child language acquisition - stages of development Flashcards

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1
Q

What kind of pre-natal development does a baby go through?

A
  • 6 months before birth the ear bones have already formed + hearing happens
  • it is likely that babies can pick up the individual intonation and speech pattern of their mother’s voice in the womb
  • 3 day old babies can distinguish their mothers’ voice from other sounds
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2
Q

What is the order of the different stages?

A
  1. preverbal
  2. holophrastic
  3. two word
  4. telegraphic
  5. post-telegraphic
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3
Q

For how long is the preverbal stage?

A

starts at birth and lasts approximately 11 months

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4
Q

What are the characteristics of the preverbal stage?

A
  • babies begin to communicate soundlessly with actions e.g. sucking on a dummy, crying, hand movements, etc
  • they learn that making noise commands attention it signals hunger, distress or pleasure
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5
Q

What are the stages within the preverbal stage?

A
  1. vocal play (single vowel sound)
  2. biological noises (coughing, burping, crying)
  3. melodic utterance (melody, rhythm and intonation develop)
  4. cooing and laughing (back of the throat)
  5. babbling (produces phonemes e.g. baba)
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6
Q

What is cooing?

A
  • also known as gurgling or mewing
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7
Q

What is babbling?

A
  • around 6-9 months old
  • exercises and experiments with articulators
  • continues for several months after the first word
  • phonemic contraction (9-10 months) the number of phonemes produced reduces
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8
Q

What are the rules of babbling from easy to difficult?

A
  • stopped sounds (the air is momentarily stopped from being released e.g. ‘p’)
  • reduplication (where the same vowel-consonant combination is required)
  • variegated babbling (as above except that the vowel sound changes
  • consonant cluster (number of consonants are combined e.g. ‘fr’)
  • friction words (vibration when air is released)
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9
Q

How do babies use intonation?

A
  • patterns begin to resemble speech e.g. rising intonation at the end
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10
Q

How do babies use gesture?

A
  • the beginnings of pragmatic development
  • their desire to communicate through gesture
    e.g. point to object and use facial expression
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11
Q

What is the second stage?

A

the holophrastic stage

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12
Q

How long is the holophrastic stage?

A

usually between 12-18 months

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13
Q

How is the holophrastic stage characterised?

A
  • the child conveys meaningful utterances that are usually 1- word utterances
  • it is a significant stage because they’re deliberately conveying meaning through lexical choices
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14
Q

What did Katherine Nelson (1973) find with the holophrastic stage?

A

a child’s first words into the following categories:
1. naming things (nouns)
2. actions/events
3. personal/social
4. modifying things e.g. nice, dirty

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15
Q

What is overextension?

A
  • a child uses a more specific word to label a more general noun
    e.g. calling all men ‘daddy’ - they have not realised this word only applies to their father
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16
Q

What can overextension be categorised into?

A
  • analogical overextension
  • categorical overextension
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17
Q

What is analogical overextension?

A
  • making links between different objects according to similar properties or use
    e.g. a child may call a scarf ‘cat’ because it is soft like a cat’s fur - or they may call a cement mixer ‘ball’ because of the similarity in shape
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18
Q

What is categorical overextension?

A
  • a child refers to all objects within the same category with the same name
    e.g. when hyponym ‘apple’ takes place of the hypernym ‘fruit’
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19
Q

What is underextension?

A
  • a child uses a more general word that only applies to a very specific thing
    e.g. an apple only being applied to naming green apples and not red ones
20
Q

Why is the holophrastic stage crucial?

A
  • children are expanding their vocabulary
  • children are developing their phonological awareness and articulation skills, or speech sounds
  • children are developing grammar through their use of a single word + the adult’s expansion of that word
  • the holophrastic stage helps building confidence + self-esteem
21
Q

What is the third stage?

A

the two word stage

22
Q

How long does the two word stage last?

A

18-24 months

23
Q

What are the characteristics of the two word stage?

A
  • combines words into a range of patterns to create mini-sentences
  • it largely revolves around nouns and the children pair them with other less frequently used word classes
    e.g. I walk (pronoun+verb), My shoe (pronoun+noun), Naughty cat (adjective+noun)
24
Q

What did Roger Brown (1973) note about the two-word stage?

A
  • he noted a particular semantic relationship between these word choices and a particular structure
    e.g. agent + action - daddy kick - dad kicks ball
25
Q

What is the fourth stage?

A

the telegraphic stage

26
Q

How long does the telegraphic stage last?

A

24-30 months

27
Q

What are the characteristics of the telegraphic stage?

A
  • using three or more words to form a first sentence to convey the greatest amount of meaning
  • words that are missed out: auxiliary verbs, articles, conjunctions and prepositions
  • there is a gradual increase in the child’s Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and inflections are gradually added
    e.g. 25 months = I show book, 28 months = I show book, 35 months = Show you the book (the model is I showed you the book)
28
Q

What are virtuous errors?

