Child language Acquisition - Social Interaction

Social Interactionism

Jerome Bruner and Lev Vygotsky, Language acquisition is down to the interactions children have with others and their environment

Motherese Hypothesis

“Those special restrictive properties of caretaker speech (parentese/motherese) play a causal role in language acquisition” (Newport, Gleitman and Gleitman 1977).

BTR (Baby Talk Register)

Ferguson 1978, features of language used by bothe caregivers and children that help language acquisition, common in interaction

BTR common features

Prosodics - Higher pitch,Slow pace, exaggerated intonation contours

Grammar - Short utterances and parataxis, Telegraphic speech

Lexis - Body parts, Quantities (adj’s), pet names

Phonetics - Consonant cluster reduction, liquid substitution, reduplication

Discourse - Questions, pronoun shift, Repetition

Pre-speech interaction theory

Clarke-Stewart 1973, The acquisition of language depends on the ‘quality of interaction’, the ‘frequency and engagement’ and ‘contextual learning’.

Scaffolding

Jerome Bruner, structured support adult gives to children to help learn. Includes recasting, where caregiver ‘corrects’ any non standard utterences.

Social Learning

Lev Vygotsky, Social interaction is catalyst for learning, and language plays a key role in cognitive development, and helps organise and directing children’s thought processes

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

The gap between what a learner can achieve independently and what they can accomplish with guidance from a More Knowledgeable Other (MKO), where most effective learning occurs

More knowledgeable other (MKO)

A caregiver, parent, teacher etc who has more knowledge of language, and helps scaffold interactions

Genie case study

Girl called Genie was locked in basement and not exposed to language for 13 years, so was unable to acquire it later in life (links to Critical period theory)

Jim case study

Hearing child with deaf parents, only exposed to passive language so didn’t acquire it until having proper language lessons, where he learnt very quickly

Critical Period theory

Lenneberg, said that there is a specific period time where children have the capabilities to learn language in a language rich environment, suggested it ended at Puberty, but others have suggested it ends at around 7.

Challenges of Social Interactionism

Never been possible to prove the link between language structures used by MKO’s and their appearance in child language

Aitchison said that caregiver speech is often non standard, and this may hinder a child’s acquisition