Child Language Acquisition Theorists

Question 1

Nativism - Noam Chomsky (1928)

Answer 1

• He argues that children do not learn through imitation and that even if they did, caregivers do not provide a good enough source of English - he calls this a ‘poverty of stimulus’
• Language learning is impossible without ‘universal language-specific knowledge’ or ‘universal grammar’.
• Hard wired knowledge of some basic grammatical/ syntactical rules.
• Chomsky called this our ‘Language Acquisition Device’ or ‘LAD’.
• Input cannot be an adequate basis for language learning.
• Input has naturally occurring errors (slurs, slips, hesitations or false starts) and is devoid of grammar corrections.
• Supported by Pinker, Pye, Berko-Gleason, The Wug Test and Case Study: Genie.
• There is no scientific proof that exists. Chomsky based his theory on his observations only.

Question 2

Nativism - Pinker

Answer 2

When a child produces an utterance, almost every single utterance is new - they cannot be imitating.

Question 3

Nativism - Pye

Answer 3

Cultures around the world raise children differently - including some which don’t use CDS - yet they all learn to speak. This suggests there is something innate at play.

Question 4

Nativism - Berko-Gleason, The Wug Test

Answer 4

Studied children’s productive use of morphology (way words are formed to create tenses, plurals etc).

Children were shown pictures of fictional things and actions and asked to form the object or action using an inflected ending. For example:
There is one WUG.
There are two ______.
The majority (75%) of child aged 4-5 were able to choose the right ending.
This means, therefore, that children do not learn through imitation.

Question 5

Nativism - Case Study: Genie

Answer 5

Genie was a chuckle who was abused until the age of 13 - shut away and deprived of human contact.
Linguists worked with her, but since she had passed the critical period, she couldn’t learn language. This suggests there must be some form of internal structure as caregivers were unable to help Genie to acquire language.

Question 6

How can I spot Nativism - Chomsky in the data?

Answer 6

• Children residing being corrected OR children which accept correction and then revert back again.
• Mistakes with inflections.
• Children making virtuous errors.

Question 7

Interactionalism - Bruner

Answer 7

• Scaffolding - Children encouraged to communicate within their ability - the adult ‘fills in’ or ‘scaffolds’ the rest.
• LASS - Language Acquisition Support System. There may well be a LAD, but there must also be a LASS. Refers to family/ playgroup/ peer/ friendship group of child.
• Constantly provide opportunities for child to acquire mother tongue: ‘ritualised scenarios’ - phases of interaction are rapidly recognised and predicted by the infant.

Question 8

Interactionalism - Snow

Answer 8

Coined the term ‘motherese’ to describe the way mothers talk to their children. This includes:
- Higher pitch.
- Greater range of intonation.
- Frequent use of interrogative and declarative mood.
- Repetition of syllables and phrases.

Question 9

Interactionalism - Bard and Sachs

Answer 9

Case study of a Jim - a boy with two deaf parents. They exposed him to TV and radio to hear language, but he didn’t learn how to speak. However, interactions with speech therapists allowed him to acquire language, thus proving the importance of interaction.

Question 10

Interactionalism - Snarey

Answer 10

Fathers play with their children in more physical and less linguistic ways.

Question 11

Interactionalism - Myszor

Answer 11

CDS helps social development, but not linguistic development.

Question 12

Interactionalism - Trevarthen

Answer 12

Children learn turn taking before they learn language as a result of CDS.

Question 13

Interactionalism - Chomsky

Answer 13

Children produce utterances which abide to no grammatical structure. No caregiver would have said their utterance, so there must be something external to caregivers.

Question 14

How can I spot Interactionalism in data?

Answer 14

Look for:
- Caregivers correcting children and children either adopting or rejecting the change.
- Caregivers using elements of motherese, LASS or CDS.

Question 15

What does Interactionalism argue?

Answer 15

Children are born with nothing (tabula rosa) and learn language from the social environment they are in - this includes caregivers providing support.

Question 16

What is Child Directed Speech and examples?

Answer 16

Language used to talk a child. This includes:
- Labelling - providing the label , for example, ‘that’s a ball’
- Over-articulation - elongating vowel sounds, for example, ‘baby’s foooooooood’.
- Echoing - repeating what the child says.
- Expansion - repeating what the child said, but in a more linguistically sophisticated way, for example, ‘doggy chew’ - ‘yes that’s right, the dog is chewing.’
- Expatiation - repeating what the child said but adding more information, for example, ‘bottle cold’ - ‘yes the bottle is cold, so I’ll warm it up for you’.
- Reformulation - repeating what the child says, but in a different way, for example, ‘doggy tail wag’ - ‘is the dog wagging his tail?.
- Repeated sentence frames, for example, ‘That’s a tiger, that’s an elephant, that’s an…’.
- Active voice, for example, ‘daddy ate the cake’.

