Spoken Theories

Question 1

Child-directed speech

Answer 1

The non standard form of language used with children and occurs when an parent converges their speech to develop the child’s speech

Question 2

Holophrastic Stage

Also known as the one word stage

Answer 2

This occurs when children are 9-18 months old. During the one word stage children may use utterances that are very similar to sentences even though they only use one word. These may be accompanied by gestures

Question 3

Two word stage and example

Answer 3

This occurs when children are 18-24 months old. At the two word stage syntax becomes very apparent when children start to change the order of their words to mean different things.
For example the phrase ‘tickle mummy’ and ‘mummy tickle’ have different meanings

Question 4

The telegraphic stage and what it tells us

What five things do they leave out?

Answer 4

This occurs when children are 18-24 months old. This is when a child can combine two or more words and the meanings become more explicit. In this stage children when speaking leave out determiners, pronouns, modal verbs, primary auxiliary verbs, and verb inflections.
This tells us that children learn content words first and function words later

Question 5

Post- telegraphic stage and what children can do within it

There are four

Answer 5

Occurs when children are between 3-5 years old. In this stage the children can…

• combine clause structures by using coordinating conjunctions (and, but) and subordinating conjunctions (because, although) to make complex and compound utterances
• use verb inflections more accurately
• can manipulate verb forms more accurately using the passive voice
• construct longer noun phrases

Question 6

Morpheme and example

Answer 6

The smallest unit of grammer in a language. For example the word ‘cats’ is made of two morphemes. ‘cat’ is a free morpheme as it makes sense on its own while the ‘s’ is a bound morpheme as it is a plural marker and does not make sense on its own

Question 7

The ‘fis’ phenomenon

Answer 7

Berko and Brown studied a child who referred to his inflatable fish as his ‘fis’. Their research concluded that children’s understanding of phonemes is more advanced than their ability to produce them.

Question 8

What are Aitchson’s three stages of children’s linguistic development?

Answer 8

Labelling - when a child makes the link between the sounds of particular words and the objects to which they refer to.

Packaging - This is where overextension and underextension occurs in order to eventually understand the range of a word’s meaning.

Network building - involves grasping the connections between words and understanding the similarities and opposites in meaning.

Question 9

Grunwell’s order of phonological acquisition

Answer 9

24 months - p, m, d, n, t, w, b
30 months - k, g h, η
36 months - f, s, j, l
42 months - tഽ, dз, f, v, r
48 months+ - θ, 3, ð

Question 10

Piaget’s cognitive theory and what did he suggest

Answer 10

Piaget emphasised that children are active leaners who use their environment and social interactions to shape their langauge through questions such as ‘wassat?’ to acquire more labels to describe the objects around them.
He also suggetsed that linguistic development is linked with an understanding of the concepts surrounding the meaning of words. This means children cannot be taught before they are ready.

Question 11

Skinner’s behaviourists model

Answer 11

Some linguists believe that language is acquired through social interaction. One of these linguists was Skinner who asserted that language is acquired through imitating the speech of others. Children he said, repeat actions they get a pleasurable response from. Therefore they can be conditioned to behave in a certain way through positive reinforcement. So if a child copies a word and recieves a form of positive reinforcement such as praise from their parent(s) then they are conditioned to use the right language.

Question 12

Sensorimotor (1-2 years)

This is from Piaget’s cognitive theory

Answer 12

To children the physical world is experienced through the senses and therefore their lexical choices tend to be concrete rather than abstract.
In this stage children tend to be egocentric and cannot percieve things from another’s viewpoint. For example they will often use the first person pronoun while their parents will use concrete ideas.

Question 13

Preoperational stage (2-7 years)

There are three

This is from Piaget’s cognitive theory

Answer 13

• Motor skills develop.
• Egocentrism begins strongly and then weakens.
• Children cannot use logical thinking.

