Child language acquisition - Innateness

Innateness/Nativism

Chomsky 1959, Children are born with an in built capacity for language development.

Telegraphic speech

Form of speech that tends to occur between 24-30 months where children omit function words but include content words

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Chomsky key concept, area in brain that is biologically programmed for speech, provides us with innate understanding and ability.

Linguistic competence

The unconscious knowledge of grammar that allows a speaker to use and understand language

Virtuous errors

Chomsky, links to universal grammar acquisition, mistakes children make when they apply a grammatical rule non standardly, e.g. ‘I goed’ to make past tense

Wug test

Jean Burko Gleason, asked children to apply grammatical rules with morphemes like pluralisation to a word they had never heard of, proving innateness.

Patterns of morpheme appearance

Roger Brown 1973, Longitudinal study on 3 children, Adam, Eve, Sarah, found a common order for 14 main morphemes to appear between 20 and 36 months, -ing 1st, plural -s 2nd, auxiliary ‘be’ last.

Stages of inflections aquisition

Cruttenden 1979, Stage 1: Children memorise words on individual basis, Stage 2: Children show awareness of inflections, learn past tense forms, often say ‘runned’ rather than ‘ran’ (Overgeneralisation), Stage 3: Standard inflections used

Stages of interrogative acquisition

Klima and Bellugi 1966, Stage 1: Rising intonation without auxiliary verbs, Stage 2: Use of auxiliary verbs without subject-verb inversion, Stage 3: Mastery of subject-auxiliary inversion

Stages of negation

Bellugi 1967, Stage 1: child uses ‘no’ and start or end of sentences, Stage 2: Child moves ‘no’ or ‘not’ into sentence, Stage 3: Child achieves standard form

Innnateness challenges

The LAD is an abstract concept that we have no proof or evidence for.

Heavily based on linguistic competence which is abstract concept.

It places more emphasis on linguistic competence of adult native speakers, than developmental parts of language acquisition