Question 17

What does Nativism argue?

Answer 17

There is some form of in-built in language learning device.

Question 18

What does behaviourism argue?

Answer 18

Children learn through positive and negative reinforcement. When a child says something right, their caregivers will praise them and when they say something wrong, they will tell them it’s wrong and correct them.

Question 19

Behaviourism - Skinner (1904-1990)

Answer 19

• Believed in process of imitation.
• Positive or negative reinforcement.
• Tabula Rosa (blank state).
• Operant Conditioning (what we do and say is shaped by its consequences for us), doesn’t take pragmatics into account in some ways.

Question 20

How can I spot behaviourism in the data?

Answer 20

Look for where the caregiver positively or negatively reinforces language.

Question 21

What does Cognitivism argue?

Answer 21

Children need to be cognitively adept to talk about things; they cannot express what they do not understand.

Question 22

Cognitivism - Piaget (1896 - 1980)

Answer 22

He argues that until children learn the rule of object permanence (things still exist when you can’t see them), they struggle to name things; hence why children’s language starts to be acquired properly at around a year.

Question 23

Cognitivism - Vygotsky

Answer 23

Children have a cognitive deficiency - they need to understand things and have a gap of knowledge… he calls this the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). He argues that the role of he caregiver (or, as he describes, a More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) is to fill the cognitive gap.

Question 24

Problems with Piaget

Answer 24

Children who have learning difficulties still manage to acquire one.

Question 25

How can I spot this in data?

Answer 25

Look for:
- Children who are struggling to say something they are unlikely to understand.
- Caregivers explaining something to children.

Question 26

What does Social Constructivism argue?

Answer 26

Children learn the rules of a language and learn to construct it.

Question 27

Social Constructivism - Tomasello

Answer 27

Children listen to languages and find patterns and develop plans on how language is used (schemas).

Question 28

Social Constructivism - Braine

Answer 28

Children learn to use slots and frames. As Tomasello says, these schemas are developed from listening to adults. These could look like this:

When I want to talk about myself having completed an action:
‘I + (SLOT)ed’

Where a verb can be added into the slot to form utterances like:
‘I liked’, ‘I played’, ‘I jumped’, ‘I threwed’.

Question 29

How can I spot Social Constructivism in data?

Answer 29

Look for:

• Children making virtuous errors.
• Formulaic expressions.

Question 30

Rescorla (1980) - Overextension

Answer 30

There are 3 different types of overextension:

1. Categorical - most common form - the child applies a label to everything in a category. For example, ‘dog’ for all animals.
2. Analogical - found in about 15% of Rescorla’s cases - the child applies a label to everything which is physically or visually similar. For example, ‘tomato’ for a ball.
3. Relational - 25% of overextension in Rescorla’s studies - the child applies a label which is in some form related to the object. For example, ‘pen’ for paper.

Question 31

Belugi (1967) - Negation

Answer 31

The child fronts negatives, for example, ‘no me go outside’ when first learning to negate.

Question 32

Berko and Brown - ‘The Fis Phenomenon’

Answer 32

Children notice when caregivers make mistakes but are unable to see that they are making a mistake. A child was saying ‘fis’ and when asked if they meant ‘fis’, they said no, but when asked if they meant ‘fish’, they said yes.

Question 33

Halliday’s 7 Functions of Language

Answer 33

Once a child has acquired language, it important to look at what they use it for. Halliday describes 7 core functions that children use language for in the order they acquire it.

1. Instrumental - the child needs something - for example, ‘want drink’ and ‘need toilet’.
2. Regulatory - the child wants something to happen - for example, ‘pass me juice’, ‘come here’.
3. Interactional - the child interacts with others - for example, ‘doggy play?’, ‘love you mummy’.
4. Personal - the child wants to express themselves - for example, ‘doggy good boy’, ‘me no like cheese’.
5. Heuristic - the child wants to learn about the world - for example, ‘what dog doing?’, ‘where dad going?’.
6. Imaginative - the child want to be creative with language, including telling stories - for example, ‘me a doggy too! Woof woof!’, ‘one day when I was…’
7. Representational - the child wants relay facts - for example, ‘I am 2’, ‘dog is on sofa’.

Question 34

Problems with Skinner

Answer 34

• We are often more interested in them saying something that is true, than we are them saying it in a grammatically correct way.
• It has been suggested that over-correcting children’s speech can have a bad effect, as there are some stages where children start to apply grammar, that they go through and learn naturally.
• Now largely discredited.

Question 35

Problems with Vygotsky

Answer 35

• Children from cultures that do not promote a lot of child-adult interaction can still be articulate and fluent users of language.