Child Language Acquisition

What did Mehler et al (1988) find?

4 day old French babies increased their sucking rate on a dummy when they heard French as opposed to other languages showing they had awareness of sounds of French prior to birth

What is the period between birth and the first word being spoken called?

Pre-verbal stage

When do babies start the cooing stage?

6-8 weeks

How old are babies when they start to babble?

6 months old

What is canonical babbling?

reduplicated babbling of strings of similar consonant/vowel combinations like ba-ba-ba

Does babbling carry meaning?

An infant may produce dadadada but not actually refer to dad at this stage so no

What is a proto-word?

A certain combination of vowels and consonants which carry meaning like a word e.g Mmm to show that they want more food

At what age does babbling start to have meaning and sound combined?

10 months old

What is deletion in terms of pronunciation?

A child drops a consonant altogether most likely at the end of a word e.g ca rather than cat

What is substitution in terms of pronunciation?

A child replaces a consonant with an easier one e.g wegs rather than legs

What is cluster reduction in terms of pronunciation?

Two or more consonants together in a word may make the child drop one of them e.g geen instead of green

What did Berko and Brown find? (1960)

• a child referred to his plastic fish as fis

• -the adult asked 'is this your fis?'

• the child said no stating that it was his fis

• when the adult asked 'is this your fish?' - the child replied yes my fis

• This suggests that children can recognise and understand a wider range of phonemes than they can produce

What is addition in terms of phonological development?

When a vowel is added to the end of a word e.g dog becomes dogu

What is assimilation in terms of phonological development?

When one consonant in a word is changed because of the influence of another in the same word e.g tub becomes bub due to the final /b/

What is reeduplication in terms of phonological development?

When a phoneme is repeated like moo-moo for cow or bik-bik for biscuit

What are the 7 functions of early child language as suggested by Halliday? (1975)

• instrumental - get something - 'go toily'

• regulatory - to make requests - 'not your teddy'

• -interactional - to relate - 'nice mummy'

• -personal - express feelings - 'naughty doggy'

• -heuristic - find out about environment - 'What boy doing?'

• -imaginative - to be creative - 'One day my Daddy came home and said'

• -representational - to convey info - 'I'm three'

How do babies learn about social conventions before they can speak?

The game of peek-a-boo is an early form of social interaction as it familiarizes turn taking

How many words can a child use at 18 months?

50

How many words can a child understand at 18 months/

250

How many words does a 2 year old use?

300

At what age will children improvise if they do not know the word for something?

12-18 months

What is underextension?

When a child uses a word in a very restricted way e.g mummy means only the child's mummy no one else can be called that

What is overextension/

When a child uses a word beyond its meaning e.g cat refers to anything with four legs

What development processes did Aitchison (1987) suggest?

Labelling, packaging, and network building

What is labelling?

when a child links a sound to an object

What is packaging?

when a child begins to understand the range of meaning a word might have e.g bottle comes in many different shapes and sizes but all bottles have the same function

What is network building?

When a child starts to make connections between words e.g opposites like big and small

What is the stage known as where a child says their first word?

Holophrastic stage

What are holophrases?

Single words that express a whole idea

e.g Teddy could mean many things like get me my teddy, where is it, here's my teddy

When do children start to use two-words in conjunction?

18 months

What stage happens at 2 years old?

The telegraphic stage - children start to use three or four word combinations

What words do children omit at 2 years?

Functional words such as prepositions, auxiliary verbs and determiners

What is Berko's Wug Test? (1958)

-children were shown a picture of a strange creature and told it was a Wug

• they were show a drawing of the two creatures and told 'there are two..' encouraging the children to complete the sentence

• 3-4 year old children said there were 2 Wugs

What did the Wug Test show?

• Children hadn't used the -s because they were imitating someone as they had never heard of a Wug before

• These children had automatically used the rule that states 0s is added to a noun to form a plural

• this is internalisation, hearing the rule so often it becomes second nature to apply it

At what age do children start to use rising intonation to ask questions?

