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.
Argued that her data showed that children were learning rules.

Question 5

Nativism - Case Study: Genie

Answer 5

Genie was a child 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 resisting being corrected OR children which accept correction and then revert back again.
• Mistakes with inflections.
• Children making virtuous errors.
• Things like over and under-extension suggest that children are actively constructing language according to an unconscious model of how language works.

Question 7

Interactionalism - Bruner

Answer 7

• Put language firmly into a social context by saying that ‘children learn to use a language initially, to get what they want, to play games, to stay connected with those on whom they are dependent’.
• LASS - Language Acquisition Support System. There may well be a LAD, but there must also be a LASS, which is the support for language learning provided by parents.
• For example, scaffolding - Children encouraged to communicate within their ability - the adult ‘fills in’ or ‘scaffolds’ the rest and Child Directed Speech (CDS).

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

Nativism - Chomsky - (Interactionalism)

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.
- Children clearly enjoying/benefitting from their interaction.
- Parents reinforcing their children’s attempts to speak by responding in an encouraging and positive way.
- Conversation skills and pragmatic awareness being modelled/taught/learnt through interaction between child and adult.

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 does Nativism argue?

Answer 16

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

Question 17

What does behaviourism argue?

Answer 17

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 18

Behaviourism - Skinner (1959)

Answer 18

• Believed in process of imitation and that language was just another form of learned behaviour.
• Children learn through positive or negative reinforcement.
• Children’s brains are a Tabula Rosa (blank state), ready for them to learn language through interaction.
• Children learn through operant conditioning (what we do and say is shaped by its consequences for us), doesn’t take pragmatics into account in some ways.

Question 19

How can I spot behaviourism in the data?

Answer 19

• Caregiver positively or negatively reinforces language.
• Caregivers explicitly modelling or teaching language, and children responding.
• Children imitating/repeating adults’ speech.
• Children learning or repairing mistakes after correction from adults.

Question 20

What does Cognitivism argue?

Answer 20

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

Question 21

Cognitivism - Piaget (1896 - 1980)

Answer 21

• 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.
• Suggested that a child’s language acquisition is part of a child’s wider development, so language comes with understanding.
• A child cannot linguistically articulate concepts they do not understand.

Question 22

The Social Interactionalist Theory - Vygotsky

Answer 22

• 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 the caregiver (or, as he describes, a More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) is to fill the cognitive gap.
• Child language is developed through interaction with adults.
• Play encouragers language acquisition.

Question 23

Problems with Piaget

Answer 23

Children who have learning difficulties still manage to acquire language and use it far beyond their actual understanding.

Question 24

How can I spot cognitivism in data?

Answer 24

Look for:
- Children who are struggling to say something they are unlikely to understand.
- Caregivers explaining something to children.
- Children talking to themselves while playing or working at a task, in a way that suggests they are trying to help themselves make sense of something.

Question 25

What does Social Constructivism argue?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

Social Constructivism - Tomasello

Answer 26

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

Question 27

Social Constructivism - Braine

Answer 27

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 28

How can I spot Social Constructivism in data?

Answer 28

Look for:

• Children making virtuous errors.
• Formulaic expressions.

Question 29

Rescorla (1980) - Overextension

Answer 29

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 30

Belugi (1967) - Negation

Answer 30

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

Question 31

Berko and Brown - ‘The Fis Phenomenon’

Answer 31

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 32

Halliday’s 7 Functions of Language

Answer 32

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 33

Problems with Skinner

Answer 33

• 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 34

Problems with Vygotsky

Answer 34

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

Question 35

What is Child Directed Speech?

Answer 35

Language used to talk to a child.

Question 36

Child Directed Speech, Labelling

Answer 36

Providing the label , for example, ‘that’s a ball’.

Question 37

Child Directed Speech, over-articulation

Answer 37

Elongating vowel sounds, for example, ‘baby’s foooooooood’.

Question 38

Child Directed Speech, Echoing

Answer 38

Repeating what the child says.

Question 39

Child Directed Speech, expansion

Answer 39

Repeating what the child said, but in a more linguistically sophisticated way, for example, ‘doggy chew’ - ‘yes that’s right, the dog is chewing.’

Question 40

Child Directed Speech, expatiation

Answer 40

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’.

Question 41

Child Directed Speech, reformulation

Answer 41

Repeating what the child says, but in a different way, for example, ‘doggy tail wag’ - ‘is the dog wagging his tail?’

Question 42

Child Directed Speech, repeated sentence frames

Answer 42

For example, ‘That’s a tiger, that’s an elephant, that’s an…’.

Question 43

Child Directed Speech, active voice

Answer 43

For example, ‘daddy ate the cake’.

Question 44

Support for Chomsky (Nativism)

Answer 44

•All children around the world go through very similar stages.
•Medical research also suggests there are specific areas in the brain to control language.
•However, these ideas do not suggest that language will be learned whatever happens, children still need some input and interaction.

Question 45

Problems with Chomsky (Nativism)

Answer 45

•Chomsky did not really pay much attention to how children then developed, he just focused on the fact that they were hard wired for language.
•So while he accepted that interaction had an important role to play, he didn’t say much about features of it.
•He never did any practical experiments, and mainly thought of his theory and hypothesised how it worked. Others have added to his work, to make it stronger.

Question 46

Against The Social Interactionist Theory

Answer 46

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

Question 47

Cruttenden

Answer 47

Learning to use inflections correctly comes in the form of a u-shaped curve:

1 3
2

At 1: the child uses an inflection and gets it right.
At 2: the child applies it everywhere and gets it wrong
At 3: the child learns when to use it correctly

Question 48

Lenneberg

Answer 48

• If a child does not learn a language before the onset of puberty, the child will not learn the language at all.
• Known as the ‘critical period’.

Question 49

Support for The Social Interactionalist Theory - Vygotsky

Answer 49

•Routines and rituals seem to teach children about spoken discourse structure and turn taking.
•Children do learn politeness and socially acceptable behaviour.
•Role play suggests more interaction with carers can affect vocabulary.