Child Language Theorists Flashcards
Skinner - Nurture (Behaviourism)
Operant Conditioning - Positive or Negative response to a child’s use of language
Positive Reinforcement - Praising a child’s use of language whether it is correct or incorrect
Negative Reinforcement - Correction, Punishment or ignoring a child’s use of incorrect language
Chomsky - Nativism (Nature)
Children are born with an innate capacity to learn.
LAD - Language Acquisition Device
LAD needs activating - this is why children put grammatical structures into utterances when they are not needed
Berko - Wug Test (Nativism)
Young children are able to connect grammatical structures to nonsense words.
They already have the ability to do this - Natural.
Kaluli Tribe - Nativism
Mothers in the Kaluli Tribe refrain from using CDS to help their children to learn language.
Shows that children have a natural ability to learn language as they do not receive help from their mothers.
Nicaraguan Sign Language (Nativism)
Deaf Children in Nicaragua spontaneously constructed their own sign language, suggesting that it is natural to them.
Piaget - Cognitivsm
Children need to develop certain mental abilities before they are able to use language correctly.
Vygotsky - Cognitivsm
The sociocultural environment plays an important role in CLA.
They learn that talking out loud is antisocial, so their intrapersonal speech goes underground and becomes the adult’s silent inner speech.
Tomasello - Usage-Based
Proposed a focus on the inter-connectedness of language development with intentional reading and pattern finding.
Intentional Reading - Children understand meanings of utterances from the language and gestures used.
Pattern Finding - Two Word Stage (Children can understand the effect of a particular word or word pairing.
Berko and Brown - Fis Phenomenon
A child called his toy fish a ‘fis’.
When asked ‘is this your fis?’, the child denied.
When asked ‘is this your fish?’, the child agreed.
Shows children understand how to pronounce words without having the ability too.
Bard and Sachs - CDS
Studied a child who was the son of two deaf parents.
Because he could not effectively communicate with his parents, his language development was severely delayed.
Human interaction is NECESSARY.
Clark-Stewart - CDS
Children whose mothers talk more have larger vocabularies.
Bruner - CDS
Language is an innate ability, but needs activating to work through the Language Acquisition Support System.
E.g. Parents use books and images to develop their children’s naming abilities and ability to engage in a conversation.
Zone of Proximal Development
Area between what a child can already do and what they cannot.
More knowledgeable others enables the child to progress through the zones through scaffolding.
Vandam - CDS
Distinguished between motherese and fatherese.
Fathers speak to their children as if hey are an adult, but Mothers speak to their children like a pet.
Halliday’s 7 Functions
HIIIPRR - Hyper
Heuristic
Instrumental
Interactional
Imaginative
Personal
Regulatory
Representational
