Child Language Acquisition (ao2) Flashcards
Nativism
The belief that children learn language naturally without facilitation from parents
Behaviourism
The idea that language is learnt through understanding the difference between right and wrong.
Behaviourists consider learning a language as a set of mechanical habits which are formed through a process of imitation and repetition. Humans learn a language through repeating the same form and text until it becomes a habit.
social interactionism
The idea that language is learnt through parental influence and scaffolding
Social interactionist theory (SIT) is an explanation of language development emphasizing the role of social interaction between the developing child and linguistically knowledgeable adults. It is based largely on the socio-cultural theories of Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky.
cognitivism
The cognitive theory of language acquisition was first proposed by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget in the 1930s. Cognitive theory is based on the idea that children are born with limited cognitive ability upon which all new knowledge can be built.
The idea that language is learnt through exposure to environments and development of schema
Bard and Sach’s study into Jim
Bard and Sachs studied a boy called ‘Jim’, who was son of two deaf parents. Although he was exposed to TV and radio, his speech development was severely retarded. It demonstrated that simple exposure to language (e.g. from television) is not an effective stimulus to language learning; human interaction is necessary to develop speech
Clark-Stewart on vocabulary development
Clark-Stewart found that children whose mothers talk more have larger vocabularies.
ZPD
Zone of proximal development
Zygotsky on ZPD
Vygotsky suggested that for children to learn they need an MKO (more knowledgeable other) who supports the child in moving beyond their ZPD, encouraging them to move beyond what they already know to what is not yet known by the means of scaffolding and support.
Garvey’s sociodramatic play
Garvey asserted that sociodramatic play usually begins when the child is around four-years-old and fulfils Halliday’s imaginative function. In their re-enactments they use subject specific lexis and structure them in some of the formulaic ways that adults use in real-life situations, suggesting they can observe and imitate adult behaviours.
LAD model by Chomsky
Chomsky stated that children are born with an innate knowledge of language and universal grammar. This innate ability to learn language is governed by the LAD (language acquisition device) which he suggested needed activating and is the reason children sometime over regularise and put grammar into utterances when they are not needed
Tomasello criticism of chomsky
Tomasello called Chomsky an armchair theorist as his ideas were only speculative.
Berko Gleason’s Wug Test
Wug Test - When faced with a picture of an imaginary ‘wug’:
76% of four-to-five-year-olds formed the regular –s plural.
97% of five –to-seven-year-olds formed the regular –s plural
Berko Gleason found that even very young children are able to connect suitable suffixes—to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms—to nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have already internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them.
Steven Pinker’s Nativist argument
In ‘The Language Instinct’, Pinker suggests that rather than being a human invention, language is an innate human ability because:
Deaf babies “babble” with their hands as others normally do with voice, and spontaneously invent sign languages with true grammar.
Even in the absence of active attempts by parents to correct children’s grammar, accurate speech develops.
Genie Wiley case study
A 13-year-old Los Angeles girl who had been locked away from all social interaction. Following her rescue, attempts to teach her English only ever produced partial success, and she never achieved full grammatical competence.
Oxana (case study)
An 8-year-old who had lived with a pack of dogs, when she was found she could hardly speak and ran on all fours barking. Since being taught language; her speech is odd, without rhythm, inflection or tone. She speaks flatly, as though it’s an order, and can still communicate through barking.
Lenneberg’s critical period theory hypothesis
Lenneberg proposed that the capacity to learn a language is innate but that if a child does not learn a language before the onset of puberty, the child will never master language at all; this is known as the critical period hypothesis. Evidence for Lenneberg’s theories emerged from studies on feral children such as Genie and Oxana.
Skinner’s Behaviourist Theory
Skinner believed that biology plays almost no part in the way children learn language. He experimented on rats and believed his findings on operant conditioning could be extended to language development. He stated that all behaviour is conditioned through positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement.
Chomsky criticism of Skinner’s theory
Chomsky questioned the validity of experiments on rats and pigeons to offer comment on humans’ capacity to learn.
