Child Language Acquisition

Question 1

What does innate mean?

Answer 1

In-built, something you’re born with.

Question 2

What is the nature vs nurture debate in English language, give a few points for each?

Answer 2

Nature- innate, to be biologically pre-disposed, they are born with the rules of language, grammatical errors, help children with their language being innate, for example plural nouns like ‘sheeps’ and ‘gooses’ and past tense verbs like ‘runned’ and ‘goed’.
Nurture- learn through environment, surroundings, who’s around us; we need conversation and interactions, in order to learn, children learn through imitation, our brain, for example imitating accents.

Question 3

Is it true that understanding comes before production?

Answer 3

Yes

Question 4

What does cognitive development mean?

Answer 4

How a child develops their understanding.

Question 5

What does lexical development mean?

Answer 5

How children learn words.

Question 6

What does grammatical development mean?

Answer 6

Learning the rules of language, for example how to form languages.

Question 7

What does phonological development mean?

Answer 7

How children develop sounds of language and how they go together.

Question 8

What does child directed speech mean?

Answer 8

The special way in which adults speak to children, for example when talking in a high-pitched voice.

Question 9

What does babbling mean?

Answer 9

Reduplication of a mono-syllable, for example bababab, dadada. This lacks meaning.

Question 10

What does phonemic expansion mean?

Answer 10

When children use lots of different phonemes. (sounds)

Question 11

What does phonemic contraction mean?

Answer 11

Fairly quickly babies reduce their babbles to sounds found from their native language.

Question 12

What does semantic errors mean?

Answer 12

Mistakes to do with meaning.

Question 13

What does over-extension mean?

Answer 13

Over applying a meaning/ broadening a word, for example apple for all fruit.

Question 14

What does under-extension mean?

Answer 14

Under applying a meaning/ making a word narrower, more specific than what it is, for example ‘shoe’ just for their little converse trainers.

Question 15

What does irregular verbs mean?

Answer 15

Verbs that don’t take the regular- ed past tense for example, take, go, buy.

Question 16

What are feral children?

Answer 16

Children who are brought up with little human interaction, due to neglect. E.g. Genie Wiley in the USA, Oxana in the Ukraine.

Question 17

What does critical period hypothesis mean?

Answer 17

The idea that there is a critical period for language learning. If a child hasn’t required language by the age of 9, they will never become fully fluent.

Question 18

What does critical period hypothesis support? Nature or Nurture?

Answer 18

Nature, because human brain isn’t fully developed until a certain age.

Question 19

What are the stages of language development?

Answer 19

• Plural Inflections
• Function Words
• Content Words

Question 20

What are plural inflections?

Answer 20

They affect word endings, including the letter ‘s’.
They mark numbers (one table, two
table), person (he/she walks) and tense e.g (-ed)
This means that plural inflections won’t use the ‘s’ and will use the wrong tense like (-ed)

Question 21

What are function words?

Answer 21

They have grammatical function, but don’t carry meaning.

Question 22

What are content words?

Answer 22

They carry meaning, like nouns, verbs and adjectives.

Question 23

What does phonemic simplification mean?

Answer 23

Make sounds simpler.

Question 24

What does deletion mean?

Answer 24

Children will often simplify pronunciation by deleting certain sounds.

Question 25

What are the three types of deletion?

Answer 25

• Final Consonants
• Unstressed Syllables
• Consonants Structures

Question 26

What are Final Consonants?

Answer 26

Consonants that may be dropped. E.g. the ‘t’ sound in ‘hat’ and ‘cat’ or the ‘du’ in ‘duck’.

Question 27

What are Unstressed Syllables?

Answer 27

Syllables that are often deleted. E.g. ‘banana’ becomes ‘nana’ or ‘potato’ become ‘tato’.

Question 28

Why does unstressed syllable ‘po’ removed from ‘potato’?

Answer 28

Because the child sees the ‘ta’ as the primary stress and ‘to’ as the secondary stress, therefore the ‘po’ is removed to make the word easier to say.

Question 29

What are consonant clusters?

Answer 29

They are consonants that are together, therefore reduced. e.g. ‘snake’ becomes ‘nake’, ‘sleep’ becomes ‘seep’, ‘squirrel’ becomes ‘skirrel’.

Question 30

Why is the word ‘squirrel’ seen as a consonant cluster?

Answer 30

the ‘skw’ is squirrel in the way it’s pronounced, is seen by a child as a secondary stress making it challenging to say, therefore it becomes ‘skirrel’

Question 31

What does addition mean?

Answer 31

Children sometimes break up consonants clusters not by deleting one of the consonants, but by adding a vowel to separate. e.g. ‘blue’ becomes ‘belu’ ( the e is the vowel)

Question 32

What are the terms in phonology?

Answer 32

• biblical
• labio-dental sounds
• dental sounds
• alveolar sounds
• velor sounds
• voiceless phonemes
• voiced phoneme

Question 33

what are biblical sounds?

Answer 33

They include the pronunciations of m,b,p

Question 34

What are labio- dental sounds?

Answer 34

They include the pronunciations of f,v

Question 35

What are dental sounds?

Answer 35

They include the pronunciations of th(in) and th(an).

Question 36

What are alveolar sounds?

Answer 36

They include the pronunciations of t,s,l,d,z,n

Question 37

What are velor sounds?

Answer 37

They include the pronunciations of k,g

Question 38

What are voiceless phonemes?

Answer 38

They include the pronunciations of s,f,t,k

Question 39

What are voiced phonemes?

Answer 39

The pronunciations of z,d,v,g

Question 40

What are fricatives?

Answer 40

Sounds that you can keep going, for as long as you can hold your breath.

Question 41

What pronunciations of letters are fricative?

Answer 41

s,f,z,v

Question 42

What are stops/plosive?

Answer 42

They are pronunciations of t,k,d,g

Question 43

What are nasal sounds?

Answer 43

Pronunciations of m,n

Question 44

What is the holophrastic stage?

Answer 44

Words that may be used as a single unit, which are known as holophrases. E.g. ‘allgone’ or ‘juice’ which could mean ‘ I want some juice’ or ‘i’ve spilt some juice’ etc..

Question 45

What does context/ paralinguistic features/ prosodic features enable?

Answer 45

They enable the parent to understand their child.

Question 46

Is it true or false that utterances don’t focus on key words (content words)?

Answer 46

False.
Utterances DO focus on key words

Question 47

What is the meaning of two-word utterances?

Answer 47

Means when a range of complex meanings can be expressed .

Question 48

What are possessions?

Answer 48

Referring to someone’s belonging.
e.g. ‘Mummy car’ should be ‘Mummy’s car’

Question 49

What does Action mean?

Answer 49

‘Paul eat’ should be ‘Paul eats’

Question 50

What does Location mean?

Answer 50

‘Teddy Bed’ should be ‘Teddy’s bed’

Question 51

How is possessions, actions and location expressed in two-word utterances?

Answer 51

Commonly possesive ‘s’ and plural ‘s’ and past tense ‘ed’ are absent.
For e.g. ‘Walk park’ is a plural present inflectional continuous tense.
‘Walk’ is missing the ‘ing’

Question 52

What does Ranged Progress mean?

Answer 52

A wider range of structures and sentence types will be used. For example e.g. Inflectional affixes.
5 year olds grammatical rules have learned through.