Question 14

Concrete operational stage (7-12 years)

There are two

This is from Piaget’s cognitive theory

Answer 14

• Children can now think logically but only with practical aids.
• They are no longer egocentric

Question 15

Formal operational stage (12 years and onwards)

This is from Piaget’s cognitive theory

Answer 15

• The child has developed abstract thought
• They can easily conserve and use logical thinking without aids

Question 16

Roger Brown and the first four morphemes

There are…you guessed it four

Answer 16

Roger Brown found that the first four morphemes a child acquires are:

• the present tense progressive e.g. words ending in ‘ing’
• prepositions e.g. in, on
• plurals e.g. ‘s
• past tense irregular e.g. run/ran

Question 17

Chomsky’s nativsit theory

Answer 17

Chomsky believed that learning takes place through an innate brain mechanism, pre programmed with the ability to acquire grammatical structures. He labelled this as the ‘Language Acquisition Device’. Supporting his theory was evidence that children from all around the world develop grammatical structiures at similar stages of development. That all children can acquire complex grammars by an early stage, regardless of their environment or intelligence, Chomsky concluded, points to an innate learning device.

Question 18

Virtous errors/overgeneralisations

Example

Answer 18

Linguistics call some virtuous errors overgeneralisations and they are usually applied to the mistakes children make as they develop grammatically. It implies that children make choices from a linguistic basis and therefore these “errors” are logical. Some common overgeneralisations are adding the plural ‘s’ inflections to irregular nouns. For example a child would label more than one mouse as ‘mouses’ when it is in fact ‘mice’.

Overgeneralisations support Chomsky’s views about an innate brain mechanism as they show that children can produce language that they have never heard an adult say because have worked out the syntactical rule.

Question 19

The Wug Test

Answer 19

Overgeneralisations were famously proved by Jean Berko Gleason who in the 1950s conducted a study into children’s pronounciation and morphological development. Part of this study was into the use of the plural ‘s’. She gave children between the ages of 4 and 5 a picture of an imaginary creature called a ‘wug’ and asked them what more than one wug would be called. Three quarters of the children surveyed formed the regular plural ‘wugs’ suggesting that children create their own grammatical understanding rather than just imitating adults.

Question 20

Critical Period Hypothesis

Answer 20

Eric Lennenberg further developed Chomsky’s nativsit theory by proposing that language has to be acquired within the first five years, also known as the critical period. Case studies of feral children such as Genie who had limited human input showed that although some language processes can be acquired, full grammatical fluency is never achieved. Further cases studies of, feral children demonstrate they are not able to acquire language effectively even after they return to live alongside others. This puts forward the arguement that whether language is innate or if nuture is important.

Question 21

features of CDS

There are ten

Answer 21

• repetition and/or repeated sentence frames
• a higher pitch
• the child’s name rather than pronouns
• the present tense
• one word utterances and/or short elliptical sentences
• fewer verbs/modifiers
• concrete nouns
• expansions and/or recasts
• interrogratives
• exaggerated pauses giving turn-taking cues

Question 22

Bruner’s social interactionist theory

Answer 22

Bruner believes that there must be a Language Acquisition Support System. He particularly looked at ritualised activities that occur daily in young chilren’s lives for example mealtimes, bedtimes, reading books, and how carers create rules and meaning to these interactions to make it explicit and predictable so that children can learn. These ritualised activities teaches children the important linguisitic aspects such as turn-taking, formulaic utterences and syntax.

Question 23

Vygotsky’s social interactionist theory

Answer 23

Vygotsky stressed the importance of the role of the adult as the ‘more knowledgeable other’ in providing linguistic suport in the ‘zone of proximal development’. This describes how adults and children work together to move children towards independence, knowledge, and competence by supporting them to do what they cannot do alone. The refers to this as ‘scaffolding’ where the suport offered to children’s language development is similar to that of support offered by scaffolding around a building.
However he observed that adults withdraw their support as children’s skills develop and once the child can support themselves independently, scaffolding is no longer required.