Child Language Acquisition Flashcards
what is the pre-vocal 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 tact’s?
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 paralinguistic 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 syntax 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
