Theories On Child Language Flashcards
What was Chomsky’s idea on child language?
There is an innate ability for language knowledge and development, leads into the idea of universal grammar
What is a polyglot?
A person that speaks multiple languages
What is the law of effect?
The law of effect entails an event that is followed by something good, would be liable to be repeated and remembered
What is Throndike’s puzzle box?
The box was designed to see how quickly a new skill could be learned by an animal (a cat in this case) to be released from a box to get food
What is reinforcement theory?
When an action is done and is rewarded with reinforcement through primary, or secondary reinforcement (primary being strong basics needs like food and water, secondary for us could be money)
What was B.F. Skinners boxes?
In Skinners boxes, he kept animals such as rats and pigeons, he would use food as an instant reward system for them, as he would keep them starved to test out wether they could learn to perform a certain skill at a certain time (schedules of reinforcement)
Who created the L.A.D.? (Language acquisition device)
Noam Chomsky
What is the L.A.D.?
A concept generated by Noam Chomsky, the LAD concept is a purported instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language
What is a virtuous error?
An error in language children make when they make a jump in syntax or tense, such as goed, mouses and stucked. Supported Noam Chomsky as this “shows” an innate ability to make jumps and leaps in language by themselves.
What is the flaw in virtuous errors?
May be caused from guesswork by children, pattern recognition, being a copy cat incorrectly, or some case of Chinese whispers
What is maturation?
The process of maturing
Who created Piagets Conservation tests?
Jean Piaget
What was Piagets Conservation Tests?
Common sense and logic tests for children to test their cognitive ability
What is a diminutive?
A shortened word or suffix, Nick from Nicholas, droplet from a small drop, booklet from a small book
What is a consonant cluster?
A collection of consonants spaced closely to each other, the more harder aspects of language to master for children
What is the pre verbal stage of language?
Noises, babbling and non words
What is the holophrastic stage of language?
At this stage most babies produce a few, single words and many sounds that will sound familiar from the babbling stage
What is the two word stage of language?
The period during which children use two words at a time when speaking (e.g., dog bone, mama cup).
What is the telegraphic stage of language?
Telegraphic speech is seen developmentally when a child moves beyond the two-word, relational stage of language development and begins to express longer, three-word sentences using a finite set of grammatical categories, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
What is the post telegraphic stage of language?
The post-telegraphic stage at age 3 a child will begin to speak increasingly like an adult, by age 4 their spoken language is largely grammatically accurate with complete sentences.
What is feral children?
A feral child is a human child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and so has had little or no experience of human care, behavior, or human language. There are several confirmed cases and other speculative ones.
Who was Victor?
A feral child (circa 1788-1828) who apparently had spent most of his childhood living wild in the woods near Aveyron
Key features about Victor
- Victor didn’t react to hot or cold things like normal people. And his speech never developed past words like “Lait” for milk (could just be babbling, one vowel sound and no hard consonants)
- He could do tasks like fetching the correct book, so he had intelligence (could be B.F. Skinners operant conditioning, training him to do a task without understanding what it is)
- He had moments where he would break out from his home naked, run around and hunt
Who was Genie?
Genie was a feral child born in 1957
Key features about Genie
- Her father thought she was mentally incapable and from infancy, confined her to one room in the house and tied to a camode
- No one was allowed to talk to her, all this happened until she was 13 years 7 months old as the US authorities didn’t know she was even in the house
- If she made noise she was growled at, and beat by her dad
- Discovered in 1970, when assessed for language, specialists thought she was about 13 months old in in forms of her development but found no signs of brain damage
- By 1971 her mental age was found between 5-8 years old, constantly curious
- Fostered by various professionals like Susan Curtis and Jean Butler
- By 1974 Genie still had problems with pronouns e.g. confusing “me” and “you” often, and only saying short sentences like “ball belong hospital” (telegraphic style). Didn’t develop interrogative pronouns
How many brain connections does a 3 year old have in comparison to a 21 year old?
They have twice as many connections, first few years of the brain is to develop connections but to also cut them, some need to go so the brain can function properly
Who was Vygotsky?
- Born 1896 died 1934
- Created the idea of the ZPD (zone of proximal development). Where a MKO (more knowledgeable other) needed to break the barrier down to go into the ZPD to expand knowledge
- He was discovered in 1978 for thinking that the community plays a vital role in the process of “making meaning”. Learning has to come before development
- Contradicts Piaget as he feels learning comes first then brain development second
What’s the average amount of words that economically advantaged and economically disadvantaged children know?
