CLA Spoken Flashcards
Outline the behaviourist approach
Skinner (1957) based this explanation on the inner workings of the brain, establishing it by conducting animal studies.
He suggested that children either acquired language through imitation or reinforcement.
He proposed that language acquisition follows this model: children repeat what they hear and when rewarded with praise (positive reinforcement), they are more likely to repeat and continue; but if they are punished by being told off (negative reinforcement), for example, they are less likely to repeat the behavior.
Hence, children learn to behave in the ways that adults consider desirable as good behavior is positively reinforced by trying various utterances and sticking to the one that they are rewarded for while bad behavior is negatively reinforced by failure to achieve the desired purpose of the communication or explicit correction.
Positives of the behaviourist approach
Children usually acquire their parents’ or carers’ pronunciation.
They also acquire some social and pragmatic aspects of language such as politeness.
Negatives of the behaviourist approach
Children often gain positive reinforcement for non-standard utterances.
They also construct sentences that have not been heard before.
Children do not memorize thousands of sentences to use later, so development can not always be based on repetition.
Negative reinforcement methods can be extreme (they cannot be punished like dogs).
Children do not usually respond to corrections of their speech.
Children may not be exposed to enough language to provide them with appropriate models to imitate.
Children often do more than merely imitate in cases of overgeneralization and overextension.
This theory does not explain the ‘wugs’ experiment.
Parents are often more interested in whether a child has said something they recognise to be true than annoyed that it is non-standard.
Define LAD, Poverty of Stimulus and Linguistic Universal
LAD: Language Acquisition Device: a device that allows children to take in and use the grammatical rules of the language that’s spoken where they live; it is a knowledge of learning structures which becomes activated through experience.
Poverty of Stimulus: where children are exposed to a cacophony of sounds such as incomplete utterances and inaudible conversations so children cannot learn through imitation.
Linguistic Universal: common features of language e.g every language contains a combination of regular and irregular verbs
Outline the Innateness theory
Chomsky (1965) argued that a child’s ability to acquire language was inbuilt. He claimed that language is not taught, but a natural development that occurs when children are exposed to language.
While Behaviourists stress on the similarities between humans and animals and in their learning mechanisms, Chomsky places emphasis on the differences.
He suggested that, with the help of the LAD, the human brain expects to find patterns and structures in linguistic sounds and moves through a series of provisional hypotheses as to what that structure is. Therefore, humans learn language quickly because they are predisposed to learn it.
Hence, children ignore corrections because of their own provisional grammar telling them to override the error because it contradicts their own rules and structure.
Jean Berko
Jean Berko constructured a ‘wug’ test which supports this where children were asked for the plural of this made up word and the majority (76%) said ‘wugs’.
Alan Cruttenden
Alan Cruttenden supported this with his ‘u-shaped’ curve where:
Point 1: child applies the rule and gets it right
Point 2: child applies it everywhere and gets it wrong
Point 3: child learns that the rule only works in certain situations
Pinker
Every utterance is practically unique” —Pinker
Positives of Innateness theory
Children all over the world seem to learn language at a similar pace moving through the different stages at similar ages. They pass through the same early stages of language acquisition, before refining their range of sounds of their native language.
There seems to be a critical period for learning language between the ages of two and seven after which learning a language seems less instinctive and more laborious.
Children appear to use language more than they need to whether or not a reward is given.
They are resistant to correction—their language is not affected by correction until it has reached a developmental stage.
They also create forms of language that have never been heard so language can’t necessarily be imitated.
Using Behaviourist methods to teach language to chimpanzees and gorillas suggest that language is uniquely a human characteristic although some animal researchers are claiming to have more success.
Chomsky has identified that all languages share fundamental similarities which he described as Linguistic Universal—all languages have regular and irregular verbs.
Negatives of Innateness theory
It underestimates the significance of Skinner’s argument that interaction, imitation and Reinforcement are important in language development
Define Object Permanence and egocentric speech
Object Permanence: the idea that things exist all the time, even if the child can’t see them.
