VCE English Language 2025 Unit 1 AOS 2: 'Language Acquisition' Essay Evidence

An example that supports the importance of social interaction.

‘Jim’, exposed to language but had little spoken interaction and struggled to use language proficiently before interacting with a speech therapist, despite having good cognitive ability.

A language example that supports imitation.

The existence of regional accents. Bottle of water? Use metalanguage.

Example that highlights the importance of cognitive development.

The inability of children to use the past-tense before they have developed the ability to conceptualize the past. For example, a child might say ‘I is wearing a dress’ when describing a photograph of themselves, instead of ‘I was wearing a dress’.

Evidence against cognitive function.

The case of Genie, who had full cognitive ability but still said ‘When is stop spitting?’

An example that disproves child imitation and proves LAD.

‘She holded the rabbit.’

Additional Language Benefits of Youth

_{^{Mimicking sounds from birth, such as rolled ‘r’s.}}

Additional Language Benefits of Age

Forming the past-tense. I walk, I did walk, Je joue, J’ai joue

Relative Difficulty

Subject-verb-object, ‘Ik kees een boek’.

Intrinsic difficulty.

Frog/frogs, croak/s/ed/ing

Environment artificial exposure.

Some languages may use different paralinguistic features. In Korea, you bow to say hello, goodbye, thank you and I’m sorry.

Personal Attributes

Working memory helps you memorize things like vocabulary, past tense conjugations.

What are the three ways children simplify pronunciation?

Deletion, substitution, and reduplication.’

What is a semantic field?

A set of semantically related lexemes.

How do children form negative constructions?

First begin to use not or no, singularly or in front of other expressions. This is followed by using ‘can’t’ or ‘won’t’ by age 3, placed after the subject and before the verb. Words like ‘didn’t’ or ‘isn’t’ occur during the third stage.’

What does it mean when a child is using a regular grammatical rule on an irregular word?

Morphological overgeneralisation.

When explaining the Wug Test, use…

Morphology, imitation.

What are the stages of questioning?

Stage one relies on intonation alone, e.g ‘Daddy gone?’. Stage two children acquire questioning words, e.g ‘Where Daddy gone?’ Stage three uses subject-auxiliary inversion, such as ‘Is Daddy gone?’

What are the different sentence structures?

Simple- One independent clause. Compound- Two independent clauses with a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) or semi-colon. Complex- One independent clause and one or more dependent clauses, connected by subordinators.