Child Language Acquisition (speech)

Question 1

What are the 5 main stages (including the sub sections of the 2nd stage) of child language acquisition?

Answer 1

1. Pre-birth
2. Pre-verbal (Crying, Cooing, Reduplicated babbling, Variegated babbling)
3. Holophrastic/One Word Stage
4. Two-word stage
5. Post Telegraphic stage

Question 2

What two abilities does a child supposedly have when inside the mothers womb in terms of understanding and recognising language?

Answer 2

1. The baby can supposedly recognise their mothers voice before it is born, as ear bones develop up to 6 months before birth
2. The baby has the ability to differentiate between its own native and foreign languages before it is born

Question 3

What function does crying serve in the language development process?

Answer 3

1. It allows the baby to exercise it’s vocal chords for the first time
2. It understands that through crying, it can gain the attention of people, and this is the first step to understanding conversational interaction

Question 4

What age does the cooing stage begin? And what happens at this stage?

Answer 4

• Cooing begins around 2 months old
• And it’s where a baby experiments with noises that can be made when the tongue comes into contact with the back of the mouth

Question 5

What age does the babbling stage begin? And what happens at this stage?

Answer 5

• Babbling begins at about 6 months old

- This stage is where the child produces the vowel and consonant sounds which we are familiar with in spoken language

Question 6

What is Reduplicated babbling? And give an example.

Answer 6

• It is the first type of babbling to appear, and is where the child repeatedly creates the same sounds.

Example: babababa or gagagaga or dadadada or mamamama

Question 7

What is variegated babbling? And give an example.

Answer 7

• The second type of babbling to occur, it includes variation in the sounds produced, but still doesn’t resemble any recognisable words

Example: manamoo or googoogaga

Question 8

At what age does a child’s first word usually appear, and at what stage is this included in?

Answer 8

The child says its first word at around 12 months old and this takes place during the holophrastic stage

Question 9

What age does the holophrastic stage take place between?

Answer 9

12-18 months

Question 10

What is the holophrastic stage? And what else is it known as?

Answer 10

The stage when a child conveys a whole sentence worth of meaning in just a single word or labels things in the environment around them. And it is also known as the one word stage.

Question 11

Besides ‘mummy’ or ‘daddy’, what type of words usually appear first in a child’s vocabulary?

Answer 11

Concrete nouns (names of things or people around them)

Question 12

What other function of language will the child rely heavily on to convey meaning to the caregiver during the holophrastic stage?

Answer 12

Non-phonological features/non verbal communication

Question 13

What is a holophrase?

Answer 13

Single words that convey a sentence worth of meaning

Question 14

What main language theme was Skinner associated with? And explain this theory

Answer 14

Behaviourism. The theory that behaviour is a result of conditioning we have experienced, rather than any freedom of choice.

Question 15

How did Skinner propose children actually learned language (through what method?)

Answer 15

Skinner proposed children learnt language through imitating the caregiver

Question 16

What is operant conditioning?

Answer 16

The idea that a child modifies its responses based upon reinforcement/correction provided by the caregiver - in response to an initial utterance by the child

Question 17

What is reinforcement theory? (explain positive and negative)

Answer 17

Skinner’s theory that if a child speaks correctly (positive reinforcement), the caregiver will respond with positive praise (in the form of a smile, or positive oral responses)

OR

If a child speaks incorrectly (negative reinforcement), the caregiver will correct the child, and the child will then imitate this correction

Question 18

Give 3 criticisms of Skinner’s behaviourist theories

Answer 18

1. Caregivers are more likely to correct a child on the truth value/contextual accuracy of what it has said rather than the linguistic accuracy
2. Children don’t just start producing fully correct and complete sentences all of a sudden, as would be suggested if the child was really imitating the caregiver
3. There is some evidence to show that children don’t always respond to correction and it can actually hamper their language development

Question 19

What main language theme was Noam Chomsky associated with?

Answer 19

Nativism

Question 20

What was Chomsky’s most famous proposed idea?

Answer 20

The idea that children have an LAD, a language acquisition device which has a critical learning period (up until around age 12) whereby if they haven’t begun to learn language by then, they never will

Question 21

What was the long time traditionally accepted view about a child’s brain at birth? (Latin idea)

Answer 21

That it was a blank canvas, with no innate abilities what so-ever. Referred to by Aristotle as a ‘tabula-rasa’ meaning blank canvas in Latin.

Question 22

What other idea did Chomsky propose?

Answer 22

Chomsky coined the term ‘Universal Grammar’ - the idea that all languages have similar grammatical properties, which a child’s brain was ‘hard-wired’ from birth to decode and apply itself