Child language development Flashcards
Katherine Nelson (1973)
Found that children in the holophrastic stage whose mothers corrected them on word choice advanced more slowly than those with mothers who were generally more accepting
Clarke-Stewart (1973)
Found that children whose mothers talks more have larger vocabularies
CDS
Child directed speech. The way that a persons linguistic characteristics alter when speaking to an infant/toddler. Tends to be slower with exaggerated intonations thus capturing attention and allowing them to grasp emotional attention.
LASS
Language acquisition support system. (Jerome Bruner input theory)
Jerome Bruner
Believes that impute is vital in helping a child acquire language. Interaction ‘scaffolds’ the language development. Children have an innate ability to learn and acquire language but also require the interaction of other users of the same language to excel in their learning. Parents who use CDS help this scaffolding.
IMPUT THEORY
Eric Lenneberg
Critical period hypothesis, the LAD needs to be activated with sufficient input before a certain point in the Childs development in order for them to be able to efficiently develop language.
-States that if they don’t get language input by age 5. they may never be able to acquire language and thus the LAD will shut down.
NATIVISM -> but also tried to explain the role of nurture
Steven Pinker
Focused on evolution and instinct, believed that we evolved because of social groups and so we had to communicate in order to distribute roles. Language develops in the absence of formal instruction or attempts to correct thus making it innate.
Principles and parameters theory
-Principles: The rules that make up universal grammar
-Parameters: Fine tuning for a specific language
NATIVISM
Universal grammar
Chomsky believed that all human languages, whatever their surface difference share a deep grammatical structure. Humans are born with an innate knowledge of these . When we hear our native language, we are ready fit these structures in.
Virtuous errors
Applies a regular morphine to an irregular morphine. it is virtuous because it shows understanding of the patterns.
LAD (Language acquisition device)
It means that children have an innate ability to extract the underlying rules from the words that they hear being spoken around them.
Arguedby Chomsky
Operant conditioning
Changing behaviour by the use of reinforcement which is given to the desired response (Skinner).
Burrhus Frederic Skinner
Suggests that a child imitates the language of its parents/carers. He coined the term operant conditioning. Overall he believed that language was taught to children.
BEHAVIOURISM
Noam Chomsky
Children can’t acquire language through simply copying, they have an inbuilt capacity to learn which he called the LAD. His evidence for this was that children make virtuous errors and develop language despite poverty of the stimulus.
Overall believed that children acquire language.
NATIVISM
What is Nativism?
The belief that children learn language naturally without facilitation from parents
What is Behaviourism?
The idea that language is learnt through understanding the difference between right and wrong
What is Social Interactionism?
The idea that language is learnt through parental influence and scaffolding
What is Cognitivism?
The idea that language is learnt through exposure to environments and development of schema
What is the ZPD?
Zone of proximal development.
Represents the space between what a learner is capable of doing unsupported and what the learner cannot do even with support.
What does Vygotsky say about the ZPD?
Vygotsky suggested that for children to learn they need an more knowledgable other 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.
What criticism did Tomasello provide for Chomsky?
Tomasello called Chomsky an armchair theorist as his ideas were only speculative.
What did the Bard and Sach’s study into Jim identify?
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
Evidence against Nativism and for Imput Theory
Explain Lenneberg’s critical period hypothesis
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.
Expanded on Chomskys LAD and Nativism
Provide a criticism for Skinner’s Theory
Chomsky questioned the validity of experiments on rats and pigeons to offer comment on humans’ capacity to learn.
Berko and Brown
Spoke to a child who referred to a ‘fis’ meaning ‘fish’ then replied using ‘fis’ and the child corrected him again but saying ‘fis’. Finally the adult reverted to ‘fish’ to which the child responded ‘yes, fis’ . This shows that correction/negative reinforcement can’t help and that the child has already developed and understanding of the word and knows the correct version just can’t pronounce it.
‘Fis phenomenon’
Assimilation
The process that illustrates how some sounds change because of other sounds around them.
-Doggie becomes goggie
-Rabbit becomes Babbit
The consonant sound (in this case the first one) has been influenced by the second.
Addition
A child places an addiction vowel sound on the end of words in order to create a consonant, vowel consonant, vowel construction.
-Mummy
-Doggie
Deletion of unstressed syllable
The phonological process in which a child deletes an unstressed syllable in a word
-Nana rather than banana
Jean Berko brown
The Wug test
Children were given a picture of a bird-like creature called a ‘wug’ and then asked to state things like what two of these creatures would be called (‘wugs’). The test invented nouns and verbs to test pluralisation and over-generalisation
Evidence against Behavoiurism and for Nativism
Over extension
The child attempts to cover too many objects with similar item properties
-Refers to any round fruit as apple
Under extension
The child over narrows the meaning of a word
-Knowing what a banana is while they are eating it but not recognising it in a photo
Michael Tomasello
Combines cognition and input approaches while also disagreeing with the existence of the LAD.
Social constructivism-> argues that children acquire chunks of language rather than single words and then rules. Our knowledge of the world emerges from our experiences of
Cognition
What % of first words did Nelson find were nouns?
60%
Haliday
Looked at the different functions of children language: Instrumental, Regulatory, Interactional, Personal, Heuristic, Imaginative, Informative
Piaget
Children can only use certain linguistic structure when they understand the concept involved. E.g. children will only understand the past tense when they understand the concept of past time.
Cognition theory
