Child Language Acquisition: Flashcards

Broomfield (1933)

Learning to speak is the greatest intellectual feat any of us is ever required to perform.

Ferguson (1978)

Came up with BTR (Baby Talk Register) which is language that the MKO uses including things such as high pitch, short utterances, infant games, reduplication and questions.

Newport, Gleitman and Gleitman (1977)

Motherese Hypothesis: the special restrictive properties of caretaker speech play a causal role in language acquisition.

Clarke-Stewart (1973)

Pre-Speech Interaction Theory: Emphasised significant role of mother-child interactions in promoting vocabulary development in ways such as:

• Quality of Interaction (using wide range of verbal interaction)

• Frequency and Engagement (regular meaningful conversation)

• Contextual Learning (incorporating language into everyday activities)

Bruner

Scaffolding: the structural support that adults provide to children as they learn new skills, including language. Support is tailored to the child’s current ability. Also includes interaction and expansion and recasting.

Vygotsky

Social Learning: social interaction is a learning catalyst, language plays a central role in cognitive development.

Zome of Proximal Development: Introduced the concept of the ZPD, a chart representing the gap between what a learner can achieve independently and what a learner can achieve with a MKO - effective learning happens in this zone.

Skinner

Behaviourist Approach: language learning is stimulus and response, learnt like any other behaviour, imitation, MKOs reinforce and correct children’s utterances, forming the basis for their knowledge of language.

Piaget

Cognitivist Approach: cognitive development must precede linguistic development, children can only produce linguistic structures once they understand the underlying concepts behind it.

Receptive Vocabulary

Lexemes that a child can understand.

Productive Vocabulary

Lexemes that a child can say, may not be pronounced in a standard manner.

Holophrasis

Where a single word represents the meaning of a potentially longer utterance.

One Word Utterance

A single lexeme label for an object - not a longer message.

Over-Extension

Children applying the same lexeme to anything with similar shape, size, texture, movement, sound, taste or situation. (eg. all pets are called dogs by the child)

Aitchison

Acquisition Of Vocabulary:

• Labelling: linking the sounds of particular words to the objects of what they refer to.

• Packaging: understanding a word’s range of meaning, over-extension and under-extension can occur here.

• Network Building: involves understanding connections begween words (eg. some words are opposites)

Also believed that the speed of learning is influenced by both innate abilities and the environment.

What are the challenges to behaviourism?

• The fact that children don’t automatically pick up correct forms from imitation.

• Language environments are complex and incomplete - Chomsky calls this ‘poverty of the stimulus’.

• Unclear how grammatical structures could be assimilated by imitation.

• Fails to explain how children produce structures they haven’t heard before.

What are the examples of behaviourism?

• Regional accents.

• Dialects/sociolects/familects.

• Repetition of utterances that have been modelled.

• Swear words.

What are challenges to congitivism?

• Difficulty in making precise connections between cognitive abd linguistic developmental stages.

• Difficult to study inside the ‘black box’ of the brain.

What are examples of cognitivism?

• Difference between productive and receptive lexicon.

• Holophrastic utterances.

• Over/underextensions.

• Evidence of children understanding concepts through their language choices.

What are challenges to social interaction?

• Children couldn’t learn adult language if they could only hear parentese.

• Parents may imitate babies’ language rather than vice versa.

• Parentese appears to structure interaction, rather than teach language.

• Babies hear all audible language in the environment, not simply what is directed towards them.

• Parents aren’t the only influence in a child’s life.

What are the examples of social interaction?

• Baby Talk Register features.

• Evidence of scaffolding.

• Interrogatives.

• Prosodics.

• Child orientated lexicon.

• Short, simple utterances.

• Liquid substitution.

• Consonant cluster reduction.

What are the challenges to Innateness?

• The LAD is an abstract concept that hasn’t been found yet.

• Theory is based on learner’s linguistic competence, which is an abstract phenomenon.

• Theory places emphasis on the linguistic competence of adults, rather than the developmental aspects of language acquisition.

What are examples of nativism?

• Universal patterns of acquisition (one word, two word, telegraphic and post-telegraphic stages).

• Setting the parameters - virtuous errors.

Bard & Sachs (1977)

Jim Case Study: Jim was a child of deaf parents who both used sign language, parents assumed that Jim would learn language through TV and radio, Jim experienced lack of structure and his speech was delayed until he went to speech therapy.

Genie (1970)

Discovered at 13, had no language other than voiceless sounds, linguists used her to test critical period theory.