Around 18months with sit me? or go walk/

At what age do childre use no or not to make things negative (usually at the beginning of a phrase)?

18 months

What did behaviourist Skinner suggest? (1957)?

That language is acquired through imitation and reinforcement:

-reinforce what the child says by repeating phrases and correcting mistakes

-children repeat what they hear

reward a child's efforts with praise

Problems with Skinner's Imitation Theory

• children can construct new sentences that they've never heard before, not always direct imitation

• -Imitation also does not explain the fis phenonmenon as children recognise a much larger range of words than they can use

• -they don't memorise sentences to use later so development is not exclusively based on repetition

• -Imitation does not explain overgeneralisations such as he runned away (children do not copy these errors as adults don't make them)

What did Nativist Chomsky (1965) argue?

-argued that a child's ability to acquire language was inbuilt

-Language isn't taught it's a natural development that occurs when children are exposed to language

What did Chomsky suggest?

• that each child has a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) which allows them to take in and use the grammatical rules of the language that's spoken where they live

• this explains overgeneralisations as if the brain is preprogrammed for them

-Therefore, children might learn language quickly as they are predisposed to it

What is a criticism of Chomsky's approach?

Underestimates the significance of interaction, imitation and reinforcement in language development

What is Piaget's Cognitive Approach?

The idea that a child needs certain mental abilities before they can acquire aspects of language: 18 months - children gain object permanence and this coincides with a big increase in vocabulary

This means that the child can better understand concepts like past,present and future

What is a criticism of Piaget?

People with learning difficulties are still linguistically fluent which therefore suggests that cognitive development and language development are not as closely connected as Piaget suggests

What does Bruner (1983) suggest?

That there is a Language Acquisition Support System (LASS) - a system where caregivers support their child's linguistic development in social situations e.g 'What's that there, is it a doggy?' the child learns to play a more active social role by asking questions

What did Lenneberg (1967) propose?

The Critical Period Hypothesis, which states that without linguistic interactions before ages 5-6 language development i severely limited

What is CDS?

child-directed speech

What are the phonological features of CDS?

• intonation is exaggerated and words are stressed more strongly than they are in adult conversations

• the pace is much slower with longer pauses than in adult speech

• words are repeated e.g Get the ball Annie, get the ball

What are the lexical features of CDS?

• vocabulary is often simplified e.g nana instead of banana

• words refer to objects that the child can see and touch 'Look at the little doggy, it's playing with the ball'

• caregivers use reduplication e.g moo-moo

• diminuitives such as fishy, doggie

What are the grammatical features of CDS?

-Sentence structures are simplified and function words are omitted e.g Annie go for walk?

• Present tense is used more than the past tense e.g Are you singing?

• Proper Nouns instead of pronouns e.g Is Annie making a sandcastle?

• -Higher proportion of nouns will be concrete nouns

What other techniques do caregivers use to encourage language development?

• repeat certain structures e.g Annie get the tractor, Annie wash the baby

• ask lots of questions e.g Where's doggie gone? - encourages the child to respond

• Use lots of imperatives e.g pick up dolly, eat your food

• -Recast what a child has said 'Playing with my car' 'Yes you're playing with your car'

• Expand on what the child has said 'Playing' 'yes you're playing with your car'

What is the impact of CDS?

• not used in every culture but speakers of all cultures still become fluent

What is scaffolding?

modelling speech and suggesting the answer e.g ‘What did we buy at the shop today? Did we buy apples?’

What is a proto conversation?

when a child cannot produce words yet but the parent still acts like they are having a conversation with them

What is framing?

Asking questions to elicit correct answers ‘Far bird’ ‘Not far, the bird is..? fast’

What are the 4 methods outlined by the LASS?

scaffolding

proto-conversations

framing

recasting

What is recasting?

repeating but with corrections ‘I want eat’ ‘What do you want to eat’

What are virtuous errors?

mistakes made by children when learning a language, which are not errors in the traditional sense, but rather demonstrate their understanding and application of language rules, even if those rules are not entirely correct