Egocentric Speech: The idea that children can’t mentally process the concept that something can exist outside of their immediate surroundings
Explain cognitivism
Piaget argues that there is a connection between a child’s psychological and intellectual development.
He suggests that a child acquires increasingly complex forms of language when the intellectual development is ready for it.
Therefore, it is futile to try and teach them these complex forms before they are ready as they cannot grasp these ideas—understanding must come first.
Piaget emphasized that children are active learners who use their environment and social interactions to shape their language—this especially noticeable in the past 18 months around which children develop object Permanence which coincides with a big increase in vocabulary.
The child is then mentally better equipped to understand abstract concepts like past, present and future.
Positives of Cognitivism
It correlates with Halliday’s taxonomies: communicating and influencing the world in which we live.
When playing alone using egocentric speech: helps themselves make sense of the world.
Negatives of cognitivism
It does not explain how some people with learning difficulties are still linguistically fluent which suggests that cognitive development and language development aren’t as closely connected as the cognitive approach suggests.
Define LASS, Critical Period Analysis and Vocative
LASS: Language Acquisition Support System; a system where caregivers support their child’s linguistic development in social situations.
Critical Period Hypothesis (Lennenberg, 1967): without linguistic interaction before 5 and 6, language development is severely limited.
Vocative: using the child’s name rather than a pronoun.
Explain Social Interctionism
Bruner (1983) proposed that children are born as a blank slate and learn languages based on their interaction with their caregivers.
He suggests that there is a LASS which greatly aids a child’s development.
There are clear patterns in everyday social interactions between a child and their caregiver during which the caregiver speaks and encourages their ward to reply by pointing at things and asking questions (referred to as using visual clues and joint attention).
This supports the idea that children who are deprived of language early on don’t seem able to acquire it easily later as Lennenberg proposed the Critical Period Hypothesis
CDS features
adults use speech focused on the child referred to as Child Directed Speech (CDS) and some features include:
repetition and or repeated sentence frames
a higher pitch (to grab and maintain their attention)
the child’s name rather than a pronoun (called the vocative)
the present tense (infants do not understand the concept of time
one word utterances and/or short elliptical sentences
fewer verbs/modifiers (simplified grammar)
concrete nouns
expansions (the development of a child’s utterance into a longer, more meaningful form)
recast (the commenting on, extending and rephrasing of a child’s utterance)
closed questions
exaggerated pauses giving turn-taking
Features of fatherese
Catherine Snow: motherese, fatherse, otherese
Features of Fatherese:
use a wider range of vocabulary
ask more direct questions
interact with the baby in a more intense way—playing dramatically, bouncing, etc
be less likely to understand the baby’s vocalizations, possibly because th
John Snarey proposes that roughhousing with the father teaches that biting, kicking and other forms of violence are unacceptable and there is a need to gain self control. The following are part of fatherese:
tickling, wrestling and throwing the child in the air
chasing
loud volume
bouncing
promotions of independence
less simplification of speech
challenging expansion of speech
Negatives of social Interactionism
Chomsky states that children produce non-standard utterances that no one has ever sad to them—errors often happen that are not present in this template
Cliff Pye studied how different cultures acquire language and found that not all cultures use CDS (Samoan families do not speak to children until 18 months)
Myzor states that CDS aids social development not linguistic development
De Villiers and De Villiers state that it is rare for caregivers to give feedback for the correctness of language development
Define MKO, Private Speech and scaffolding
Private Speech: when a child talks aloud to itself
ZPD: Zone of Proximal Development; when a child needs a caregivers help in order to interact
MKO: More Knowledgeable Other; anyone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the child, particularly in regards to a specific task, concept or process
Scaffolding: giving a child a model to apply to similar situations in the future when they might respond without help
Explain the socio cultural theory
This theory, proposed by Vygotski (1978) suggests that social interaction and experiencing different social and cultural contexts are very important for language development
Three important factors that the highlights are:
Private Speech: Vygotski saw this as a major step forward in the child’s mental development as this is evidence that the child is thinking for itself
ZPD: for example, if a doctor asks Where does it hurt?, the child might not answer. The caregiver either responds for the child or tries to encourage a response. This kind of support is called scaffolding.
