Child language aquisition Flashcards
What are Virtuous errors?
Errors that occur when Children apply grammatical rules to irregular situations
What are the stages of child language acquisition, in order?
- Before birth
- Babbling stage
- Holophrastic stage
- Telegraphic stage
- Post-telegraphic stage
- 5-8 years
Name the stages that occur before a child reaches 12 months
- 0-4 months*: Vegetative crying
- 4-7 months*: Cooing
- 6-12 months*: Babbling
- 9-12 months*: Proto words
What occurs during the Vegetative crying stage?
Sounds of discomfort
Reflexive actions
Coughing, sucking, burping, crying
What occurs during the Cooing stage?
Comfort sounds
Vocal play
Open vowels
Grunts, sighs
Laughter
Practising pitches and loudness
What occurs during the babbling stage?
The infant spontaneously produces unrelated sounds which prepare them for the production of words later on
What occurs during the Proto-words stage?
Word-like vocalisations
Not real words, but have intended meaning
Gestures are used to accompany utterances
The stages of Child Language Acquisition:
What occurs before birth?
- Babies become attuned to the rhythm of language around them
- Recent research appears to contradict the long-held belief that the cries of newborn babies are not language-specific.
- A German study in 2009 found that the melodies of the newborn babies’ cries followed the same intonations as the languages the babies had heard in the womb. The French babies’ cries, for example, tended to end on a rising note, which is a characteristic of the French language
The stages of Child Language Acquisition:
What occurs in the Babbling stage?
- Babies make an assortment of sounds.
- The baby’s first smile
- The baby starts to make repeated sounds
- The vocal chords develop
- More sustained ‘babbling’
The stages of Child Language Acquisition:
What occurs in the Holophrastic stage?
- Single words express a complete idea
- Caregivers need contextual clues to interpret holophrases
- The stage of rapid vocabulary acquisition and basic syntax development
- First words are usually spoken at about twelve months
- Children will have gained a vocabulary of about 200 words before their second birthday
- The term holophrastic refers to the child’s first attempt at grammar, where the meaning of a word may have many possibilities
- The child becomes able to use a wider range of initial consonant sounds
- Sounds in the earliest vocabulary include plosive /b/ and /p/ sounds, which require a small explosion in production
- New lexical items learned are nouns, referring to people and items in the infant’s world
- New vocabulary items relate to personal interactions
- The child is now more aware of the world around them
The stages of Child Language Acquisition:
What occurs in the Telegraphic stage?
From this stage onwards there is a huge increase in the vocabulary actively used by the child - often by as many as ten new words per week.
Young children will have a vocabulary of about 2000 words by the age of five
Children have to learn to express their meaning using their limited vocabulary
This often causes overextension
The child’s limited vocabulary may also result in underextension
A child’s utterances become longer and more grammatically complex
The words now have a greater purpose than simply the identification of people and objects, but are they still condensed
The child is communicating much more clearly
The child is now able to produce a wider range of consonants and is likely to abbreviate longer words
The stages of Child Language Acquisition:
What occurs in the Post-telegraphic stage?
- The young child acquires the skills to use language in more complex ways
- They become able to sustain conversation and speak using more than one simple idea as they combine ideas by using coordinating conjunctions ‘and’ and ‘but’ as well as subordinating conjunctions, such as ‘because’
- Converse effortlessly in the majority of situations
- They can understand and articulate complex language structures and tenses
- They make use of the conditional tense
- They understand abstract ideas as well as idioms
- They can take part in conversations
The stages of Child Language Acquisition:
What occurs between the years 5-8?
- Children are good at expressing requests and ideas
- Reading and writing broadens to exposure to language
- Lexical extension includes the understanding that different words can have similar meanings
- Children begin to understand that words can be usd literally or in more imaginative ways
- They are able to use language for different purposes
What is instrumental language?
Language used to fulfil a need
What is Regulatory language?
Language used to influence others through persuasion and demands
