Theories & Evidence

Question 1

Halliday’s Imaginative Function of Language

Answer 1

evidence of children putting their innate development of grammar knowledge to use as they are creating brand new sentence structures that are often correct in the post-telegraphic stage

Question 2

Order of Acquisition of Inflections & Function Words

Answer 2

development of -ing before -ed can be linked to the development of mental capacity to differentiate between tenses

Question 3

Fis Phenomenon

Answer 3

indicates that children rely on adult pronunciation (imitation) to know the correct way to pronounce the word

Question 4

Object Permanence

Answer 4

indicates that the realisation of object-permanence plays a significant role in the development of children’s early vocabulary

Question 5

Overgeneralisations

Answer 5

shows that children learn grammatical rules and indicates that they have an innate capacity for learning grammar

Question 6

Halliday’s Interactive Function of Language

Answer 6

demonstrates the importance of interaction in a child’s development as it is one of the earlier functions of language to be used by children as they develop language

Question 7

Proto-Conversations

Answer 7

highlights the importance of interaction in the development of language

Question 8

Bruner’s (1976) study on Peek-A-Boo games

Answer 8

found that up to about 9 months, the adult is generally in control. From then on, control of the sequence of activity is shared more equally between child and adult

Question 9

Berko’s Wug Experiment

Answer 9

supports the innateness theory because these rules will have been learnt by children themselves and not through imitation.

Question 10

Child-Directed Speech

Answer 10

indicates that interaction from caregivers plays a key role in children’s language acquisition because the words that are emphasised are often the ones that children learn first

links to usage-based because children are more likely to get utterances involving such words correct

Question 11

Brown, Cazden and Bellugi (1969)

Answer 11

found that parents often respond to the TRUTH value of what their baby is saying, rather than its grammatical correctness

Question 12

Genie

Answer 12

This highlights the importance of interaction in the development of language in children.

Question 13

Overextensions

Answer 13

represents the Universal Grammar approach of innateness as it reflects the child working out grammar and meaning for themselves since they have not imitated it

as mentioned in David Crystal’s ‘How Language Works’, the child relies on the adult they are interacting with correcting them to help them put these words in the right category

Question 14

Brown’s Semantic Roles

Answer 14

demonstrate a basic knowledge of syntax as children begin to utilise word order to express a certain meaning - ‘location + entity’ is absent as we always give the subject before the complement in English.

Question 15

Jim

Answer 15

highlights the importance of interaction in learning language

Question 16

Babbling

Answer 16

is a universal attribute which indicates that babies have the capacity to learn language from birth and that it is innate

Question 17

Melodic Utterance

Answer 17

shows the baby is imitating the people around it: a baby who will have a tonal language as their mother tongue (e.g. Mandarin or Thai) will learn tones in this stage

development of these varying tones reflects growing grammatical ability: for example, rising and falling tones differentiate between the two functions of tag questions in English