Concepts Flashcards
Brown’s U-Shaped Regression Model
As children grow older, the number of errors they make appears to increase. Initially, they will use the raw form of the verb. Over the course of a few months, a child who was originally saying ‘flew’ and ‘held’ might say ‘flyed’ and ‘holded’ using an overgeneralised -ed ending. However, children soon ‘re-learn’ the irregular forms.
Halliday’s Functions of Language
Instrumental / Regulatory Interactional Personal (expresses feelings/attitudes) Informative Heuristic (monologue that accompanies play) Imaginative
Order of Acquisition of Inflections & Function Words
-ing present participle
-s plural
-s possessive
Determiners e.g. articles
-ed past tense inflection
-s third person singular
Auxiliary verb ‘be’
‘Fis’ Phenomenon
A child referred to a ‘fis’ meaning ‘fish’. An observer said: ‘This is your fis?’. The child corrected them saying ‘fis’. The child continued to reject the adult’s imitation until he was told ‘That is your fish’ - the child responded ‘Yes, my fis’.
Concept of Object Permanence
At 18 months old a child begins to realise that objects exist even if they are out of sight. There is a sharp increase in vocabulary after the object-permanence stage is reached.
Overgeneralisations
virtuous errors that children produce when they apply a rule on an irregular, an example of this would be ‘sheeps’ - the use of -s would be regular, but sheep is an irregular plural that stays the same.
Proto-Conversations
conversations that follow all tendencies of any other interaction e.g. turn-taking and tones but have no words
babies have been observed to suckle in rhythm then pause, waiting for their mother to interact
Kaye’s (1980) features of Child-Directed Speech
Prosodic Features: higher pitch and greater range of frequencies (to maintain interest from the child)
Lexical Features: special forms of words like ‘doggy’
Complexity Features: shorter utterances with fewer clauses and fewer auxiliaries
Redundancy Features: immediate and later repetitions
Content Features: topics within the child’s world
Genie
A young girl was set back in her language development significantly due to her traumatic childhood characterised by a lack of interaction
Overextensions
Categorical: a word for one member of a clear category is extended to other members of that category (‘apple’ for all fruits)
Analogical: a word for one object is extended to another object which is not in the same clear category but which still bears some similarity to the original object (‘cat’ for a soft scarf)
Statement: a one-word sentence (‘dolly’ when seeing a doll’s bed)
Brown’s Semantic Roles
AGENT + ACTION ACTION + AFFECTED AGENT + AFFECTED ACTION + LOCATION ENTITY + LOCATION ENTITY + ATTRIBUTE POSSESSOR + POSSESSION NOMINATION RECURRENCE NEGATION
Jim
The case of a young boy who was placed in front of a television to learn language as his parents were deaf. He was severely delayed in his progress until he was taken to mainstream education where he caught up due to interaction.
Babbling
consists of combinations of consonants and vowels (e.g. ba, ma, baba, gaga) - even deaf babies babble
Melodic Utterance
melody, rhythm and intonation develop. This leads parents to believe their children’s utterances have different functions; such as questions (rising tone), statements (falling tone) etc.
Realisation rules: reduplication
reflects babbling and aims to make the word into a CV unit.
‘water’ might be [wɔwɔ]
Realisation rules: deletion
final sounds are ‘deleted’ to make a CV unit.
‘hat’ becomes [hæ]