Piaget on language development
Piaget stated that children need to develop certain mental abilities before they can acquire particular aspects of language, so they cannot be taught before they are ready. Until around 18 months, children are egocentric, and then they begin to realise that things have object permanence.
According to Piaget there are 4 stages of language development sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, formal operational.
Sensorimotor (up to 2)
Experiences the physical world through the senses and begins classifying the things in it; lexis tends to be concrete; object permanence develops
Pre-operational (2-7)
Language and motor skills develop; language is egocentric
Concrete operational (7-11)
Begins thinking logically about concrete events
Formal operational (11+)
Abstract reasoning skills develop
Some people with learning difficulties are still linguistically fluent so cognitive development and language development are not always as closely connected as Piaget suggests.
Egocentric
A child is unable to see a situation from another person’s point of view or mentally process the concept that something can exist outside their immediate surroundings
Object permanance
A child understands something can exist without having to see it
Repacholi and Gopnik’s criticism of Piaget
In an experiment involving food, broccoli and crackers were offered to infants aged between 14 and 18 months, who preferred the crackers. When offering a snack to the researcher:
14-month-old would offer the cracker, irrespective of whether the researcher expressed an interest for broccoli or crackers.
18-month-old was able to identify the researcher had indicated a preference for broccoli and offered this.
This suggests that from a very young age, children are sensitive to the needs and desires of others and are not entirely egocentric in their behaviour.
Bruner’s LASS model
Bruner states that language learning is an innate ability but that, crucially, it needs activating through the Language Acquisition Support System (LASS). This is exemplified by how parents often use books and images to develop their child’s naming abilities and their ability to get involved in conversation:
Gaining attention - drawing the baby’s attention to a picture
Query - asking the baby to identify the picture
Label - telling the baby what the object is
Feedback - responding to the baby’s utterances
Catherine Snow
Snow’s research focussed on the ways in which mothers talk to their children and the connection to the child’s age. She initially proposed the idea of child directed speech.
Child Directed Speech
attract and hold the baby’s attention
encourage a child to interact and respond
help the process of breaking down language into understandable chunks
make the conversation more predictable by keeping the conversation in the ‘here and now’ and referring to things the baby can see
It is also called motherese, fatherese, carese, baby talk, parentese.
Vandam on Motherese and Fatherese (CDS)
Vandam distinguished between ‘motherese’ and ‘fatherese’ by stating that male talk to children is more likely to resemble that used to other adults, and is less likely to have the sing song intonation and simplification that is perhaps more attributable to a female caregiver.
Schatz evaluation of correction in CDS
Only 4% of children’s errors corrected by caregivers
Features of CDS
Exaggerated intonation patterns for key content words as children tend to imitate the stressed words
Frequent use of the child’s name and an absence of pronouns.
Questions and commands (getting the child to do something)
Questions where the w-word doesn’t appear in its usual place but where the baby must replace with a word (eg. you ate what?)
Repeated sentence frames. This occurs when the parent uses the same structure over and over, filling in part of it with a different word each time, e.g. ‘That’s a … ‘
Absence of past tenses (e.g. threw, ran, played).
One-word utterances.
Use of simple sentences (e.g. Shoogle is a nice cat)
Omission of inflections such as plurals and possessives
Fewer verbs, modifiers (adjectives in front of nouns) and function words (e.g. at, my)
Use of concrete nouns and dynamic verbs
Simplification of lexis to become more general (eg. calling tulips, roses and bluebells ‘flowers’)
Repetition and partial repetition of the adult’s own words.
Use of re-castings — where the baby’s vocabulary is put into a new utterance.
Papa New Guinea criticism of CDS
In the Kaluli Tribe in Papua New Guinea, adults speak to children as they speak to adult, and children acquire language at the same pace as elsewhere.
Samoa criticism of CDS
In some tribes of Samoa, parents do not speak to their children until they reach a certain age. These children still go through the same developmental stages at roughly the same time provided there is exposure to language
Stages of Language Acquisition
- Babbling
- Holophrastic Stage
- Two- Word Stage
- Telegraphic Stage
- Post Telegraphic Stage
Babbling - Desmond Morris
For the first 6 months of a baby’s life gurgles and babbles will be the same, regardless of the baby’s nationality or how much parental input the child had had. Deaf children will also create the same sounds. By 6 months, the child will be increasingly attuned to variations in language being used around them and the babbling will start to resemble this more closely.
