Children's spoken language development Flashcards
When does the vegetative state occur, and what are its features?
0-4 months, reflex crying noises
When does the cooing stage occur, and what are its features?
3-6 months, open-mouthed vowel sounds
When does the babbling stage occur, and what are its features?
6-12 months, repeated consonant vowel sounds and combinations of these eg. gagagagaga
When does the proto-word stage occur, and what are its features?
9-12 months, babbling seems to match actual words therefore is a grey area between pre-verbal and grammatical stages
When does the holophrastic stage occur, and what are its features?
1 year, Using one word to signpost things, includes more complex and functional aspects of language
When does the two-word stage occur, and what are its features?
Around 18 months, two word utterances that make up mini sentences, beginnings of syntax
When do a child’s first recognisable words usually appear?
12 months (holophrastic)
What happens once a child reaches 18 months old?
They have a productive vocabulary of around 50 words that they can say, but understand many more
What happens when a child reaches 24 months old?
Most children will have a 200 word productive vocabulary
What happens when a child reaches 36 months old?
Most children will have a 2000 word productive vocabulary
How did Nelson (1973) classify the early words of children?
Naming words, action words, social words and modifying words - largest category was naming words, with around 60% of a child’s first 50 words being nouns
What does Bloom (2004) argue about the noun bias in children’s early vocabulary?
The noun bias merely reflects the relative frequency of nouns in the language (nouns outnumber verbs by about 5:1 in most dictionaries
What is overextension?
Applying a label to more referents than it should, eg. saying ‘sea’ for any body of water - children have a limited productive vocabulary
What patterns did Saxton (2010) observe?
Food and drink, family, animals, body parts, clothing, vehicles, games and routines, toys, familiar objects, actions, descriptions, sound effects
What is underextension?
When a label only covers a narrow extent of a word’s meaning eg. can recognise a banana IRL but not in a book
What forms of overextension did Rescorla (1980) note?
Categorical overextension, analogical overextension, mismatch or predicate statements
What is an example of a categorical overextension?
‘Apple’ is used to refer to any round fruit
What is a hyponym?
A word whose meaning is included in the meaning of another eg. apple is a hyponym of fruit
What is a hypernym?
A word to name a broad category that includes other words eg. hypernym ‘fruit’ includes the hyponym ‘apple’
How often were Analogical overextensions found in Rescorla’s research?
15% of cases
What is an analogical overextension?
relates to the function or perception of an object eg. a scarf may be labelled a cat when a child strokes it
How often were mismatches / predicate statements found in Rescorla’s research?
25% of cases
What is a mismatch / predicate statement?
Statements that convey abstract information eg. pointing at a doorway and saying ‘cat’, because the cat normally sits there
What three stages did Aitchison (1987) identify in children’s acquisition of words?
Labelling, packaging, network building
What is labelling (Aitchison, 1987)?
Associating sounds with objects, linking words to things, understanding the concept of labels
What is packaging (Aitchison, 1987)?
Exploring the extent of the label (when over and under extensions occur most frequently)
What are the common phonological errors?
Addition, deletion, reduplication, substitution, consonant cluster reduction, deletion of unstressed syllables, assimilation
What is network building (Aitchison, 1987)?
Making connections between the labels they’ve developed, understanding similarities and opposites, relationships and contrasts
What is addition?
Adding an extra vowel sound to create a CVCV structure eg. doggy
What is deletion?
Leaving out the last consonant of a word eg. mouse - mou
What is reduplication?
Repetition of particular sounds and structures eg. choochoo
What is substitution?
One sound is swapped for another eg. wabbit
What is consonant cluster reduction?
Turning tricky consonant clusters into smaller units eg. dry - dy
What is deletion of unstressed syllables?
Removal of an entire syllable eg. pyjamas - jamas
What is assimilation?
When substitution occurs as a result of the words around it eg. great doggy - great goggy
What is MLU?
Mean length of utterance
What does MLU take into account?
