CLA/CDS Flashcards
Key facts of Stages of development
Children don’t develop at same rate and they follow the same universal pattern of acquisition regardless of language being learned
Do children learn language before birth?
Yes they do. Evidence suggests that baby acclimatises to native language through sound of mother’s voice
What’s the research that shows that they learn language before birth?
Mehler 1988, French babies are able to distinguish French from other languages
What is the first stage?
Crying
What happens when they are 6-8 weeks?
It’s the stage of cooing. There’s an increasing control over vocal chords eg. Coo, ga, goo
What is the most important stage?
Babbling
What’s babbling?
It resembles adult sounds
What’s a bilabial sound?
Consonant and vowel combination eg. Ba,da,ma
Repetition monosyllable like ma-ma
Does a bilabial sound have meaning?
No
What is phoneme?
Smallest element of unit sound in a language
What is phonemic expansion?
During babbling number of different phonemes used increases
What is phonemic contraction? When does it occur?
Number of phonemes produced are reduced to those found in native language. 9-10 months
Is there any evidence when babies are in the phonemic contraction stage ?
Babies of different nationalities begin to sound different. In an experiment, adults have successfully recognised babies from their own countries
How do they may suggest greeting or calling?
By intonation
How can they express themselves without speaking? Give an example
Through gestures. Point to object and use facial gesture ‘What’s that?’ Begginings of pragmatic development, recognising that social context has meaning
When do they start recognising words?
By the end of the first year. They understand common names, no, bye
What happens when they are 12 months?
Baby utters their first recognisable word
When do they master all consonants? How do they use them?
When they are 6-7 years old. When they are 2.5, they master all vowels and 2/3 of consonants, when they are 4 they have difficulty with only a few consonants.
- Consonants first used at beginning of words
- consonants at end of words present more difficulty eg. Push, rip.
- high frequency sounds are acquired first
What is phonemic simplification?
Deletion Final consonants dropped Unstressed syllables deleted Consonant clusters reduced Substitution
What is substitution?
Easier sounds substituted for harder ones- r becomes w, th becomes d, n or f, t becomes d, p becomes b
What is the fis phenomenon?
Berko and Brown. Babies do not hear themselves in the same way and no amount of correction will change this. Moreover, children understand more sounds that they can produce
What is lexical development?
A child’s acquisition of words
What is semantic development?
A child’s acquisition of the meaning of the words
How many words do children learn when they are 18 months? 2 years? 5 years? 7 years?
18-50 words 2- 200 words Explosion 5-2000 words 7- 4000 words
Do children understand all meanings when they use the words?
Not necessarily
What word classes are their first words?
Concrete nouns, verbs and adjs
What is the pattern of their first words?
Entities,properties,actions,personal/social
When do they begin to use abstract nouns?
5-7 years old
What is underxtension? Example
Word given a narrower meaning. Cat is family pet but not other cats
What is overextension? Example
Word is given a broader meaning. Daddy to all men
What is syntactic development?
Development of a child’s ability to create grammatical constructions by arranging words in an appropriate order
In what stage are they when they are 12-18 months? 18 months?2-3 years? 3 years?
- one word stage
- two word stage
- telegraphic stage
- post telegraphic stage
What is holophrase?
Single words or phrases which convey a meaning. 12-18 months
How do carers understand the child’s meaning with only one word?
Context, gesture and intonation
Are grammatical function words and inflections used when they are 18 months?
They are omitted, focus on key words. Called two word stage
Explain the telegraphic stage
- Aged 2,3,4, some word utterances will be complete. eg. lucy likes tea
- Determiners, auxiliary verbs and prepositions often omitted
- Interrogatives, imperatives and simple statements used
What happens when they are 3?
- They start to use determiners
- More than one clause used
- Coordinating conjunctions FANBOYS
- Inflectional affixes used
- Most of basic grammar rules mastered by 5, though the passive needs to be learnt
What did Brown in 1973 discover on the acquisition of inflections?
Predictable pattern: -ing, plural s, possesive s, the/a, past tense -ed, third person singular s, auxiliary be
What did Cruttenden discover?
overgeneralization of rules initially- applying regular verb tenses to irregular verbs or using regular plural
What did Berko discover?
3-4 years old- wugs: young children have taken general rules from the language around them, rather than simply memorising words that they have heard.
- 5 to 5 years show awareness of grammatical rules through errors such as sheeps, foots, goed
- Children are not conscious of learning grammatical rules- no metalinguistic awareness
Asking questions process
- complex structure
- two word stage relies on intonation only
- second year they learn question words such as who, what, where, why
- Third year, they begin to use auxiliary verbs and inversion
Negation process
- Rely on word no initially
- Third year: dont and cant
- More negative forms acquired: didnt, isnt
What is communicative competence?
Coined by Del Hymes. When to speak, how to respond to others and using the appropriate register
What is Halliday’s theory?
Children are forced to learn language because it serves certain purposes/functions
What are the functions of language?
