Child Language Acquisition theories

Halliday- Functions of Language Theory

-Instrumental: language used to fulfil a need

-Regulatory: used to influence behavior of others

-Interactional: used to develop social relationships

-Personal: used to express personal opinions, feelings, and speaker identity

-Representational: used to exchange, relay, or request info

-Heuristic: used to explore world + learn and discover

-Imaginative: used to explore imagination

B.F. Skinner- Operant Conditioning (Behaviorism)

Imitation and reinforcement theory (think jedi mind trick)

-Child: "I falled down"

-Adult: "You fell down?"

-Child: "Yes, I fell down."

Chomsky- Language Acquisition Device (LAD or Nativism)

Innate (inborn) ability to acquire language- suggests grammatical and syntactic structures are innate; child only needs to learn vocabulary

Vygotsky- Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD or Cognitivism)

Actual (aided) developmental stage VS. potential (assisted developmental stage)- teachers and parents provide help for children to progress beyond current stage

(ie. modeling: "I do, you do, we do")

Bruner- Language Acquisition Support System (LASS)

Adults provide scaffolding (building blocks)

-LASS 1: (caregiver) gains attention

-LASS 2: query (asks child qn)

-LASS 3: Label (child answers)

-LASS 4: Feedback (correction or praise)

Piaget- Cognitive Development

Idea that sensory development depends on psychological development

-Sensory motor (0-2): child experiences world through senses + movement, no ability to think through actions

-Preoperational (2-7): still can't think through actions; assumes others share viewpoint & engages in collective monologues (talk, no interact) but understands conversation

-Concrete operational (7-11): develops reasoning process (identification), orders objects by certain physical aspects (seriation; ex. small to large), groups objects focusing on certain aspects (classification; ex. animal kingdom)

-Formal operational (11+): can think abstractly; developed inductive/deductive abilities, can imagine best possible solutions through thinking ideally, develops complex hypothetical thinking skills

Child-directed speech

Language used to address children by caregivers, includes features such as:

-Simplified lexis

-Exaggerated intonation

-Interrogatives

-Simple closed sentences

-Concrete nouns (physical world, 5 senses)

-Dynamic verbs (description showing what someone is doing)

-Recastings and repeated sentence frames

-Omission of inflections

Child language acquisition (use for introduction: "child is in ___ stage due to ___")

Pre-linguistic stage (0-6 months): early vocalizations such as cooing and crying, as well as recognition and imitation of sounds in the environment

Babbling stage (6-9 months): Babbling, making sounds with both consonants and vowels. Also begins to repeat syllables and experiment w tones and volumes

Holophrastic stage (one word; 12-18 months): Begin to use single word to express wide range of meanings (ex. "milk" might mean "I want milk")

Two-word stage (18-24 months): children start combining two words to form simple phrases (ex. "Mommy car")

Telegraphic stage (2-3 years): multi-word utterances are used with simplified grammar and omitted words (ex. "Daddy go park")

Post-telegraphic stage (3-5): development of language skills, learning more complex grammatical structures and sentence patters