Theories Flashcards
Who formed the behaviourist theory?
Skinner
What does the behaviourist theory discuss?
Children learn by:
- trial and error
- imitating adults
- operant conditioning
What does Paul and Norbery’s theory discuss?
They have said that caregivers add information on to children’s speech and writing via expansion and recasting.
Who formed the Nativist Theory?
Noam Chomsky
What does the Nativist Theory discuss?
Children have the innate ability to acquire language. It suggests that as children learn language, they create unique utterances.
Who created the Social Interactionist Theory?
Bruner
What does the Social Interactionist Theory by Bruner stress?
The fundamental role of social interaction in the development of a child’s language.
What term did Bruner coin to connect with Chomsky’s nativist theory?
LASS (Language Acquisition Support System), which is all about the child’s interaction with others.
What did Bruner say about child-directed speech?
It’s an important feature to help children acquire language
What are the 8 features associated with child-directed speech?
1) Simplified terms (condensed language and simple sentences)
2) Paralanguage and prosody
3) Convergence (Giles)
4) Shared knowledge (talking about content they are familiar with)
5) Interrogatives
6) Third person address
7) Inclusive language
8) Scaffolding
Which theory links to Bruner’s Social Interactionist theory?
William O’Grady’s caregiver language theory
Who came up with the cognitive theory?
Piaget
What does the cognitive theory entail?
Piaget said it is the idea that children can only understand language when they understand the concept. He said comprehension comes before application. A child must understand a word before they use it; they have to experience it.
What are the 4 stages of Piaget’s cognitive theory?
Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operations, Formal Operations
What does Piaget’s sensorimotor stage include?
- approximately 0-2 years old
- child experiences the world through senses and movement
- object permanence learnt in the latter part of this stage
- Goal-directed behaviour acquired
- Become deliberate and choose actions (problem solvers)
What does Piaget’s preoperational stage include?
- approximately 2-7 years old
- egocentric - considers own viewpoint and judgement
- collective monologues
- sociodramatic play
- beginning of simple classification
- talk about events that happened in the past or people who are not in the room
What does Piaget’s concrete operations stage include?
- approximately 7-11 years old
- greater logical thought/reasoning - problem solvers, considering alternative outcomes
- egocentric cognition disappears and children consider other viewpoints
- greater understanding of classification
Whose theory is the caregiver language?
William O’Grady
What did O’Grady say is common form of child directed speech?
O’Grady said that it is common for caregivers to use shorter syntax as a form of child-directed speech (CDS).
How does O’Grady’s caregiver language contradict Skinner’s behaviourism and Paul and Norbury’s recasting?
He suggested that caregivers often leave the majority of children’s ungrammatical sentences alone, creating positive facework (Goffman).
What did Clark’s theory discuss?
Clark has said that children often experiment with spatial terms due to them being relative and context dependent.
What were Vygotsky’s theories called?
The Sociocultural Theory and the Sociodramatic Play Theory
What is Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development?
It’s the range of abilities that an individual can perform with aid but cannot yet perform independently. A child’s ZPD will involve lots of scaffolding in earlier years.
What did Vygotsky’s Sociodramatic Play theory discuss?
He linked sociodramatic play to both cognitive and social development. He also said that children ‘role-play’ adult behaviours as a part of exploring their environment.
How did Catherine Garvey build on Vygotsky’s Sociodramatic Play theory?
She found that children adopt roles/identities, act out storylines and invent objects and settings as required in a role-play scenario.
What was Michael Halliday’s theory?
Taxonomy language
What did Halliday’s taxonomy language discuss?
He suggested that communication and language begins before children can speak. He broke down children’s early language functions into what he termed a taxonomy language.
What are the seven different functions of Halliday’s taxonomy language?
Instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative, representational
What does Halliday’s instrumental function include?
- Expressing needs
- Language is used to fulfil a child’s need, directly concerned with obtaining food, drink and comfort
What does Halliday’s regulatory function include?
- Language is used to influence the behaviour of others
- Concerned with persuading/commanding/requesting other people to do things you want - telling others what to do
- Speaker is more dominant
What does Halliday’s interactional function include?
- Used to make contact with others and form relationships, e.g. ‘I love you’
- It is language used to develop social relationships and is concerned with the phatic dimension of talk
What does Halliday’s personal function include?
- Used to express feelings, opinions and individual identity, e.g. ‘me good girl’
- It is language used to express the self (refer to yourself)
What does Halliday’s heuristic function include?
- Language used to explore and gain knowledge about the environment - shows curiosity.
- Children use language to learn; this may be questions and answers.
- Or it could be the kind of running commentary that frequently accompanies children’s play.
What does Halliday’s imaginative function include?
- Here, language is used to tell stories and jokes, and to create and imaginary environment.
What does Halliday’s representational function include?
- Use of language to convey facts and information e.g. ‘I’ve got something to tell you’
What are the four grammatical stages of development?
Holophrastic, two-word stage, telegraphic stage, post-telegraphic stage
What does the holophrastic stage include?
- 12 to 18 months old
- One word utterances - mainly nouns used to label and name objects (concrete), e.g. juice (holophrases)
Which theorist is linked to the holophrastic stage?
Katherine Nelson
What did Katherine Nelson discuss?
She looked at the first 50 words of a child. She found that 60% were nouns. Closely followed by verbs, then modifiers and finally personal/social words e.g. ‘hello’.
What is included in the two-word stage?
- Approximately 19 - 26 months old
- Two-word combinations
- It marks the beginning of syntactical development
- Two-word utterances exhibit consistent word order, which has been described in terms of pivot and open words.
Which theorist and theory relates to the two-word stage?
Roger Brown’s Meaning Relations
What did Brown’s Meaning Relations discuss?