A
  • they are based on sound logic, where children are ‘overgeneralising’ the rules of grammar and lexical formation
    e.g. There was three mans (-s ending to form plural noun)
  • this overgeneralisation, like most other aspects of children’s developing grammar, is typically resistant to correction
29
Q

What did Jean Berko (1950s) find?

A
  • an experiment on children’s -s plural
  • when faced with a picture of an imaginary animal called a ‘wug’, children tended to create the plural ‘wugs’ when asked to complete the statement
30
Q

What percent of 4-5 year olds and 5-7 year olds formed the regular -s plural?

A
  • 4-5 year olds = 76%
  • 5-7 year olds = 97%
31
Q

What did Berko conclude from these findings?

A
  • these rules are innate
  • they already internalised systematic aspects of the linguistic system enabling them to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms of words that they have never read before
32
Q

What is child-directed speech?

A

the specialised register of speech that adults and older children use when talking to young children, it is simplified and often more grammatically correct than adult-directed speech

33
Q

What features characterise CDS?

A
  • more pronounced intonation
  • more obvious lip and mouth movement
  • higher pitch and exaggerated intonation
  • simplified vocab
  • repeated grammatical ‘frames’
  • shorter utterances
  • questions and commands
  • deviant use of pronouns e.g. mummy’s going to give baby his dinner
34
Q

What kind of mothers use longer utterances and a greater range of different words?

A
  • high socioeconomic status mothers and their children therefore have larger vocabularies
35
Q

Approximately how many utterances do children from high SES families hear a day compared to children from low SES families?

A

high SES = 11,000 utterances in a day
low SES = 700 utterances in a day

36
Q

What do researchers believe about CDS?

A
  • baby talk contributes to mental development, as it helps teach the child the basic function and structure of language
  • studies have found that even responding to an infant’s babble with meaningless babble aids the infant’s development
  • while babble has no logical meaning, the verbal interaction demonstrates to the child the bidirectional nature of speech, and the importance of verbal feedback
37
Q

What did Hart and Risley (1995) discover about CDS and disparities?

A
  • the discovery of a 30 million word gap in language to children from higher and lower SES backgrounds over the first 3 years of life is now widely cited in the popular press as well as in academic journals
  • the quantity of speech is actually a proxy for the quality of children’s early language experience
38
Q

What is a criticism of Hart and Risley?

A
  • its just providing the MC researcher with yet another stick with which to beat the WC parent (Pine, 1992)
    BUT several researchers have now studied larger samples of families from more diverse backgrounds, confirming disparities among children in their early language experience - to ignore the role of parents is to dismiss a vital influence in children’s lives
39
Q

What is the fifth stage?

A

post-telegraphic

40
Q

At what age does the post telegraphic stage begin?

A

around 3 years

41
Q

What are the characteristics of the post-telegraphic stage?

A
  • missing function words begin to appear in the right places
  • more complex grammatical structures are used
  • passive voice, different tenses, aspects and clause structures become apparent
  • length of sentences develops, particularly through the use of co-ordinating conjunctions ‘and’ and ‘but’
  • contrasting connections with the co-ordinating conjunction ‘or’
  • expressing conditions with subordinating conjunctions ‘if’ (though, although, whether and unless’ come later)
  • time connections - ‘then, when, while, before and after’
  • causal connections are acquired - ‘because; so and to’ (‘since’ comes later, usually after age 5)§
42
Q

What did Baldie (1976) find?

A
  • children started to show an understanding of the passive voice at around 3 but could not use it until somewhere between 6 and 8, even at age 8, only about 80% will be using it
43
Q

What can children do by age 5?

A
  • follow multi-step, complex directions
  • children can understand and combine words to form active sentences e.g. ‘the cat chased the dog’
  • children also start to understand passive sentences e.g. ‘the cat was chased by the dog’
44
Q

What is Halliday’s Taxonomy?

A
  • instrumental = to express needs
  • regulatory = tell others what to do
  • interactional = make contact with others and form relationships
  • personal = express feelings, opinions, individual indentity
  • representational = exchange information
  • heuristic = gain knowledge about the environment
  • imaginative = tell stories, jokes and create imaginary environment
45
Q

Who influenced Halliday’s work?

A

John Dore

46
Q

What are John Dore’s(1975) speech acts?

A
  • labelling = naming/identifying a person, object or experience
  • repeating = echoing something spoken by an adult
  • answering = giving a direct response
  • requesting action = demanding
  • calling = attracting attention
  • greeting
  • protesting = objecting requests
  • practising = using and repeating language when no adult is present