Instrumental, personal, heuristic, imaginative, regulatory, interactional and representational
When does pragmatic development start?
Before child starts to speak- routine events accompanied by regularly repeated sentences
What is Bancroft’s discovery?
peep-oh parallels: turn taking, response, common purpose and understand the sequence, pleasure
How does the carer convey their feelings to the child?
Despite the fact that the child has not begun to speak, the adult will show approval/disapproval, express agreement, ask questions
Conversations aged 2-4
development in turn taking, response to questions, greetings, politeness forms
First conversations
statements, child will often seem to ignore the other speaker. Typical conversation is initiated by an adult, dependent on continued adult input to progress
Phonology in CDS
Separate phrases, speak slowly, exaggerated sing song intonation, exaggerated difference between questions, statements and commands, higher and wider range of pitch
Lexis and semantics in CDS
use of concrete nouns and dynamic verbs, adopt child’s own words for things, frequent use of child’s name and absence of pronouns
Grammar in CDS
Repeated sentence frames, more simple sentences, fewer complex sentences and passives, omission of past tense and inflections, more command questions and tag questions, use of recasting
Pragmatics in CDS
Lots of gesture and body language, stopping frequently for child to respond, supportive language
What is recasting?
child’s vocab. is put into a new utterance
Explain Clarke-stewart’s theory
High SES mothers- children whose mothers talked to them more had a wider vocabulary
Low SES mothers- more focused in how children use the language more than its context
Nelson’s theory
Holophrastic stage: children whose mothers corrected more made slower pace than those whose mothers were more accepting
What is devoicing?
Use of de-voiced consonant instead of a voiced one. Eg. T instead of d, or s instead of z
What is voicing?
The vibration of the vocal chords to produce the difference between z and s
How does the carer get the child to do something?
With questions and commands
Do carers refer to the child with you?
No, they frequently use of the child’s name and absence of pronouns
What is Nelson’s research on expansion?
Expansion coupled with recasting improved children’s ability to imitate
What is Clark and Clark’s research?
Children who are only exposed to adult speech do not acquire the same standard of language as those whose parents speak to them directly in a modified manner
What is Keith and Shuttleworth’s research?
CDS may be primarily social rather than educational
What’s Wells’s theory?
The rate of language development at 30 months is related to the proportion of mother’s speech during shared activities
What us Brown, Cazden and Bellugi’s theory?
Parents often respond to the truth of what their baby is saying rather than its grammatical correctness.
What is Chomsky and Pinker’s theory?
Babies are born with an innate knowledge of the structure of language and this speeds up their leaning of their native language when they hear it. When they hear examples of language they fit these into their unconscious mental model of how language works (LAD)
What is LAD?
Language Acquisition Device
Look for children speaking creating lexical fields of their immediate surroundings and…
- doing more than simply imitating adult speech. Eg. Semantic overextension and overgeneralisation suggest children are actively constructing language according to an unconscious model of how language works
- children resisting or simply not responding to correction from adults
- children making up new names for things
- children forming utterances they’ve never heard anyone else say (LAD)
What’s Spelke’s theory?
Children like objects that are clearly defined in shape, that don’t dissappear, which are solid,and which don’t have a life of their own unless they’re animate, animals or people
What is egocentric speech?
Children talk to themselves while playing or working at a task, in a way that suggests they are trying to help themselves make sense of something. Children failing to use or understand language because they haven’t yet grasped the concept expressed by language
What is Gary Marcus’s theory?
Children using rules for past tense endings correctly some of the time but making errors other times
Anna’s case study
• Born in 1936.
• Anna was six years old when she was found.
• She was an illegitimate child and her grandfather disapproved of his daughter’s behaviour
• She was kept in a room for most of her life.
As a result of this, she was deprived of normal human contact because her mother resented the trouble Anna caused her and gave her little attention for almost her first six years of life.
• She was tied to a broken chair which was too small for her and when she was found, she was suffering from malnutrition. She couldn’t do anything that showed any signs of intelligence. She was immobile, expressionless and indifferent to everything. She had been fed nothing except cow’s milk. She was believed to be deaf as she did not response to others (later they found that her deafness was functional rather than organic).
• Once Anna was taken away and placed in a foster home she showed signs of improving.
• The caregiver at the foster home used the same method to talk to Anna by which a mother would talk to their infant. After a year at the foster home, she was sent to a school for defective children. Although she could not speak at the time, she understood instructions.
• At the age of nine, she began to develop speech. She had started to conform to social norms and was able to feed to herself, though only using a spoon.
• She became more human, and was similar to a one-year-old.
• Anna passed away in August 1942 of Hemorrhagic Jaundice.
• This shows that the personal and social development associated with being human is acquired through intensive and prolonged social contact with others.
• Kingsley Davis compared the apparent failure of Anna’s treatment to the success of treating another girl called Isabella (Isabella’s story is similar to Anna’s. However, as opposed to Anna, Isabelle had learnt to communicate with her deaf mother through hand gestures.