Brown said that when children first combine words, they talk about objects through pointing, naming indicating location, what they are like, who owns them etc (Nelson). They also talk about actions performed by people and the objects and locations of actions. These concepts should show that a child has finished in Piaget’s sensorimotor stage.
What are Brown’s meaning terms?
- Entity - object
- Agent - person
- Action - the verb
- Attribute - modifier
- Affected - the object, person impacted
- Recurrence - requesting more, repetition
- Negation - denial/refusal
- Nomination - labelling
- Possessor - ownership
- Location - whereabouts
What does the telegraphic stage include?
- Approx 2-2.5 years old
- Two or (mostly) three words
- Elliptical or minor sentences - ‘telegraphic utterances.’ Content words are used; function/grammatical words often omitted.
- Often reflects Chomsky as it demonstrates an inbuilt, innate understanding of grammar as children are clearly not imitating utterances.
What does the post-telegraphic stage include?
- 3 years onward
- Begin to see more syntax awareness with sentences being longer and more complete.
- Children will start to use more function/grammatical words.
- They will start to formulate requests using modal auxiliary verbs.
- Expect to see overgeneralisations as vocabulary increases.
What was Berko and Brown’s fish/fis phenomenon?
A child referred to his inflatable fish as fis. When adults asked ‘is this your fis?’, he rejected the statement. When asked, ‘is this your fish?’, he responded, ‘yes this is my fis’. This shows that although the child could not produce the phoneme, he could perceive it as being different from the phoneme /s/.
What did Berko and Brown’s study suggest?
Berko and Brown suggest that children often find it challenging to make the right sound but expect adults to say the world accurately. This therefore shows that children can be aware of many different phonemes before they are able to produce them themselves.
What did Bleile suggest?
Children between the ages of 2-5 years often substitute fricatives and affricates for plosives. This is because plosives are easier sounds to produce in comparison to fricatives and affricates. E.g. this -> /dis/.
What theorist does Bowerman link to?
Clark
What did Bowerman find?
She observed verb overgeneralisations and adjectival experimentation in her daughter’s language. As a child’s vocabulary increases, the experimentation increases.
What four verbs did Bowerman label and what did she label them as?
Put and take are change of location verbs.
Make is a change of state verb.
Give is a change of possession verb.
What did Rescorla theorise?
- Divided overextensions into categorical, analogical and mismatch statements
- Found that most of children’s overextensions are categorical
- Very rarely analogical overextensions
What’s Aitchison’s theory called?
Lexical categorisation theory
What three stages did Aitchison believe children go through as their language develops?
Labelling, packaging and network building
What happens in Aitchison’s labelling stage?
Child identifies/names objects and people; e.g. understanding that “mummy” refers to the child’s mother. Links to Brown and Nelson.
What happens in Aitchison’s packaging stage?
Starting to explore/test the extent of the label - often the point where overextension and underextension occurs most frequently, e.g. where they may call their mother’s coat “mummy” (mis-match statement).
What happens in Aitchison’s network building stage?
Involves grasping the connections between words. Some are antonyms, some are synonyms and acknowledging the relationship between hypernyms and hyponyms. Shows semantic awareness.
Does Nutbrown apply to written or spoken language?
Written language only
What does Nutbrown theorise?
Quality children’s education is key to children’s learning and development. Exposure to the environment has an affect on children’s development.
Does Joan Rothery applicable to written or spoken data?
Written language only.
What did Joan Rothery say?
Said that recounts and narratives usually follow a set pattern.
What is the set pattern that Joan Rothery says recounts follow?
- Orientation (beginning): sets the scene - context established
- Event (middle): what actually happened
- Reorientation (end): a completion of the writing
What is included in Labov’s narrative structure?
- Abstract: signals story is about to begin
- Orientation: the context in which the story takes place
- Action: the ‘what happened’ element
- Resolution: what finally happened
- CODA: signals end of story and can link back to present situation
- Evaluation: comments, gestures running throughout the story to show this is interesting
Is Britton applicable to written or spoken data?
Written only
What are Britton’s three modes of children’s writing?
Expressive, poetic and transactional
What happens in Britton’s expressive mode?
First mode resembles speech. Children use first person and content is based on personal experiences.
What happens in Britton’s poetic mode?
Creativity begins. Child will use adjectives and similes. They may use phonological features such as rhyme, rhythm and alliteration.
What happens in Britton’s transactional mode?
Around secondary school age - more academic style essays. Formal third person style.
What is Barclay’s theory about?
As with reading, there are certain stages you need to know. It is all about orthography and graphology.
What are Barclay’s 7 stages?
Scribbling, mock handwriting, mock letters, conventional letters, invented spelling, appropriate spelling, correct spelling.
What happens in Barclay’s scribbling stage?
Any marks on paper that are random and not letters or words. Child talks through what they are doing as they do it.
What happens in Barclay’s mock handwriting stage?
Lots of shapes forming though they are not fully comprehensible. Pseudo-letters begin to form - writing and writing skills become emergent.
What happens in Barclay’s mock letters stage?
Letters now formed but not as words - just random letters. Spacing is irregular - can sometimes have large gaps and sometimes be cursive.
What happens in Barclay’s conventional letters stage?
Sounds now linked to letters. Spacing still isn’t there. Sometimes words are reduced to the initial position consonant, e.g. ‘g’ for good.
What happens in Barclay’s invented spelling stage?
Phonetic spelling dominates. Words which are familiar and simple are often spelled correctly.
What happens in Barclay’s appropriate spelling stage?
Complexity arises in sentences. Standard spelling is nowhere apparent. Writing is now quite eligible.
What happens in Barclay’s correct spelling stage?
Spelling is more accurate than not. Cursive font is now common.
