9093 A Level English Lang: Language Acquisition in Children

B.F. Skinner

"operant conditioning"

• Behaviorism

• Imitation and Reinforcement (with repetition)

Example:

Child: I falled down the step.

Adult: You fell down the step did you?

Child: Yes, I fell down the step.

Piaget

"cognitive development"

• Stages of Development

• Idea that language development depends on psychological maturity

Example:

Abstract ideas, e.g. times and future occasions like Christmas and birthdays

Chomsky

"language acquisition device (LAD)"

• Innate ability to acquire language

• Grammatical/syntactic structures are innate: child only has to learn vocabulary

Example:

Errors arise from over-generalizing a rule

Vygotsky

"Zone of Proximal Development"

• Actual (unaided) developmental stage as opposed to

• Potential (assisted developmental stage)

Example:

Teachers and parents provide help for children to progress beyond their current stage, e.g. by modelling a structure

Bruner

"Language Acquisition Support System (LASS)"

• Adults provide "scaffolding"

Example:

The "peek-a-boo" game as an early introduction to conversational turn-taking

Pre-Linguistic Stage

Parents sometimes infer/ imagine that the child is trying to communicate a particular meaning

Example:

Cooing and Babbling sounds

Holophrastic Stage

Single words -- often concrete nouns -- used to stand for whole phrases

Example:

"Drink!" could mean "I would like a drink" or "I have spilled my drink". What else could it mean?

Telegraphic Phrase

Elliptical Utterances:

function words

(grammatical items)

left out, content words (lexical items) used

Example:

"Want drink juice" could mean "I want to drink my juice" or "Do you want me to drink my juice?" Can you think of any other possible meanings?

Post-Telegraphic Phrase

Beginning to use utterances with more than one clause. Words which were missing in the telegraphic stage are now present:

determiners, auxiliary verbs (helping verbs), personal and possessive pronouns

Child-Directed Language

Motherese

-Is very gendered, melodic and soft (i.e. "Bunny")

-Imitation --> Reinforcement --> Motherese <-- Turn-Taking

Fatherese

-Very direct questions

Othereses

-Like from a neighbor or something