What is exaggeration?
Using more exaggerate intonation patterns. E.g uh oh!
What are prosodic cues?
Slightly higher frequencies, greater pitch variation.
What is recasting?
Phrasing sentences in different ways, such as making it a question. Eg. Dada bye bye daddy, is daddy going bye bye?
What is echoing?
Repeating what the child said
What is expansion?
Restating what the child said in a more linguistically sophisticated form. Eg. Ball all gone- yes we lost the ball
What is expatiation?
Expanding further on the word by giving more information. Eg. Baba hot- yes, the bottle is hot. We’ll wait until later
What is labelling?
Providing the name of objects, using simplified vocab
What is overarticulation?
Using more precise sounds contained in the words, stretching out sounds, sounding out supervowels. Eg. Yees, fahr
Nature vs. nurture debate
CLA raises this debate. Concept to which extent particular aspects of behaviour, in this case CLA, is learned or imprinted into us genetically. First introduced by Chomsky, who said that humans innate language and Skinner, who claimed that language is acquired through practice. Still discussed by linguists and psychologists
Conclusion to CLA
Interaction with caregivers is seen as a vital part of a child’s general development. The idea of whether language is already inherited, therefore it places less importance on the role of the caregiver or developed with their help is still discussed between linguists and psychologists
What’s ZPD?
Vygotsky developed the zone of Proximal Development which is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help. According to him, humans use tools that develop from a culture, such as speech and writing, to mediate their social environments. Initially children develop these tools to serve solely as social functions, ways to communicate needs
What’s Vygotsky’s theory?
- viewed language as having two separate roles: one for communication and one for the basis of thought. He saw language in this second role as being helpful for developing understanding and believed that language and thought become closely related after a relatively short time.
- feral children can still form language skills even last their early development stages, this means that there are exceptions even in the basic scientific rules. Biology-society memory development
Pinker’s theory
Developed Chomsky’s LAD theory and put forward his principles and parameters theory(PPT).
- humans are born with innate ability and capacity for language.
- System that allows speakers of a particular language to set the parameters of their own language through listening to the language around them. E.g English word order adj+noun- their parameter will be set
Vygotsky’s social development
Social learning precedes development
Skinner’s theory
- language was a form of learned behaviour
- children learn through positive and negative reinforcement
- blank slate ready for them to learn language through interaction- children’s brain
Problems with Skinner
- often more interested in them saying something that is true, than we are them saying it in a grammatically way.
- over correcting children’s speech can have a bad effect, as there are some stages where children start to apply grammar, that they go through and learn naturally
How to apply or support Skinner’s theory
- Adults explicitly modelling or teaching language, and children responding
- children imitating/repeating adult’s speech
- children learning or repairing mistakes after corrections from adults
Chomsky’s theory
- innate mess. Capacity for learning language are already there when we are born
- LAD- controls the development of language
- allows the child to assemble a set of rules about the language as they hear it being used around them
- could explain how children can say grammatically complex phrases without having heard them before
- as more and more language is heard, the grammar becomes more and more like that of adults
Support for Chomsky
- all children go through the similar stages
- medical research also suggests there are specific areas in the brain to control language
- However, these ideas do not suggest that language will be learned whatever happens, children still need some input and interaction
How to apply Chomsky’s theory
- children doing more than simply imitating adult speech
- over and under extension- actively constructing language according to an unconscious model of how language works
- resisting or not responding from adult’s corrections
Piaget
- suggested that a child’s language acquisition is part of a child’s wider development, so language comes with understanding
- A child cannot linguistically articulate concepts they do not understand
How to apply Piaget’s theory
- egocentric speech
- children failing to use or understand language because the haven’t yet grasped the concept expressed by the language
Problems with Piaget
- evidence of children with severe learning difficulties and cognitive problems, who still manage to use language far beyond their actual understanding
- language is unique, distinct from other areas of development
Bruner
- interactions between child and carer are crucial to language development, and help children develop important abilities such as turn taking
- importance of conversations, routines of interaction and the role of CDS
- LASS- Language Acquisition Support System, which is the support for language learning provided by parents
- children did more than provide models for imitation
How to apply Bruner’s theory
-children clearly enjoying/benefitting from their interaction
-parents reinforcing their children’s attempts to speak by responding in an encouraging and positive way
-conversation skills and pragmatic awareness being modelled/taught/learnt through interaction between child and adult
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What does Anna’s case study show? Whose theories do they support?
- most babies learn a language by a certain age. A critical period is a fixed time period on which certain experiences can have a long lasting effect on development. It is a time of readiness for learning, after which, learning is difficult or impossible. Difficult to determine whether there is a critical period for language development.
- in 1967, Lenneberg argued that the LAD needs to be activated with sufficient input before a certain point in the child’s development or the child’s language acquisition will be impaired. -children raised without human interaction and nurture
