Child Language Acquisition (year12)

Gennie Wiley

‘wild child’-she was trapped for 13 years and she could never learn how to speak as she has passed the critical period.

critical period

0-5 years - harder to learn langauge after this period.

Phonology

study of sounds

Phoneme

unit of sound (consitant sound)

Phonation

ability to make sounds

vowel sounds

a,e,i,o,u (first sounds that babies hear)

Plosives

b,d,k,t (hard constant sounds)

Fricatives

f,s,v,z

Wasal

n,m,ng

Lateral

L

Approximants

y,j,w,r

Vegatative crying stage

0-4 months - coughing/burping/sucking/crying

Cooing stage

4-7 months - grunt/laughter starts,pitch and loudness practised.

babbling stage

6-12 months - sounds linked to own langauge reduplicated words.

proto- words stage

9-12 months - world like vocalisations 12 months =50 words.

Holophrastic stage

12-18 months - One word utterances

Two words stage

18-24 months - two words combines to create simple syntactical structures.

Telegraphic stage

24-36 months - three or more words joined in increasingly complex and accurate orders.

Post- Telegraphic stage

36 months - Increasing awareness of grammatical rules and irregularities.

Phoneme addition

Reduplication of sounds as an extreme phoneme is added eg. ‘doggie’ rather than ‘dog’.

Phoneme deletion

Final phoneme may be deleted and unstressed syllables may be removed eg. ‘banana’ becomes ‘nana’ and consonant clusters may be reduced ‘seep’ instead of ‘sheep’.

Phoneme substitution

Simplification by replacing harder sounds with sounds which are easier.

Assimilation

Whereby the child changes a sound because of the neighbouring sound in the word eg, ‘doggie’ can become ‘goggie’.

The Fis Phenomenon

1960s - Jean Berko- Gleason and Roger Brown

suggets that reception has outstripped production:childeren can hear more than they can say.