Economically advantaged children normally know 1,100 words, economically disadvantaged children normally know 500 words
Key features about Anne Fernald
- Created an experiment with two pictures being shown, when the object was stated she tracked how long it took for the child to view the correct object. Often things with similar phonetic structures
- Set up different linguistic labs for English and Spanish children to experiment on. Good data set as she’s tracking to languages and set up labs for socially advantaged and disadvantaged children
- LENA technology was hidden inside dungarees to track how children talked by removing observers paradox as the child doesn’t know what is being recorded, also counted the amount of words uttered while recording
- Children try to figure out unfamiliar words by trying to understand the context of all the other words around it. Higher SES class families normally have more quality interaction, leading to children learning faster
Key features of Patricia Kuhl
- Experiment when the child turns its head at the appropriate time to the appropriate sound, a box full of toys will light up and a bear starts beating drums
- Citizens of the world
- When turning their heads Japanese children got the sound transition 40% correct while English children got 80% correct
- English and Japanese children brought up differently, with English having more L-R sounds while Japanese has a Japanese R
- Testing took place in America and Tokyo
- Test was then tested on Mandarin and Taiwanese babies, with Taiwanese sounds, while Taiwanese babies got the sounds correct 65-70% of the time, English babies got 55-60% correct of the time for 10-12 months old. Tested in America and Taipei
- After exposing the English babies to 12 mandarin session, they did as well as the Taiwanese babies. This didn’t work when they tried to teach the children through TV or only sound, had to be a person to activate learning
- Also stated that music helped development, with music allowing them to recognise rhythm and patterns. Prepare the brain circuitry for complex pattern recognition and success at a variety of cognitive tasks
When does language exhibit a critical period?
0-7 years old, and starts to drop off at 11-15 years old drastically
Who came up with the term “citizens of the world”?
Patricia Kuhl
Key features about Jerome Bruner
- Created L.A.S.S. (Language acquisition support system) To counteract L.A.D. From Chomsky
- Spiral curriculum, and scaffolding
- Thought that the act of learning required three stages. Acquisition (gaining new info), Transformation (changing old info into new), and Evaluation (judging whether the changes of info makes sense)
What are some key features of CDS? (Child directed speech)
- Higher pitch or melodic speech
- Frequent/longer pauses
- Slower/clearer speech
- Repetition
- Grammatically simpler sentences
- More questions, tag questions as well as providing the child with both the answer and question
- Diminutives
- Nouns instead of pronouns (“mummy” and “daddy”)
- Politeness features
- Mitigated imperatives
- Recasts
- Expansions
What is a mitigated imperative
A command given but disguised in the form of a question “shall we get this homework done then”?
What is a recast?
Where a caregiver repeats a child’s utterances but provides a correct version of what the child has said “I runned” “you ran?”
What is expansion?
Where a caregiver develops the child’s utterance to make it more grammatically complete
What is the Kaluli tribe? Why are they important?
They only start talking to the children when the children start talking to them first, they don’t use CDS
What is IRF?
- Initiation (question)
- Response (Answer)
- Feedback (comment on the answer)
What did Katherine Nelson discover?
She found that children at the holophrastic stage whose mothered corrected them on word choice and pronunciation advanced slower than children who weren’t corrected. Studied 18 children’s first words, approximately 60% of their first words were nouns, majority were one or two syllables long, with a majority being plosives at the beginning
M.A.K. Halliday seven functions for children using language
- Instrumental: Where the child is trying to fulfil a need
- Regulatory: Used to control the behaviour of someone
- Interactional: Used to develop relationships
- Personal: Used to express views and preferences
- Heuristic: Used to explore the world around them
- Imaginative: Used to explore something creatively
- Representational: Used to exchange information
What did Lesli Rescarla find?
- She studied 78 children from the age of 2 for 15 years and published her findings in 2009
- She found out that ‘overheard speech’ (Television and videos) is no substitute for real speech
What is overextension?
Where a child might use a word more broadly to describe things other than the specific item to which the word actually applies (e.g. garden for field, park or graveyard)
What is Under-extension?
Where a child might use a word more narrowly to describe something without recognising the wider use of the word (e.g. a child might believe that the label dog applies only to Fido, the family dog)
What was the Wug test?
A test where children were subjected to pseudo words such as wug, and the objective is to see wether the child can pluralise the word or not. 76% of 4-5 year olds responded correctly
What is a grapheme?
Letters, the way we write a phoneme (e.g. /k/ can be written as C, K, CK, QU, CH)
What is a phoneme?
Sounds, the smallest unit of sound in a word (e.g. /K/)
What is an iconic symbol?
A symbol that bears a physical resemblance to it’s meaning or concept
What is a symbolic symbol?
A symbol that has no resemblance to the material form and the mental concept associated with it
What is Polysyllabic?
A word having more than one syllable
What is Monosyllabic?
A word or utterance consisting of one syllable
What is John Abbot known for?
The free range Vs battery chicken approach to child language development
What is Overgeneralisation?
Regular spelling rules are applied even when it is not accurate to do so (e.g. run to runned)
What is Omission?
Letters are missed out of words
What is Substitution?
Where the right letter is replaced with an alternative (often phonetically plausible letter)
What is Transportation?
Where a pair of letters is switched around (e.g. olny instead of only)
