Spoken Theories and concepts Flashcards
Sinclair and Coulthard’s IRF model 1975
Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) treated pupil-initiated exchanges and teacher-initiated exchanges as having a different structure; they suggested that when pupils initiated an informing exchange it was followed by feedback rather than a response, so the structure was IF rather than IR.
Clarke-Stewart 1973 Theory
Children of mothers who talk a lot have larger vocabularies
Berko and Brown 1960 Fis Phenomena
In an account of a child who called his plastic fish a fis but refused to accept this pronunciation from adults and was satisfied only when they called it a fis. This phenomena happens during a child’s language acquisition that demonstrates the perception of phonemes occurs earlier than a child’s ability to produce appropriate allophone. although the child could not produce the phoneme /ʃ/, he could perceive it as being different from the phoneme /s/.
Bard and Sachs 1977 Jim born to deaf parents.
In 1977, Bard and Sachs published a study of a child known as Jim, the hearing son of deaf parents.
Jim’s parents wanted their son to learn speech rather than the sign language they used between
themselves. He watched a lot of television and listened to the radio, therefore receiving frequent
language input. However, his progress was limited until a speech therapist was enlisted to work with
him. Simply being exposed to language was not enough. Without the associated interaction, it meant
little to him
Genie 1970
The horrible case of Genie, a 13-and-a-half-year-old who was abused and isolated by her father helped linguists learn more about the critical period of a child. The term critical period was first established in 1967 by Eric Heinz Lenneberg and says that there is one critical period between the age of 2 to about 13 in which the individual should be able to acquire FL. acquiring first language after this period is much more difficult and will never reach the perfect status of language acquired during the CP.
B.F Skinner - a Behaviorist’s Theory
He says that Children imitate adults. Their correct utterances are reinforced when they get what they want or praised.
Chomsky - a Innateness Theory
A child’s brain contains special language learning mechanisms at birth
Piaget - a Cognitive Theory
He says that language is just one aspect of a child’s overall intellectual development
Burner - a Interactionist Theory
This theory emphasizes the interaction between children and their care-givers
WUG test by Jane Berko Gleason 1958
The WUG test is an instrument developed to allow the investigation of how the plural and other inflectional morphemes are acquired in a certain language. While at first just applicable to English, the test has been modified to fit certain languages.
