents tend to reward infant vocalisations
(such as babbling) by giving the infant attention.
This increases the frequency of vocalisation.
He would suggest that the child will not progress
from babbling to language unless the parents
shape the child’s language behaviour.
Another important feature of Skinner’s theory is the
idea that children imitate speech sounds and words
spoken by caregivers and, provided this imitation is
rewarded, learning will take place. This is how
children learn new words.
what was bard and sachs’ theory?
input theories are the most recent CLA theories. Stresses the role of interaction in the development of language. A child’s lang acquisition is said to depend on the input made by parents and other carers
bard and sachs studied a boy called Jim who was born to 2 deaf parents. although he was exposed to TV and radio, his speech did not develop until he attended face to face sessions with speech therapist.
he was 3 years and nine months at the time of therapy and went on to develop normal speech
what did berko-gleason do?
conducted the Wug Test (1958), asking children to complete a sentence. The children were able to answer correctly saying there are two Wugs
things that support skinner?
paralinguistics and prosodics during the holophrastic and early telegraphic stage MUST be imitated
babbling reduces to sounds heard in the child’s environment
early vocab is made up of imitated labels
things against skinner?
children apply rules they cannot have heard from adults eg irregular past tenses ‘flied, throwed’ etc
children form their own partially complete telegraphic utterances
what was chomsky’s nativist theory?
that the ability to learn language is innate within a child’s brain
Chomsky’s theory directly attacked the Behaviourist theory of CLA
Chomsky argued that it is quite clear that children do not acquire
language through imitation
He pointed out that children do make grammatical mistakes when learning to speak (for example, “wented” and “bestest”)
He also pointed out that children will only hear a narrow range of
language from their parents, yet they are able to understand and produce grammatically correct utterances very quickly
He proposed that every child is born with the ability to speak “programmed” into the brain; it is “native” within us
He called this the Language
Acquisition Device, or L.A.D.
what does nativism seem to explain?
the impressive speed at which children learn to speak
the fact that children from different cultures pass through the same stages of development
the existence of grammatical features that are common to all/many languages
what is chomsky’s universal grammar?
the idea that we are born with a number of highly specific grammar rules built into our heads, which he called Universal Grammar
what was Pinker’s theory?
Pinker agreed with Chomsky’s nativist idea and said children were born with speech perception, but that they needed adults to help them assimilate the language that they used naturally
developed the PRINCIPLES AND PARAMETERS THEORY (PPT)– speakers set the parameters of their own language through listening to language around them
Pinker believed that the LAD may, in fact, be sequences of neural connections in the brain rather than a physical area of it
what was Lenneberg’s theory?
developed the Critical Period hypothesis
it presents the idea that acquiring language can only take place during a set period in a child’s early life and that it is impossible to achieve full competence after it
criticisms of Chomsky?
nativism suggests that if a child is exposed to language, acquisition of that language will occur naturally. However, in Bard and Sachs’ case study of Jim, they found that even though he was exposed to language through TV and radio, his speech did not develop until he attended face to face sessions with a therapist
evidence FOR chomsky’s nativism theory?
children apply logical rules to language as they develop eg early babbling, the syntax of telegraphic talk, over extension and under extension
evidence AGAINST chomsky’s nativism theory?
children who are neglected or feral do not develop language until they are interacted with by adults
some elements of communication can only be acquired by imitating eg prosodics and paralinguistics
what was piaget’s cognitivsm theory?
his work focused on how humans make meaning in relation to the interaction between their experiences and their ideas
‘blanket and ball’ study (1963): piaget examined what he called ‘object permenance’. This is the ability to recognise that an object exists even if you cannot actually see it. requires the capacity to form a mental representation of the object
observed that this starts in a child’s first year, but is not complete until 18 months. At this point, there is a sharp increase in a child’s vocabulary
Piaget theorised that a child can only learn the names of objects once they realise they permanently exist
what is cognitive development?
cognitive development considers intellectual development, mental abilities, and skills. this means examining how a child’s thought process changes and develops as they get older
what is the adaptation of schemas (cognitivism)
equilibrium - assimilate - disequilibrium (when new knowledge does not fit with out existing schemas) - accommodate - equilibrium - etc
what is Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development
Vygotsky proposed a Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD):
In this, children reach a stage which they can attempt with support, and are then able to perform independently.