MKO: in the example above, this is what the parent is acting as. They require less and less support as they become more able to deal with different social and cultural situations on their own.
Regarding Private Speech, Vygotski also suggests that there is a link between the language that we speak and the kinds of thoughts that we have.
How do Sapir and Whorf support the socio-cultural theory
Sapir and Whorf support this idea by stating that people can only think what their language allows.
The debate over the need for ‘political correctness (carefully choosing words in spoken or written communications or actions, intended to avoid giving offense to ethnic, racial, cultural or sexually oriented groups, disabled people or other designated groups that may be stigmatized)’ is partly founded on the notion that our way of thinking about things is influenced by the words that are used for them, e.g Peacekeeper as the name for nuclear missiles.
Opposing Piaget’s model which suggests that cognition is largely dependent on language, Vygotski challenges this model and the idea that children outgrow egocentric speech, suggesting that children learn that egocentric speech is antisocial so it goes underground and becomes the silent speech that adults use to think.
Dell Hymes View of Communicative Competence
Dell Hymes’ View of Communicative Competence is essentially the aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally in different contexts. Hymes defines his theory as what a speaker needs to know in order to communicate competently in the speech community.
Stages of Linguistic Development
Preverbal
Holophrastic: questions are indicated by intonation only.
Two-word stage
Telegraphic stage: three or more words joined in increasingly complex and accurate orders e.g subject + verb + object/complement/adverbial
Post-telegraphic stage: increasing awareness of grammatical rules and irregularities e.g saying runned instead of run; make complex sentences, use the passive voice and construct longer noun phrases
Halliday’s Taxonomy
Instrumental: language used to fulfill a need on the part of the speaker
Regulatory: language used to influence the behavior of others
Interactional: language used to develop social relationships and ease the process of interaction
Personal: language used to express the personal preferences and the identity of the speaker
Representational: language used to exchange information
Heuristic: language used to learn and explore the environment
Imaginative: language used to explore the imagination
Dore’s Infant Language Functions
Labeling: simply naming or identifying something
Repeating: echoing something as spoken by an adult speaker
Answering: giving a direct response to an utterance from another speaker
Requesting action: demanding something
Calling: attracting attention by shouting
Greeting: self-evident
Protesting: objecting to requests
Practising: using and repeating language when no adult is present
Crystal’s Preverbal Stages
Biological Noises: sounds common to whole human race such as vomiting, coughing, burping and crying
Cooing and laughing: produced when the baby is in a settled state. There are either short vowel-like sounds or some consonant-like sounds coming from the back of the throat which shows that the baby is beginning to develop control over the vocal muscles
Vocal Play: a controlled single vowel-like or consonant-like sound. More varied than babbling but much less controlled
Babbling: the babies produced phoneme, often in the form of combinations of vowels and consonants (e.g ma, ga, ba) which are sounds that largely appear in the child’s native tongue
Melodic Utterance: melody, rhythm and intonation develop. Parents assume that these sounds have different functions such as greeting. Babies of different nationalities sound increasingly different from each other
Mother’s accent
Babies learn language in the last three months of pregnancy as they pick up the melodic characteristics of music and speech
Cruttenden’s Effect of Intonation
Children up to age of seven are less accurate at noticing the differences placed on intonation, which makes them less likely to understand sarcasm
Fis experiment
Jean Berko and Roger Brown (1960s):
They found that a child referred to a plastic inflatable fish as a ‘fis’ (substitution) couldn’t link an adult’s use of ‘fis’ with the same object
Hence, child understand what a sound should be like but can’t replicate it so their knowledge exceeds ability
Refutes the imitation theory
Phonological errors
Deletion: omitting the final consonant in words
