first language acquisition

infants learning

infants don’t learn language through explicit teaching
→ children resist instruction most of the time
→ adults reward a correct message/ meaning > child’s grammar
→ many aspects of lang are too complex to be explained

‘caregiver speech’

used to be called ‘motherese’
slower speech rate
wider pitch range
hyper articulation
repetition
→ better indication of sounds, words and syntactic phrases

imitation

imitation → learn words and unanalysed phrases, but not learn a productive application of grammatical patterns
e.g. knowing that you can replace nouns with NPs, how many arguments verbs need etc

pattern learning skills

error patterns show children are building a rule-governed system, not just memorising what they hear
e.g. applying the usual suffix to irregular verbs, they haven’t learnt the exception but they are applying the rule (‘eat’→’eated’)