Language Acquisition Flashcards
Berko and brown study?
1960, children can distinguish between correct forms of pronunciation even when they can’t pronounce it correctly themselves.
Child rejected adult’s pronunciation of fish as fis, even when they themselves couldn’t pronounce it as fish
How is intonation used?
Used to represent a wider range of meanings
‘My car’ versus ‘MY car’- very possessive
Understanding of meaning is however limited
What was Cruttendon’s study?
1974
Research on intonation, used football scores as stimulus.
Adults could accurately predict home win, away win or draw
Children (7-11): youngest were unsuccessful, oldest were less successful than adults
What is lexical development?
The acquisition of words
What is semantic development?
The acquisition of meaning for those words
Rate of lexical development
1st year- begin to speak
18months- 50 words
2 years- 200 words
5 years- 2000 words
7 years- 4000 words
The meanings of words aren’t immediately understood
How does a child acquire words?
A large proportion of first words are familiar people, objects or aspects of social interaction.
Nouns are used most (around 60% of words) then verbs then adjectives.
Grammatical function words (the, of, to) are absent
What are virtuous errors?
Children overgeneralise to make language more consistent. Eg sheeps- adding -s suffix to form plural noun as part of a learned rule, but sheep is an irregular.
Eg changing the auxiliary verb were to was- again irregular
What was the Wug test?
Jean Berko 1958. Created fake creature to test children, asked them to make it plural. Said ‘Wugs’ to form a regular plural noun.
Four 5yr olds tested, and 76% formed regular -s plural.
What was Beluggi and McNeill’s conclusions?
3 stages of acquisition.
1. No like book (negative word at beginning)
2. Me not going (negative word moves, incorrect use of pronouns)
3. I’m not happy (correct use of pronouns, correct use of negative placement)
Stages of pronoun acquisition?
- Use a name rather than pronoun
- Struggling to correctly apply subject and object pronouns
- Correctly applying pronouns
