Child Language Acquisition (ao2) Flashcards
Nativism
The belief that children learn language naturally without facilitation from parents
Behaviourism
The idea that language is learnt through understanding the difference between right and wrong.
Behaviourists consider learning a language as a set of mechanical habits which are formed through a process of imitation and repetition. Humans learn a language through repeating the same form and text until it becomes a habit.
social interactionism
The idea that language is learnt through parental influence and scaffolding
Social interactionist theory (SIT) is an explanation of language development emphasizing the role of social interaction between the developing child and linguistically knowledgeable adults. It is based largely on the socio-cultural theories of Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky.
cognitivism
The cognitive theory of language acquisition was first proposed by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget in the 1930s. Cognitive theory is based on the idea that children are born with limited cognitive ability upon which all new knowledge can be built.
The idea that language is learnt through exposure to environments and development of schema
Bard and Sach’s study into Jim
Bard and Sachs studied a boy called ‘Jim’, who was son of two deaf parents. Although he was exposed to TV and radio, his speech development was severely retarded. It demonstrated that simple exposure to language (e.g. from television) is not an effective stimulus to language learning; human interaction is necessary to develop speech
Clark-Stewart on vocabulary development
Clark-Stewart found that children whose mothers talk more have larger vocabularies.
ZPD
Zone of proximal development
Zygotsky on ZPD
Vygotsky suggested that for children to learn they need an MKO (more knowledgeable other) who supports the child in moving beyond their ZPD, encouraging them to move beyond what they already know to what is not yet known by the means of scaffolding and support.
Garvey’s sociodramatic play
Garvey asserted that sociodramatic play usually begins when the child is around four-years-old and fulfils Halliday’s imaginative function. In their re-enactments they use subject specific lexis and structure them in some of the formulaic ways that adults use in real-life situations, suggesting they can observe and imitate adult behaviours.
LAD model by Chomsky
Chomsky stated that children are born with an innate knowledge of language and universal grammar. This innate ability to learn language is governed by the LAD (language acquisition device) which he suggested needed activating and is the reason children sometime over regularise and put grammar into utterances when they are not needed.
LAD is an innate system in the brain which allows the spontaneous development of languages in a child from birth, in contrast to learning a language later in life.
This theory suggests that this device enables children to be more receptive to language development and that they are able to acquire more than one language around them. According to this view, all children are born with an instinct for a universal grammar. which makes receptive to the common features of all languages. Since, they possess an instinctive capacity to learn grammatical structures young people easily pick up a language when they are exposed to a particular form.
Evidence:
* The stages of language development occur almost at the same age, even though different children experience different environments.
* Children’s language development follows a similar contruct across cultures.
* Children generally acquire language skills quickly and effortlessly.
* Children make virtuous errors of verbs. The subject-verb form of grammar is common to all languages and children seem to be aware of the correct forms.
According to Harry Richie, Chompsky was brilliant but wrong. Recent evidence from neurology, genetics and linguistics which all point point to there being no innate programming.. Richie veers to a more Skinner type view, “Children learn language the same way they learn all other skills; by experience,”
Tomasello criticism of chomsky
Tomasello called Chomsky an armchair theorist as his ideas were only speculative.
Steven Pinker’s Nativist argument
In ‘The Language Instinct’, Pinker suggests that rather than being a human invention, language is an innate human ability because:
Deaf babies “babble” with their hands as others normally do with voice, and spontaneously invent sign languages with true grammar.
Even in the absence of active attempts by parents to correct children’s grammar, accurate speech develops.
Berko Gleason’s Wug Test
Wug Test - When faced with a picture of an imaginary ‘wug’:
76% of four-to-five-year-olds formed the regular –s plural.
97% of five –to-seven-year-olds formed the regular –s plural
Berko Gleason found that even very young children are able to connect suitable suffixes—to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms—to nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have already internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them.
Genie Wiley case study
A 13-year-old Los Angeles girl who had been locked away from all social interaction. Following her rescue, attempts to teach her English only ever produced partial success, and she never achieved full grammatical competence.
