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English Language- AO2 > Child Language Acquisition > Flashcards

Child Language Acquisition Flashcards

1
Q

What are the 7 approaches of child language acquisition?

A
  1. Innate
  2. Cognitive
  3. Behaviourism
  4. Social interaction
  5. Rule based
  6. Creative
  7. Functional/usage
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2
Q

Who suggested the cognitive approach?

A

Piaget

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3
Q

What does the cognitive approach suggest?

A
  1. Viewing speech acquisition in relation to a child’s mental and emotional development
  2. Language reflects thought processes
  3. Directly links language acquisition to intellectual development
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4
Q

What are the 4 stages within the cognitive approach, when do they occur, and what are they?

A
  1. Sensorimotor stage (up to age of 2)- learning about the physical world; developing motor skills
  2. Preoperational stage (ages 2-6)- developing ability to think of symbols and form words from ideas
  3. Concrete operations stage (ages 7-12)- develop logic and reasoning and begin to consider others’ ideas
  4. Formal operations stage (up to age 15)- complex language system develops fully
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5
Q

Who proposed the behaviourist approach?

A

Skinner

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6
Q

What does the behaviourist approach suggest?

A
  1. Emphasises the role of environmental factors in influencing behaviour
  2. Language learning is cause and effect (stimulus and response)
  3. Involves imitation
  4. Caregivers reinforce and ‘correct’ children’s utterances
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7
Q

What can the behaviourist approach be used to explain?

A
  1. Lexemes that children pick up from their environment (e.g. swear words)
  2. Regional accent features
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8
Q

What view do behaviourists maintain?

A

When we are born our mind is a ‘tabula rasa’ (blank slate), therefore we must mimic the speech we hear, reinforced by caregivers

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9
Q

Who proposed the innate approach?

A

Chomsky

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10
Q

What does the innate approach suggest?

A
  1. Children are born with an inbuilt capacity for language development
  2. The brain has a language acquisition device that’s biologically programmed for speech and provides us with an innate understanding ability
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11
Q

Who proposed the social interaction approach?

A

Vygotsky and Bruner

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12
Q

What does the social interaction approach suggest?

A

Caregivers will design speech for children, giving them the opportunity to partake in positive communicative relationships which form the basis for future meaningful communication

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13
Q

What does Vygotsky’s sociocultural model suggest and what approach does it support?

A
  • Supports social interaction approach
  1. Cultural development happens when children observe others interacting, the child is then able to develop the behaviours to communicate this way
  2. Children learn best when interacting with others during problem solving
  3. Interaction between adult and child begins as adult led, the child then emerges as the communicator in their own right and goes from gurgling to producing full standard utterances
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14
Q

What does Bruner’s learning development theory suggest and what approach does it support?

A
  • Supports social interaction approach
  1. Learners learn best when they discover knowledge for themselves
  2. Interaction between adult and child builds the structure of knowledge and language long before the child can speak
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15
Q

What does the functional/usage based approach suggest?

A
  1. The structure and organisation of a speakers linguistic knowledge is the product of language use
  2. We have words like ‘this’ and ‘that’ because we interact with others for context
  3. We have interrogatives because language functions as a tool to gain information
  4. Children have an innate ability to understand the goals/intentions of mature speakers when they use language
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16
Q

What are some of the criticisms of the functional/usage based approach?

A
  1. Cannot explain the complex grammatical constructions
  2. Doesn’t deal with the poverty of the stimulus
  3. Cannot conclude whether the cognitive processes are really universal
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17
Q

What does the creative approach suggest?

A
  1. A child should be allowed to experiment creatively with language, without struct correction, using trial and error
  2. Advocates suggest that, by not focusing primarily on accuracy, we make children less afraid of making mistakes, raising their enjoyment and self esteem
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18
Q

What does the rule based approach suggest?

A

When a child understands the conventions of writing (rules of spelling, punctuation and grammar), progress will be more rapid and they will move on quickly to producing understandable texts

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19
Q

Who suggested the motherese hypothesis?

A

Newport and Gleitman

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20
Q

What does the motherese hypothesis suggest?

A

Those special restrictive properties of caretaker speech play a casual role in language acquisition

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21
Q

Why is the motherese hypothesis not generally accepted today?

