child language development a02 Flashcards
what are the five stages of spoken language development
pre-verbal holophrastic two word stage telegraphic stage post telegraphic stage
] Pre-verbal stage: cooing
Cooing begins from about 2 months old. The baby experiments with the noises that can be made
Pre-verbal stage:babbling
Variegated babbling emerges slightly later and involves variation in the consonant and vowel sound being produced. E.g. daba, manamoo.
Holophrastic stage
The holophrastic stage is when the child produces their first word that they used to convey meaning.
What consonants develop first
Plosives generally like /b/ /p/ /d/ while they develop fricatives later. Becauseof ease of articulation.
What is meant by communicative competence?
When a child reaches a stage when they can fully comprehend and uselanguage, including an awareness of context.
Diminutives
Blankie for blanket
Or
Doggie for dog
Reason for use: ease of articulation
Phonological Features in CLD:
Substitution
The process of swapping onesound for another (that is easierto pronounce)
fink
Phonological Features in CLD: assimilation
Saying the same sound in place of twodifferent sounds in the same word –assimilation.
goggie
Deletion (final consonant or weak syllable)
Omitting a phoneme in word
flyin
Consonant cluster reductions
Reducing phonologically more complex unitsinto simple ones – from two or moreconsonants down to one.
Spoon –>poon
The Two-word stage
At around 18months a child will start to put two words together to articulate something to their caregivers
At this stage they begin to understand the rules of grammar as they use 2 words and begin to see the relationship between them.
This stage is also described as the vocabulary spurt or naming explosion phase. After a child has learnt about 50 and 100 words
Telegraphic stage
At around 2, a child will move from just producing two words together to producing longer and ‘more complete’ utterances.
As a result of this, children at this stage will include content words and omit grammatical words. They may say things like this:
‘me going on trip’ as opposed to ‘I am going on a trip
‘me going on trip’?
Demonstrates awareness of syntax – word order is accurate (SVO)
However, the child hasused the object pronoun‘me’ as thesubject asopposed to‘I’ which is the subject pronoun.
Grammatical function words omitted:
the auxiliary verb ‘am’ and indefinitearticle ‘a’
] Post telegraphic stage
By the age of 3, a child’s speech will become more like adult speech.
Grammatical words will begin to emerge; longer sentences with both content words and grammatical words.
Behaviourism: Skinner
Children learn through positive and negative reinforcement.
positive reinforcement
When a caregiver reinforces language either by encouraging the child through praise when they say something ‘correct’
negative reinforcements
Discouraging a child to use ‘incorrect’ version by gesturing no, repeating what they say but correcting it or simply telling them that it is incorrect.
Behaviourism: limitations
A huge part of learning language is the learning the rule of grammar.
In this process children apply or over apply rules and create unsuccessful utterances
These cannot have been acquired through negative or positive reinforcement.
Children are often unable to repeat what an adult says.
Parents are more concerned about the truth value of their child’s speech as opposed to the grammar –
skinner tested on rats
Roger brown u bend theory virteous errors are needed to learn that their are exceptions
Behaviourism: how to apply to data
Look for where the caregiver positively or negatively reinforces language
Parent corrects or praises the child
‘Well done’
Affirmative response ‘yes that’s right’
Negation ‘no that is not the right thing to do’
Child imitates (repeats what the parent is saying) without understanding
Nativism: Chomsky Nativism: Chomsky
Belief that there is an innate, in-built language learning device that have from birth that enables us to learn how to speak and use language.
poverty of stimulus
Caregivers do not provide a good source of English and therefore this lead to a poverty of stimulus.
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
His main theory is that children have a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in their brains which enables them to develop and acquire language. It contains a set of rules about to use grammar. When children become more expose to language, this activates parts of their LAD.
Universal Grammar.
The rules of grammar coded in the LAD, he calls Universal Grammar.
virtuous errors
He explains that children make mistakes with language that they will never have hear from their parents i.e. ‘I threwed the ball’ therefore they could have picked this up learnt this through imitation.
He calls these virtuous errors – as it is understandable why they have been used. Grammatical rules have been extended and used on irregular verbs.
Nativism: Pinker
Proposed that when a child produces an utterance, almost every single time the utterance is new.