Holophrastic- Katherine Nelson
Nelson placed the early words of children in to four categories: naming, action, social and modifying (descriptions). She found that around 60% of a child’s first 50 words were nouns.
Holophrastic- Bloom
Bloom says the supposed noun bias merely reflects the frequency of nouns in our language; nouns outnumber verbs by 5:1 in dictionaries.
Holophrastic- Aitchison
Aitchison identified three stages that occur during a child’s acquisition of vocabulary:
Labelling: The general understanding of what each word means. The child relates the sounds of the word to the object they are describing. (mummy for the child’s mother)
Packaging: Explores the extent to which the label can stretch.
Very closely linked to over/underextention
(will explore the names of other four legged animals)
Network Building: Starts to make connections and relationships between different labels.
Such as opposites and similarities
This shows child is capable of active and deductive learning
A child is working things out to make sense and is making connections for themselves.
innateness theory
Holophrastic- Rescorla
Rescorla further explored overextension, collecting concrete data:
Categorical Overextension:
Word for a member of a clear category I’d extended to other members of the category
E.g “Apple” to all types of fruit
Analogical Overextension:
A word is extended to other objects which bare some similarity but are not normally associated with each other
E.g “cat” for a soft scarf
Mismatch/Predicate statements:
When associating objects together that bare no similarity but the child might have seen them together
E.g “mummy” for their mother’s coat
Two-word - Roger Brown
He identified the syntactic structures of two-word utterances and suggested that the combination of words places together follow a limited range of patterns
Telegraphic - Roger Brown
Question development stages:
Only prosodic features (rising intonation) indicate the interrogative mood: ‘Daddy come…?’
Interrogative pronouns (wh- words, such as when, where, what, how) are used at the start of sentences: ‘where baby…?’
Syntactic inversion of the auxiliary verb (can, is, did – tense will not always be correct) and the subject of the sentence (e.g. You, Daddy) produce the correct form: Is Daddy gone?
Telegraphic- Ursula Belluigi
Negation development stages:
Uses ‘no’ or ‘not’ at the beginning of end of the sentence – “No shoes!”
Puts ‘no’ or ‘not’ inside the sentence –“I no wear shoes!”
Attaches negatives to auxiliary verbs - “I won’t wear shoes!” NB the main verb is not always yet in the correct tense
Telegraphic- Ursula Belluigi
Pronoun usage stages:
Uses their own name – “Katherine play.”
Recognises I/me pronouns – “I play”, “Me up”
Uses pronouns according to whether they are the subject or object position – “I play with the toy.”/ “Give it to me.”
Halliday’s functions
He proposed the functions of child language can be categorised.
The most commonly used is instrumental and regulatory, which are learnt, along with interactional and personal, at a young age. Representational is used by 6-8+ year olds.
- instrumental: Language used to fulfil particular needs E.g “I want”
- regulatory: Language used to influence other’s behaviours (Do as I tell you) E.g. “Wash hands”
- interactional: Language used to develop social relationships (Me and you) E.g “love mummy”
- personal: Language used to express own ideas and individual identity (Here I come) E.g “jimmy good boy”
- heuristic: Language used to learn and explore the environment (Tell me why) E.g “why the bus stop here?”
- imaginative: Language used to create imaginary environment. Usually accompanies play (Let’s pretend) E.g “jimmy shoot cowboy”
- representational: Language used to convey facts and information ‘I’ve got something to tell you’
Children learnt these functions in this order so that they were able to get what they wanted and make conversation and interaction with people.
supports pragmatic theory
Berko and Brown’s FIS phenomenon
‘Fɪs phenomenon’ - A child called his toy fish fɪs. When asked: “Is this your fɪs?”, he said no. But when asked: “Is this your fɪʃ“, he said: “Yes, my fɪs.” This is evidence that children’s perceptual abilities are often in advance of their productive abilities.