This idea focuses on children as individuals with their own individual needs, instead of thinking that all children need to reach a government-driven definition of development based on mass testing.
weaknesses of the blanket and ball study by piaget?
each child had up to 3 minutes to complete the task and reach for the object. Within this time period, it is plausible that they may have successfully completed the task by accident
for example, randomly reaching out and finding the object or even reaching out due to the distress of the lights going out (rather than reaching out with the intention of searching for an object)
what did bower and wishart (1972) do?
used a lab experiment to study infants aged between 1-4 months old
instead of using a piaget’s blanket technique, they waited for the infant to reach for an object, and then turned out the lights so the object was no longer visible. they then filmed the infant using an infrared camera. they found that the infant continued to reach for the object for up to 90 seconds after it became invisible
what was bruner’s interactionalism theory?
bruner developed the concept of the LASS– the Language Acquisition Support System which he believed supported Chomsky’s idea of a predisposition to learn language
what is scaffolding?
a form of linguistic support where adults provide the child with conversational material and patterning
what are proto-conversations
a basic form of scaffolding before the child can function as an effective producer of language
could also include non-verbal responses
what is framing?
controlling the agenda of a conversation, or making utterances that allow the child to fill in the blanks
what is recasting?
the rephrasing and extending of a child’s utterance
what is child directed speech (CDS)
the speech used to facilitate children’s language development
it is a form of adapted language where the adult helps the child to learn language by making their input accessible to the child. it may also take on an educational aspect
what is simplification in CDS?
substitute difficult sounds for easy ones
use of proper nouns instead of pronouns
short sentences
concrete language
simple vocab
what is emphasis in CDS
accentuates new info
exaggerated intonation
repetition of words/clauses
what is audience participation in CDS
plural personal pronoun use
tag questions
frequent questions
what are prosodics in CDS?
higher pitch
pauses between words
longer intervals between phrases and sentences
weaknesses of bruner’s interactional theory?
some cultures in Samoa and Papua New Guinea are notable for the lack of CDS, yet children still learn how to speak
what did curtiss’ study on genie wiley find?
genie wiley was a feral child who was locked away isolated in the back room of her house for 12.5 years without human interaction, meaning her language didn’t develop.
when she was rescued she was given speech therapy, and she did manage to pick up some lexis, but could never understand grammar
who was oxana malaya? (fry’s study)
was abandoned onto the streets by parents who couldn’t care for her.
she found shelter with some homeless people but the shelter was mainly frequented by packs of dogs. oxana started to walk on all fours, to bark and would only eat raw meat.
was rescued at age 8 and given intensive therapy but never fully developed speech
what did bennett say about neurodiversity?
Some babies born with autism cannot take part in echolalia (echoic response) or they
can’t get out of it. These children have gone through babbling and can form mands
but they struggle to give mands meaning or to develop them into proto-words that
they understand.
Productive lexicon (everyday vocabulary): severely autistic children can either have
huge vocabularies (often from restricted fields) which they have difficulty applying to
different contexts, develop very limited vocabularies or don’t speak at all.
phonological development of children’s language?
Babbling - Protowords - Reduplicated sounds - words
Caregivers and children use diminutives (e.g.doggie) - reduce the “scale of an
object” by addition. This is supposed to make word easier and more appealing to
children.
Plosives appear before frictives due to “articulatory ease” and perceptual
discriminability”
Berko and Brown (1960)’s finding?
found that children can recognise more than they can pronounce eg fis vs fish
what order to children learn groups of sounds in?
Early - By age 3: m, b, j (y), n, w, d, p, h,
Middle - By age 4-5: t, ng, k, g, f, v, ch, j,
Late - By age 6 - sh, th, s, z, l, r,
what is addition?
child adds an extra vowel to the CVCV structure
what is deletion?
child leaves out the last consonant in a word
what is reduplication?
child repeats a structure of sounds
what is substitution?
child swaps one sound for an easier one
what is consonant cluster reduction?
groups of 2 or more consonants are reduced for ease
what is deletion of unstressed syllables
child removes entire unstressed syllables, eg nana instead of banana
what is assimilation?
child changes a sound in a word for one that is closer to others in the word, eg goggie instead of doggie
What was John Dore’s Functional theory?
(useful for holophrastic)
labelling
repeating
answering
requesting action
calling
greeting
protesting
practising
what was sinclair and coulthards’s theory?
IRF structure = initiation, response, feedback
a 3 part adjacency exchange in which a speaker starts the conversation, a second speaker responds and the first speaker then provides some feedback
demonstrates how questioning and evaluating are important aspects of CDS
what were roger brown’s stages of grammatical inflection development?
(supports nativism)
- present participle
- plural -s
- possessive -s
- articles
- past tense -ed
- third person singular -s
- auxiliary verb (to be)
what did moerk do?
analysis in 40 studies
found that corrections play a role in positive responses to children’s language