Substitution: using one sound of another especially when there are harder sounds
Addition: adding an extra vowel sound to the ends of words
Assimilation: changing one consonant or vowel for another nearby sound. Can be in a word or between words e.g gog for dog
Reduplication: repeating a whole syllable e.g dada and mama
Consonant Cluster Reduction: e.g spider for spider
Deletion of unstressed syllables: omitting the opening syllable in polysyllabic words
First words
Katherine Nelson’s Four Categories of First Words:
Naming: 60% of first words are nouns
Actions/Events
Personal/Social Words
Describing/Modifying things
Basis of overextensions
Eve Clarke’s Idea on What Children Base Overextensions:
The physical qualities
Features such as taste, sounds, movement, shape, size and texture
Overextension vs underextension
Overextension: feature of a child’s language where the word used to label something is stretched to include things that aren’t normally part of that words meaning
Underextensions: a feature of a child’s language where the word used the label is reduced to include only part of its normal meaning
Hypernymy
ypernymy:
Hypernym: a superodinate; a word that is more generic or general and can have more specific words under it
Hyponym: a more specific word under the hypernym
Types of overextensions
Categorical Overextension: the name of one member of a category is extended to all members of the category
Analogical Overextension: a word for one object is extended to one in a different category, usually based on some physical or functional connection
Mismatch Statements: one-word sentences that appear quite abstract; child makes a statement about one object in relation to another
Developmental stages
Jean Aitchison’s Developmental Stages:
Labeling: linking words to the objects to which they refer, understanding that things can be labeled
Packaging: exploring the labels and to what they can apply; over/underextensions often occur in order to eventually understand the range of a word’s meaning
Network-building: making connections between words, understanding similarities and opposites in meanings
Clues to new words
How parents provide the clues to toddlers learning new words:
Providing visual clues aids children to label things they can see
This is supported by the theory of joint attention (when one person purposefully coordinates their focus or view to that of another person
However, it does not work on abstract nouns
Stages of Linguistic Development
Piaget’s Stages of Linguistic Development:
Sensorimotor (up to 2 years): the child experiences the physical world through the senses and begins classifying the things in it; lexical choices, when they appear, tend to be concrete rather than abstract. Object Permanence develops
Pre-operational (between 2 and 7 years): language and motor skills develop and become more competent; language is egocentric
Concrete operational (7-11 months): children begin thinking logically about concrete events
Formal operational (11+): Abstract reasoning skills develop
Pattern of grammatical concepts of two-word stage
Brown’s Universal Pattern of Grammatical Concepts of The Two-Word Stage:
Agent + Action: did someone perform an action?
Agent + Affected: does someone do something to an object?
Entity + Attribute: is something being described?
Action + Affected: does an action affect an object?
Action + Location: does an Acton occur in a place?
Entity + Location: is an object located?
Possessor + Possession: does an object have possession?
Nomination: is something being labeled?
Recurrence: is an event repeated?
Negation: is something denied?
Deep structure vs surface form
Chomsky’s Deep Structure vs. Surface Forms:
Surface from is performance while deep structure is competence
It is the idea that a phrase might have different interpretations of its function, depending on the context
Importance of pragmatics and context (a statement could really be a question and vice versa)
Stages of pronouns
Ursula’s Bellugi’s Three Stages of Pronoun Usage:
Child refers to self by using their name
Child uses pronouns but indiscriminately in subject position in sentence e.g I drink juice, Me like that
Child uses them correctly in subject or object position
Stages of negation
Ursula’s Three Stages of Negation
‘No’ or ‘Not’ at the beginning or end of a sentence
‘No’ or ‘Not’ inside a sentence
Correct syntactic and morphological usage
Phonemic Expansion vs contraction
Phonemic Expansion: early development allows the child to increase the variety of sounds produced.
Phonemic Contraction: the reduction in the variety of sounds produced to only those of their own language.