A
  1. Children couldn’t learn adult language if they only hear parantese
  2. Parents may imitate babies rather than vice versa
  3. Parantese appears to structure interaction rather than teach language
  4. Babies hear all audible language in the environment, not what’s directed to them
  5. Parents aren’t the only influential figures in a child’s life
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22
Q

What is pre speech?

A

Stages of development before a 1st word is produced

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23
Q

What are the stages of pre speech and when do they occur?

A
  1. Stage 1- biological noises (0-8 weeks)
  2. Stage 2- cooing (8-20 weeks)
  3. Stage 3- vocal play (20-25 weeks)
  4. Stage 4- babbling (25+ weeks)
  5. Stage 5- melodic utterance (40+ weeks)
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24
Q

What happens in stage 1 of pre speech and when does it occur?

A
  1. Occurs 0-8 weeks
  2. Biological noises- burping, hiccuping, coughing
  3. Produce reflexive cries: a series of 1 second pulses with a falling intonation
  4. Practice moving organs of the vocal tract and controlling airflow
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25
Q

What happens in stage 2 of pre speech and when does it occur?

A
  1. Occurs 8-20 weeks
  2. Cooing
  3. Segments of sound get shorter: 0.5 seconds
  4. Velar sounds are produced: /g/, /k/, [x]
  5. Uvular /r/ is produced
  6. Long vowels such as /u:/ are produced and eventually more varied diphthongs /aʊ/
  7. Laughing begins
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26
Q

What happens in stage 3 of pre speech and when does it occur?

A
  1. Occurs 20-25 weeks
  2. Vocal play
  3. Front nasal phoneme /m/ and /n/ produced
  4. Intonation from high to low on vowels
  5. Greater repetition of sounds
  6. Fricative /f/ produced
  7. Raspberries
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27
Q

What happens in stage 4 of pre speech and when does it occur?

A
  1. Occurs 25+ weeks
  2. Babbling
  3. Begins with reduplicated babbling: small number of sounds, greater frequency and stability
  4. Begins with reduplicated velar plosives /k/ and /g/
  5. Back sounds are replaced by bilabial plosives /p/ + /b/ and alveolar /d/
  6. After 40 weeks, babbling moves to less fixed patterns known as variegated babbling
  7. Alveolar fricatives produced
  8. Consonant>vowel rather than vowel>consonant
  9. Babies from all speech communities babble using the same sounds
  10. Deaf babies will also babble as it’s not a reaction to environmental sounds
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28
Q

What happens in stage 5 or pre speech and when does it occur?

A
  1. Occurs 40+ weeks
  2. Melodic utterances
  3. Prosodic patterns of the language are acquired- spoken melody develops
  4. Often known as scribble talk
  5. Babies from different speech communities will now sound different
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29
Q

What is a criticism of pre speech?

A

All children develop at different rates, so the ages of entering stages are very generalised- babies are their own individuals

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30
Q

Who proposed the language acquisition support system (LASS)?

A

Bruner

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31
Q

What is the language acquisition support system (LASS)?

A

A child’s social support network; the caregivers help and provide towards speech acquisition

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32
Q

Who suggested the more knowledgeable other?

A

Vygotsky

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33
Q

What is a more knowledgeable other?

A

Caregivers, parents, older siblings- anyone who interacts with a child who has more experience of speech

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34
Q

What is child directed speech?

A

Linguistic features used to accommodate children

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35
Q

What is the baby talk register?

A

Typical child directed speech features

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36
Q

Who proposed the language acquisition device (LAD)?

A

Chomsky

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37
Q

What does the language acquisition device (LAD) do?

A

Provides us with an instinctive mental capacity with enables the acquisition and production of speech

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38
Q

What is universal grammar?

A

A set of principles upon which all languages build

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39
Q

Who proposed universal grammar?

A

Chomsky

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40
Q

Who proposed virtuous errors?

A

Chomsky

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41
Q

What are virtuous errors?

A
  • A nonstandard utterance from a child based upon logical conclusions about grammar and morphology
  • E.g. thrower
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42
Q

What are the 2 types of vocabulary?

A
  1. Receptive
  2. Productive
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43
Q

What is a receptive vocabulary?