Words, number of morphemes
What and when is the telegraphic stage?
2-2.5 years, utterances contain three or more words, key content words are used whereas grammatical function words are omitted eg. where daddy gone?
What’s missing in the telegraphic stage?
Auxiliaries and modals, articles and prepositions, morphology (eg. verb conjugating)
What and when is the post-telegraphic stage?
Missing grammatical words from the telegraphic stage start to appear, clauses begin linking to make longer sentences
Ursula Bellugi and David McNeill (1960s-70s) - rules applied to the creation of negatives and questions
Where to place the negative word / clitic morpheme, how to invert syntax of subject and verb
What features start to appear in the post-telegraphic stage?
Prepositions, auxiliary verbs, articles / determiners, tenses, aspects, voice, phrases
How does pragmatics govern our interactions?
Turn taking, paying attention to positive and negative face needs, politeness
What are the virtuous errors?
Morphology, pluralisation, conjugation
Who formulated the wug test?
Jean Berko Gleason (1958)
What were the findings of the wug test, and what does it show?
76% of four to five year olds formed a regular pluralisation, 97% of seven year olds formed a regular pluralisation, illustrates unconscious systemisation of language
What are two defining features of human language?
Displacement (referring to things beyond immediate surroundings) and Abstraction (terms become reference points for ideas beyond what they are)
Alex + the Avian language experiment
Alex the African Grey Parrot communicated in a holophrastic sense, made up of loose combos of words, but didn’t master any particular sense of grammar
Who outlined nativism?
Chomsky (1959)
What does Chomsky argue in his nativism argument?
The language that babies hear is not a useful model (poverty of stimulus) and can produce utterances never heard before, therefore there must be some innate language faculty
Who outlined behaviourism?
BF Skinner (1957)
What does Skinner argue in his behaviourism model?
Children’s language is the same as any other conditioned behaviour in the animal world - children hear language and are either positively or negatively reinforced, and this selective reinforcement conditions words, phrases, and utterances towards full adult speech through repetition
Arguments against behaviourism
Children would never hear virtuous errors but still produce them therefore base their language off of rules they’ve intuited, language learning is incredibly complicated during a period where cognitive faculties are underdeveloped, children appear to learn language in a systematised order around the world (universal grammar)
What is Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device (LAD)?
The in-built facility for grammar, which kicks in when a child is exposed to their native language - over-generalisations eg. plurals + past tense suffixes are evidence of this working
Saxton (2010)’s perspective on language acquisition
Grammar may be one of the many mental achievements acquired by general-purpose cognitive learning mechanisms - these mechanisms may be the ability to spot patterns, follow logical orders etc. therefore not language-specific
How did Aitchison (1983) argue against Chomsky’s views?
We have mental ‘puzzle-solving equipment’, rather than a language-specific mechanism
How do contemporary linguists argue against Chomsky?
The language environment of a child provides much richer data than Chomsky acknowledged, parents and caregivers interact with children to provide context, in-built facility may be linked to understanding and development rather than purely language
What did Gerome Bruner (1983) theorise?
Parental input and ‘scaffolding’ should be emphasised to help a child develop skills
What did Bruner notice when formulating his LASS?
The activity of children is hugely social and communicative, and interaction between adults an infants (games, non-verbal communication) builds the structure of a language before they learn to communicate verbally
What is Bruner’s Language Acquisition Support System?
Language is acquired through conversation and its various codes
What does Bruner argue about the relationship between the LAD and LASS?
In principle, the LASS directly opposes the LAD, but the two co-operate and interact to ‘allow children to enter the linguistic community and the culture to which the language gives access.’
What does the Interaction Model focus on?
Language directed by caregivers to children
What roles did Vygotsky view language as having?
Communication + basis of thought
What are the characteristics of the Interaction Model?