Oxana (case study)
An 8-year-old who had lived with a pack of dogs, when she was found she could hardly speak and ran on all fours barking. Since being taught language; her speech is odd, without rhythm, inflection or tone. She speaks flatly, as though it’s an order, and can still communicate through barking.
Lenneberg’s critical period theory hypothesis
Lenneberg proposed that the capacity to learn a language is innate but that if a child does not learn a language before the onset of puberty, the child will never master language at all; this is known as the critical period hypothesis. Evidence for Lenneberg’s theories emerged from studies on feral children such as Genie and Oxana.
Skinner’s Behaviourist Theory
Skinner believed that biology plays almost no part in the way children learn language. He experimented on rats and believed his findings on operant conditioning could be extended to language development. He stated that all behaviour is conditioned through positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement.
According to BF Skinner language is acquired by conditioning (a process where behaviour is changed due to repeated change of stimulus, overtime triggers a specific form of behaviour). In language acquisition, this process makes the child imitate sounds around them, perhaps due to praise and approval.
Skinner followed Pavlov’s SR theory (stimulus response). The basis of this idea is that all human and animal behaviours are learnt responses which occur as a result of reinforcement which is achieved through rewards. Conversely, unwanted or bad behaviour can be extinguished by punishment according to behaviourist theories proposed by Skinner.
Problems with the theory:
* Does not account for language acquisition as a whole.
* Each child produes an infinite number of utterances, many of which they will have never heard before; so they do not solely imitate nor do they imitate exactly.
* Children make virtuous errors of grammar and language and adults do not; children are applying rules which they understand , such as ‘-ed’ inflection of verbs of past tense. Meaning they do not simply copy, they learn the rules of language.
* Children correct their own language even when adults don’t correct them.
* Children can understand alot more language than they are able to speak.
Chomsky criticism of Skinner’s theory
Chomsky questioned the validity of experiments on rats and pigeons to offer comment on humans’ capacity to learn.
Piaget on language development
Piaget stated that children need to develop certain mental abilities before they can acquire particular aspects of language, so they cannot be taught before they are ready. Until around 18 months, children are egocentric, and then they begin to realise that things have object permanence.
According to Piaget there are 4 stages of language development sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, formal operational.
Sensorimotor (up to 2)
Experiences the physical world through the senses and begins classifying the things in it; lexis tends to be concrete; object permanence develops
Pre-operational (2-7)
Language and motor skills develop; language is egocentric
Concrete operational (7-11)
Begins thinking logically about concrete events
Formal operational (11+)
Abstract reasoning skills develop
Some people with learning difficulties are still linguistically fluent so cognitive development and language development are not always as closely connected as Piaget suggests.
Egocentric
A child is unable to see a situation from another person’s point of view or mentally process the concept that something can exist outside their immediate surroundings
Object permanance
A child understands something can exist without having to see it
Repacholi and Gopnik’s criticism of Piaget
In an experiment involving food, broccoli and crackers were offered to infants aged between 14 and 18 months, who preferred the crackers. When offering a snack to the researcher:
14-month-old would offer the cracker, irrespective of whether the researcher expressed an interest for broccoli or crackers.
18-month-old was able to identify the researcher had indicated a preference for broccoli and offered this.
This suggests that from a very young age, children are sensitive to the needs and desires of others and are not entirely egocentric in their behaviour.
Bruner’s LASS model
Bruner states that language learning is an innate ability but that, crucially, it needs activating through the Language Acquisition Support System (LASS). This is exemplified by how parents often use books and images to develop their child’s naming abilities and their ability to get involved in conversation:
Gaining attention - drawing the baby’s attention to a picture
Query - asking the baby to identify the picture
Label - telling the baby what the object is
Feedback - responding to the baby’s utterances
Catherine Snow
Snow’s research focussed on the ways in which mothers talk to their children and the connection to the child’s age. She initially proposed the idea of child directed speech.