A
  • Lexemes a child can understand
  • Deconstruction of message/semantic meaning
  • On average, children can understand 20-50 words before producing 1
44
Q

What is a productive vocabulary?

A
  • Lexemes a child can produce
  • Self expression may be pronounced in a non standard manner
  • 1st word is at 12 months
  • By 18 months the vocabulary is 50 words
45
Q

What are holophrasis?

A
  • Where a single word represents a meaning of a potentially longer utterance
  • /dɔ:/ meaning ‘can you close the door mummy’
46
Q

What is a one word utterance?

A
  • A single lexeme label for an object, not a longer message
  • /dɔ:/ alongside pointing to a door
47
Q

What is the primary hypothesis?

A
  • What words mean when children hear a lexeme the 1st time based off of contextual cues/knowledge of language
  • E.g. uses white to describe snow, confusion when parent uses it to describe a blank page
48
Q

What are the 2 types of extension?

A
  1. Over
  2. Under
49
Q

What is over extension?

A
  • Overly broad misuse of a lexeme based on perceived similarities/relationships
  • Common under 2 years
  • E.g. dog= all small animals
50
Q

What is under extension?

A
  • Overly narrow misuse of a lexeme
  • Less common/easy to spot because it’s accurate as far as it goes
  • E.g. ‘shoe’ means the child’s own shoe and nobody else’s
51
Q

Who suggested children’s first 50 words?

A

Nelson

52
Q

What is children’s first 50 words?

A
  • A study of the first 50 words produced by 18 children, suggesting 4 categories for early lexis
  1. Naming things or people
  2. Actions and events
  3. Describing/modifying
  4. Personal and social words
53
Q

Who looked at the ‘Stages of Child’s Acquisition of Vocabulary’

A

Aitchison

54
Q

What is the ‘Stages of Child’s Acquisition of Vocabulary’?

A
  • Identified 3 stages that occur during a child’s acquisition of vocabulary
  1. Labelling- making the link between the sounds of particular words and the objects to which they refer to
  2. Packaging- Understanding a word’s range of meaning (over extension and under extension become a hurdle in the development of language)
  3. Network building- grasping the connections between words
55
Q

Who proposed the taxonomy of language functions?

A

Halliday

56
Q

What is the taxonomy of language functions?

A
  • The classification of the functions of utterances of a child
  • Instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, representational, heuristic, imaginative
57
Q

Who proposed the categories of children’s speech functions?

A

Dore

58
Q

What are the categories of children’s speech functions?

A
  • Categorised children’s speech functions through studying 12-18 month old children
  • Labelling- Utterances that don’t seek a response
  • Repeating- repeating an overheard word
  • Answering- responding to a question
  • Requesting- asking for help with an action
  • Calling- calling to someone far away
  • Greeting- welcoming a newcomer
  • Protesting- shouting at something unwanted
  • Practising- saying a word, out of context, just to practise it
59
Q

Who proposed the fis phenomenon?

A

Berko and Brown

60
Q

What is the fis phenomenon?

A
  • Demonstrates that the perception of phonemes occurs earlier than the ability of the child to produce those phonemes
  • During a research project, a child referred to his inflatable fish as /fɪs/. When adults asked him “is this your fis” he said no, but when they asked “is this your fish?” he said yes
  • Although the child could not produce the phoneme /ʃ/ he could perceive it as being different from the phoneme /s/
61
Q

What is telegraphic speech?

A

A stage in children’s language development where utterances are created without function words

62
Q

What is the word spurt?

A

Highly productive phase of acquiring lexis triggered by a child’s newfound ability to construct interrogative clauses

63
Q

Who proposed the stages of interrogative acquisition?

A

Klima and Bellugi

64
Q

What are the stages of interrogative acquisition?

A
  • Questioning function is initially expressed prosodically with rising intonation
  • Children structure closed interrogatives (requiring yes or no) with an initial auxiliary element before they can imply initial interrogative pronouns
65
Q

Who proposed the stages of negation?

A

Bellugi

66
Q

What are the stages of negation?

A
  1. Firstly, children use ‘no’ to begin an utterance
  2. No/not moves to the inside of the clause
  3. The child achieves the standard form of negation “I don’t want to”
67
Q

Who proposed the critical period hypothesis?

