Child Language Acquisition - Theory (A02)

Question 1

What is Nativism?

Answer 1

The belief that children learn language naturally without facilitation from parents

Question 2

What is Behaviourism?

Answer 2

The idea that language is learnt through understanding the difference between right and wrong

Question 3

What is Social Interactionism?

Answer 3

The idea that language is learnt through parental influence and scaffolding

Question 4

What is Cognitivism?

Answer 4

The idea that language is learnt through exposure to environments and development of schema

Question 5

What did the Bard and Sach’s study into Jim identify?

Answer 5

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

Question 6

What did Clark-Stewart identify about vocabulary development?

Answer 6

Clark-Stewart found that children whose mothers talk more have larger vocabularies.

Question 7

What is the ZPD?

Answer 7

Zone of proximal development

Question 8

What does Vygotsky say about the ZPD?

Answer 8

Vygotsky suggested that for children to learn they need an MKO 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.

Question 9

What is Garvey’s sociodramatic play?

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

What is the LAD Model by Chomsky?

Answer 10

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 which he suggested needed activating and is the reason children sometime over regularise and put grammar into utterances when they are not needed

Question 11

What criticism did Tomasello provide for Chomsky?

Answer 11

Tomasello called Chomsky an armchair theorist as his ideas were only speculative.

Question 12

Explain Berko Gleason’s Wug Test

Answer 12

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.

Question 13

What is Steven Pinker’s Nativist argument (1994)?

Answer 13

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.

Question 14

Explain the Genie Wiley case study

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

Explain the Oxana case study (1991)

Answer 15

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.

Question 16

Explain Lenneberg’s critical period hypothesis

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

What is Skinner’s Behaviourist Theory?

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

Provide a criticism for Skinner’s Theory

Answer 18

Chomsky questioned the validity of experiments on rats and pigeons to offer comment on humans’ capacity to learn.

Question 19

What is Piaget’s attitude to language development?

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

What are Piaget’s four stages of development?

Answer 20

sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, formal operational.

Question 21

Explain these stages

Answer 21

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

Question 22

Define Egocentricity

Answer 22

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

Question 23

Define Object Permanence

Answer 23

A child understands something can exist without having to see it

Question 24

Explain a criticism of Piaget’s idea

Answer 24

Some people with learning difficulties are still linguistically fluent so cognitive development and language development are not always as closely connected as Piaget suggests.

Question 25

What is Repacholi & Gopnik’s criticism of Piaget?

Answer 25

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.

Question 26

Explain Bruner’s LASS Model

Answer 26

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

Question 27

What did Catherine Snow focus on within her research?

Answer 27

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.

Question 28

Define Child Directed Speech

Answer 28

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.

Question 29

What did Vandam explore relating to motherese and fatherese?

Answer 29

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.

Question 30

What does Schatz evaluate about correction in CDS?

Answer 30

Only 4% of children’s errors corrected by caregivers

Question 31

What are the features of CDS?

Answer 31

Higher pitch

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.

Question 32

Explain the Papa New Guinea criticism of CDS

Answer 32

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.

Question 33

Explain the Samoa criticism of CDS

Answer 33

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.

Question 34

What are the stages of Language Acquisition?

Answer 34

1. Babbling
2. Holophrastic Stage
3. Two- Word Stage
4. Telegraphic Stage
5. Post Telegraphic Stage

Question 35

Babbling - Desmond Morris (2008)

Answer 35

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.

Question 36

Holophrastic - Katherine Nelson (1973)

Answer 36

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.

Question 37

Holophrastic - Bloom (2004)

Answer 37

Bloom says the supposed noun bias merely reflects the frequency of nouns in our language; nouns outnumber verbs by 5:1 in dictionaries.

Question 38

Holophrastic - Aitchison (1987)

Answer 38

Aitchison identified three stages that occur during a child’s acquisition of vocabulary:

1. Labelling
2. Packaging
3. Network Building

Question 39

Holophrastic - Rescorla (1980)

Answer 39

Rescorla further explored overextension, collecting concrete data:

1. Categorical Overextension
2. Analogical Overextension
3. Mismatch/Predicate statements

Question 40

Two-Word - Roger Brown (1973)

Answer 40

He identified the syntactic structures of two-word utterances and suggested that the combination of words places together follow a limited range of patterns

Question 41

Telegraphic - Roger Brown (1973)

Answer 41

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?

Question 42

Telegraphic - Ursula Bellugi (1967)

Answer 42

Negation development stages:

1. Uses ‘no’ or ‘not’ at the beginning of end of the sentence – “No shoes!”
2. Puts ‘no’ or ‘not’ inside the sentence –“I no wear shoes!”
3. Attaches negatives to auxiliary verbs - “I won’t wear shoes!” NB the main verb is not always yet in the correct tense

Question 43

Telegraphic - Ursula Bellugi (1967)

Answer 43

Pronoun usage stages:

1. Uses their own name – “Katherine play.”
2. Recognises I/me pronouns – “I play”, “Me up”
3. Uses pronouns according to whether they are the subject or object position – “I play with the toy.”/ “Give it to me.”

Question 44

What are Halliday’s Functions?

Answer 44

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.

Question 45

List all 7 functions

Answer 45

Heuristic
Imaginative
Instrumental
Interactional
Personal
Regulatory
Representational

Question 46

What does John Dore categorise?

Answer 46

Describes language functions through focussing more on categorising individual utterances.

Question 47

What are his categories?

Answer 47

Answering
Calling
Greeting
Labelling
Practising
Protesting
Repeating
Requesting Action

Question 48

What is Berko and Brown’s Fis Phenomenon?

Answer 48

‘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.