Therefore, it could not have been acquired through imitation.
Nativism: Pye
Cultures around the world vary and raise children differently.
Some don’t use CDS (Child directed speech) yet they all learn to speak.
This shows that there must be something innate about process of acquiring language.
Nativism: Berko-Gleason and The Wug Test
The experiment was used to test whether children memorise words and their endings or whether they extract the rules they know about word endings (inflections) to other words.
75% of children aged 4-5 were able to choose the right ending.
This supported the view that children did not learn through imitation as the word was made up. But rather they had an innate system of grammatical rules.
Nativism: The Genie case study
Genie was a child who was severely neglected and abused until the age of 13
She had no exposure or contact with humans. She had been deprived of this.
Linguists worked with her to help her learn language.
But because she passed the critical period, she couldn’t learn language like children normally do – particularly in terms of grammar.
This supported the nativist view that language cannot be acquired through imitation and that their must be an internal structure.
Nativism: Limitations
There is no scientic proof for Chomsky’s theory
He based his theory solely on his observations.
Hedid not study real children. The theory relies on children being exposed to language but takes no account of the interaction between children and their carers. Nor does it recognise the reasons why a child might want to speak, the functions of language.
However, Pinkerhas developedChomsky’s original theory and it isreceivedwell in the academic world.
Nativism: How to apply to data
Children resisting being corrected OR children which accept correction and then revert back again.
Mistakes with inflections.
Children making virtuous errors.
Correct application of syntax.
Social Interactionism Theory: Bruner
Language exists for the purpose of communication and can only be learned in the context of interaction with people who want to communicate with you.
Children are born with nothing and learn language from the social environment they are in – this includes caregivers providing support.
Language Acquisition Support System (LASS)
Bruner developed the concept of the Language Acquisition Support System (LASS) which is designed for caregivers to scaffold and support a child’s language to help them get it correct. When using language to talk to a child, this is called ‘Child Directed Speech (CDS)’
CDS includes
CDS includes: labelling, over-articulation, echoing, expansion , expiation, and reformulation.
Interactionalism: Bruner
labelling
Labelling – caregivers providing a label ‘this is a ball’ that is a net’
Over-articulation bruner
Echoing
Over-articulation – elongation vowel sounds – baby’s fooood
– repeating what the child is saying
expansion bruner
Expansion – repeating what a child is saying but in a more linguistically specialised way. Taking basic utterances and making them more specialised: child: doggy chew -> caregiver: yes, that’s right, the dog is chewing.
Expatiation bruner
repeating what the child said but adding more information for example – child: bottle cold -> caregiver: yes, the bottle is cold so I will warm it up.
Reformulation bruner
repeating what the child says, but in a different way, for example: child: doggy tail wag -> caregiver: is the dog wagging his tail
Snow interactionalists
Coined the term ‘motherese’ to describe how mothers talk to their children. This includes:
Higher pitch, greater range of intonation, frequent use of interrogative and declarative sentences, repetition of syllables and phrases
Bard and Sachs
inter
Case study of Jim a boy with 2 deaf parents. They exposed him to TV and radio to hear language but he didn’t learn how to speak. With interactions with speech therapist he was able to acquire language.
Trevarthen
studied the interaction between parents and
babies who were too young to speak. He concluded that the turn-taking structure of conversation is
developed through games and non-verbal communication long before actual words are uttered.
Cognitivism: Piaget
Children need to be cognitively adept to talk about things; they cannot express what they do not understand.
object permanence
Piaget argues that until children learn the role of object permanence (things still exist when you can’t see them) – they struggle to name things; hence why children properly acquire language at around 1 year.
Cognitivism: Vygotsky
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).
ZPD
describes the area between what a child can already do and that which is beyond their reach. It is the area into which a caregiver might enable the child to progress by offering the necessary support or scaffolding to facilitate learning.
More Knowledgeable Other (MKO)
He argues that the role of the caregiver (or, as he describes, a More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) is to fill the cognitive gap.
Cognitivism: limitations
Children who have learning difficulties still manage to acquire language
Cognitivism and what to look for in data
Children who are struggling to say something they are unlikely to understand
Caregivers explaining something to children