A

Lenneberg

68
Q

What does the critical period hypothesis suggest?

A

There is a ‘window’ of time to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment, after which further acquisition becomes more difficult and effortful

69
Q

What is the case of Genie?

A
  • Genie was a 13 year old girl found in a dark room with no interaction after 10 years of isolation
  • Upon finding her, she portrayed animalistic behaviour, aggression, voiceless sounds
  • The 1st words she could produce were monosyllabic
  • Genie never fully acquired the grammatical structures of English
70
Q

What is the case of Jim?

A
  • A boy who was the son of deaf parents
  • Parents tried to help him learn language by making him listen to the radio everyday, but this din’t work
  • His speech development was severely limited until attending speech therapy
  • Indicates the importance of verbal interaction
71
Q

What was the wug test?

A
  • Research which tested acquisition and application of the morphological system
  • Researcher showed children cards with drawing of imaginary animals and teaches the child a nonsense name for it. The researcher says “This is a wug. Now there’s 2 of them, there are 2 ___”
  • The children were baffled by the question and couldn’t answer correctly, answering “two wug”
  • Children aged 4-5 test best in dealing with /z/ after a voiced consonant and generally say there are 2 wugs, with a /z/; they do almost as well with the voiceless /s/
72
Q

How can the word ‘wugs’ be analysed?

A

Wug= neologism
S= plural inflectional bound morpheme + voiceless velar plosive

73
Q

What is the principles and parameter theory?

A

By hearing the principles and parameters of a native language, children can define and retain rules

74
Q

Who suggested the principles and parameter theory?

A

Pinker

75
Q

What is truth value vs reinforcement?

A
  • Parents often respond to the truth value of what their child is saying, rather than how standard the grammar is
  • E.g. a parent is more likely to respond to “there doggie” with “yes, it’s a dog” than “no, it’s there is a dog”
76
Q

Who proposed pre speech interaction?

A

Clarke-Steart

77
Q

What does pre speech interaction suggest?

A

Children whose parents talk to them a lot during pre speech have larger vocabularies later on than other children do

78
Q

What is sociodramatic play?

A

Children often adopt roles and identities, acting out storylines, practicing negotiation and social interaction

79
Q

What is a child’s average productive vocabulary at 2 years of age vs at 2.5 years of age and what is it called?

A

2 years: 200-250 words
2.5 years: over 500 words
- Very productive 6 month phase is called the word spurt and is largely due to the child’s syntactic ability to construct the interrogative mood

80
Q

What is a consonant cluster reduction?

A

Not producing 1 or more consonant phonemes in a consecutive run of consonants in the target

81
Q

What is assimilation?

A

Where a phoneme takes on qualities from its immediate phonetic environment

82
Q

What is reduplication?

A
  • Repeating 1 syllable with omission of other syllables
  • E.g. Choo Choo
83
Q

What is harmonisation?

A

Producing the same phoneme at 2 points within the lexeme

84
Q

What are all of the monophthongs?

A
  1. i:
  2. ɪ
  3. ʊ
  4. u:
  5. e
  6. ə
  7. ʒ:
  8. ɔ:
  9. æ
  10. ʌ
  11. a:
85
Q

What are all of the diphthongs?

A
  1. ɪə
  2. eɪ
  3. ʊə
  4. ɔɪ
  5. əʊ
  6. eə
  7. aɪ
  8. aʊ
86
Q

What are all of the consonants?

A
  1. p
  2. b
  3. t
  4. d
  5. tʃ
  6. dʒ
  7. k
  8. g
  9. f
  10. v
  11. θ
  12. ð
  13. s
  14. z
  15. ʃ
  16. ʒ
  17. m
  18. n
  19. ŋ
  20. h
  21. I
  22. r
  23. w
  24. j
87
Q

What are the challenges of the innate approach?

A
  1. There is no real evidence to support it as it is based upon mental processes
  2. Genie + Jim prove that there is not an inbuilt capacity for language as they did not develop language
  3. Linguists haven’t been able to establish how universal grammar could’ve evolved
  4. Can be seen as reductive as it focuses on the structure of grammar and doesn’t consider the purpose of language
88
Q

What is a challenge of the cognitive approach?