More pronounced intonation of key syllables and morphemes, simplified vocabulary, repeated grammatical frames, shorter utterances, tag questions to initiate turn-taking, ‘recasting’ errors to make them grammatically accurate
Why was basis of thought seen as a useful role of language by Vygotsky?
it’s a helpful tool for understanding - language facilitates the understanding of difficult concepts and not the other way around
What did Vygotsky say was important to co-constructing the world through knowledge and language?
A More Knowledgeable Other (MKO)
What is the importance of ritualised scenarios to Interactionists?
Children ‘learn their lines’ and develop turn-taking skills, with parents then recasting to refine and expand vocab and utterances
How can the interactionist model be criticised?
Some cultures eg. Samoa and Papua New Guinea don’t have child-directed speech
Which theorists found a positive correlation between CDS at an early stage and subsequent educational / linguistic achievement?
Wells (1986), Hart and Risley (1995), Thiessen et. al (2005, Henrichs (2010)
What is the construction-based approach?
The use of ready-made chunks of language that can be used productively to express many ideas
How does Ibbotson (2012) contribute to the construction-based approach?
Young children learn very logical patterns eg. where’s X, more X, I want X - X is a slot in a broader frame, and children can use these to build more abstract constructions by analogising exemplars
How does the construction-based approach differ from the nativist model?
The focus is on real language, as used between parents and children - the language environment is rich, and children pick up chunks of language and adapt them rather than picking up individual words and combining them
What is Piaget (1964)’s and Vygotsky (1934)’s cognitive approach?
CLA is part of wider development of understanding the world around them - a child cannot linguistically articulate a content that he/she does not understand
What study did Deb Roy (MIT) carry out?
Human speechnome project - surveilled his son 24/7 from birth to three years old to observe language development
What did Deb Roy find in his human speechnome project?
He and his wife unconsciously simplified their language, then made it more complicated as their child’s speech developed
Example of a change that Deb Roy observed during the human speechnome project
/gaga/ meant water before the child’s speech developed - Roy would use this until the child learnt otherwise
What did Tecumseh Fitch (UVienna) highlight?
The larynx of a chimpanzee pulls down on the vocal cavity, allowing sound to exit from the mouth - if talking was wholly anatomical, animals could talk as their vocal tracts can reconfigure
What did Cathy Price (UCL) study?
Left side of the brain for language, front for speech, right for understanding - speech issues could then be matched in stroke victims to brain activity and damage therefore she is responsible for mapping the language brain
What did William Fifer (Columbia) study?
Measured newborn brain activity using a set of electrodes
What did Fifer find?
babies respond to a mother’s voice differently to other linguistic stimuli, and learn in-utero, therefore we’re attuned to the sound of speech since birth
What did Gary Morgan study?
He studied Christopher, who speaks 20 languages
What were the findings of Morgan’s study of Christopher?
Christopher memorised newly taught words in a central Mexican language in 10 minutes, therefore innate ability?
What did Ofer Tchernikovski study?
Zebra finches
How did Tchernikovski carry out his study?
Isolated zebra finches during development to find out if they’d develop a sound
What were the findings of Tchernikovski’s study?
The isolated finches did not develop sound. beyond a croak, and the sons of the isolated birds learnt the deficient song BUT each new generation improved the song until it became more and more species-like therefore innate?
What did Faraneh Vargha-Khadem (UCL) study?
The linguistic abilities of family members both with and without speech problems
what did Khadem find?
Part of chromosome number 7 was broken off and mutilated in family members - this was called FOXP2
What did Simon Kirby (Edinburgh) find?
Language happens as a blind process of transmission
What did Mark Pagel (Reading) find?
The birth of language coincided with proliferation of man-made objects 50,000 years ago, therefore language developed as a way to divide roles and tasks
How did Simon Kirby carry out his study?
Used a made-up language to label alien fruit, and asked participants to recall these words and match them to the fruit - BUT the input by one group of participants dictated the labels of the fruit for the next participants
What does Kirby’s study show?
Language gains structure and order over time, despite beginning randomly