A

It’s hard to prove

89
Q

What is the zone of proximal development?

A

What a learner can do by themselves in comparison to what they can do with the help of someone else

90
Q

Which theories/concepts support the innate approach?

A
  1. Pre speech- setting the parameters
  2. Wugs
  3. In built knowledge- universal grammar
  4. Language acquisition device
  5. Wernicke’s/Broca’s area
  6. Pre speech stages
  7. Telegraphic/post telegraphic speech
  8. Interrogatives
  9. Negation
91
Q

Which theories/concepts support the cognitive approach?

A
  1. Receptive and productive vocabulary
  2. /fis/ phenomenon
  3. Over/under extension
  4. Holophrasis
  5. Word spurt
  6. Nelson’s first 50 words
92
Q

Which theories/concepts support the behaviourist approach?

A
  1. Learning from the environment
  2. Familect, sociolect, dialect, accent
  3. Doesn’t just revolve around the caregiver
  4. Imitation + mimicking
  5. Positive reinforcement
  6. Truth value vs reinforcement
  7. Chomsky- poverty of the stimulus
93
Q

What did Roger Brown do?

A
  • Conducted a longitudinal study on 3 children
  • Found that 14 grammatical morphemes started to appear at a mean length utterance of 2 and through to 4.25 and beyond (inflections of context words, function words, plural ‘s’, verb tense markers)
  • Found a similar order of acquisition for all 3 children
94
Q

What morpheme acquisition did Roger Brown find between 20-36 months?

A
  1. __ing
  2. Plural ‘s’
  3. Posessive ‘s’
  4. ‘The’, ‘a’
  5. Past tense ‘ed’
  6. 3rd person singular verb ending ‘s’
  7. Auxiliary ‘be’
95
Q

What did Cruttenden find?

A

Stage 1- Children memorise words on an individual basis

Stage 2- Children show an awareness of the general rules or inflections. They observe that past tense forms usually end in ‘ed’, so they say runned instead of ran (overgeneralisation)

Stage 3- Standard inflections are used

96
Q

What did Tomasello propose?

A
  • A usage based theory of language acquisition
  • States that children come to the process of language acquisition at around 1 year of age, equipped with 2 sets of cognitive skills
  • Both sets evolved for other, more general functions before linguistic communications emerged in the human species
  1. Intention reading
  2. Pattern finding
97
Q

How does pattern finding link to child language acquisition?

A

Children must find patterns in the language they hear to go beyond them to create abstract linguistic schemas or constructions to they can produce their own creative utterances

98
Q

What is meant by literacy as a social practice?

A

Literacy is not simply knowing how to read and write a particular script, but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in scientific contexts of use (Barton)

99
Q

What skills are involved within writing?

A
  1. Muscle control
  2. Pen grip
  3. Orthography
  4. Graphemes/phonemes
  5. Letter formation
  6. Punctaution
  7. Lineraity and directionality
100
Q

What is environmental print?

A

The print of everyday life (logos, signs, TV, shops)

101
Q

What was Ferrera and Teberosky’s research into environmental print?

A
  1. Researched the impact of environmental print on children’s literacy bu studying literacy knowledge of 4-6 year olds
  2. Found that children had developed knowledge about language before being formally taught it at school
  3. This knowledge came from their day to day experiences of printed language that they saw in the world around them, at home, in school, in shops and their local community
102
Q

Who conducted research into the environmental print?

A

Ferrera and Teberosky

103
Q

What did James Britton say?

A

“No one can learn to write well without first first being given the chance to write about what matters to them”

104
Q

What did Ferrera and Teberosky say?

A

“Writing is a cultural object”

105
Q

What was Bezemer and Kress’ research?

A
  1. Uses and forms of reading and writing have undergone profound changes over the last decade, which call for a change in the pedagogic understanding of literacy learning
  2. According to Bezemer and Kress, 2 trends mark the developments:

Digital media, rather than texts and books, are increasingly becoming the sites of learning in different areas of life

The written word is being supplemented by image as a mode for representation

106
Q

What is multimodality?

A

Communication practices in terms of the textual, aural, linguistic, spatial and visual resources - often characterised loosely as modes (used to compose messages

English Language- AO2 (9 decks)

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