Child language development

Question 1

Katherine Nelson (1973)

Answer 1

Found that children in the holophrastic stage whose mothers corrected them on word choice advanced more slowly than those with mothers who were generally more accepting

Question 2

Clarke-Stewart (1973)

Answer 2

Found that children whose mothers talks more have larger vocabularies

Question 3

CDS

Answer 3

Child directed speech. The way that a persons linguistic characteristics alter when speaking to an infant/toddler. Tends to be slower with exaggerated intonations thus capturing attention and allowing them to grasp emotional attention.

Question 4

LASS

Answer 4

Language acquisition support system. (Jerome Bruner input theory)

Question 5

Jerome Bruner

Answer 5

Believes that impute is vital in helping a child acquire language. Interaction ‘scaffolds’ the language development. Children have an innate ability to learn and acquire language but also require the interaction of other users of the same language to excel in their learning. Parents who use CDS help this scaffolding.

IMPUT THEORY

Question 6

Eric Lenneberg

Answer 6

Critical period hypothesis, the LAD needs to be activated with sufficient input before a certain point in the Childs development in order for them to be able to efficiently develop language.
-States that if they don’t get language input by age 5. they may never be able to acquire language and thus the LAD will shut down.

NATIVISM -> but also tried to explain the role of nurture

Question 7

Steven Pinker

Answer 7

Focused on evolution and instinct, believed that we evolved because of social groups and so we had to communicate in order to distribute roles. Language develops in the absence of formal instruction or attempts to correct thus making it innate.
Principles and parameters theory
-Principles: The rules that make up universal grammar
-Parameters: Fine tuning for a specific language

NATIVISM

Question 8

Universal grammar

Answer 8

Chomsky believed that all human languages, whatever their surface difference share a deep grammatical structure. Humans are born with an innate knowledge of these . When we hear our native language, we are ready fit these structures in.

Question 9

Virtuous errors

Answer 9

Applies a regular morphine to an irregular morphine. it is virtuous because it shows understanding of the patterns.

Question 10

LAD (Language acquisition device)

Answer 10

It means that children have an innate ability to extract the underlying rules from the words that they hear being spoken around them.

Arguedby Chomsky

Question 11

Operant conditioning

Answer 11

Changing behaviour by the use of reinforcement which is given to the desired response (Skinner).

Question 12

Burrhus Frederic Skinner

Answer 12

Suggests that a child imitates the language of its parents/carers. He coined the term operant conditioning. Overall he believed that language was taught to children.

BEHAVIOURISM

Question 13

Noam Chomsky

Answer 13

Children can’t acquire language through simply copying, they have an inbuilt capacity to learn which he called the LAD. His evidence for this was that children make virtuous errors and develop language despite poverty of the stimulus.
Overall believed that children acquire language.

NATIVISM

Question 14

What is Nativism?

Answer 14

The belief that children learn language naturally without facilitation from parents

Question 15

What is Behaviourism?

Answer 15

The idea that language is learnt through understanding the difference between right and wrong

Question 16

What is Social Interactionism?

Answer 16

The idea that language is learnt through parental influence and scaffolding

Question 17

What is Cognitivism?

Answer 17

The idea that language is learnt through exposure to environments and development of schema

Question 18

What is the ZPD?

Answer 18

Zone of proximal development.
Represents the space between what a learner is capable of doing unsupported and what the learner cannot do even with support.

Question 19

What does Vygotsky say about the ZPD?

Answer 19

Vygotsky suggested that for children to learn they need an more knowledgable 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.

Question 20

What criticism did Tomasello provide for Chomsky?

Answer 20

Tomasello called Chomsky an armchair theorist as his ideas were only speculative.

Question 21

What did the Bard and Sach’s study into Jim identify?

Answer 21

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

Evidence against Nativism and for Imput Theory

Question 22

Explain Lenneberg’s critical period hypothesis

Answer 22

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.

Expanded on Chomskys LAD and Nativism

Question 23

Provide a criticism for Skinner’s Theory

Answer 23

Chomsky questioned the validity of experiments on rats and pigeons to offer comment on humans’ capacity to learn.

Question 24

Berko and Brown

Answer 24

Spoke to a child who referred to a ‘fis’ meaning ‘fish’ then replied using ‘fis’ and the child corrected him again but saying ‘fis’. Finally the adult reverted to ‘fish’ to which the child responded ‘yes, fis’ . This shows that correction/negative reinforcement can’t help and that the child has already developed and understanding of the word and knows the correct version just can’t pronounce it.

‘Fis phenomenon’

Question 25

Assimilation

Answer 25

The process that illustrates how some sounds change because of other sounds around them.
-Doggie becomes goggie
-Rabbit becomes Babbit
The consonant sound (in this case the first one) has been influenced by the second.

Question 26

Addition

Answer 26

A child places an addiction vowel sound on the end of words in order to create a consonant, vowel consonant, vowel construction.
-Mummy
-Doggie

Question 27

Deletion of unstressed syllable

Answer 27

The phonological process in which a child deletes an unstressed syllable in a word
-Nana rather than banana

Question 28

Jean Berko brown

Answer 28

The Wug test
Children were given a picture of a bird-like creature called a ‘wug’ and then asked to state things like what two of these creatures would be called (‘wugs’). The test invented nouns and verbs to test pluralisation and over-generalisation

Evidence against Behavoiurism and for Nativism

Question 29

Over extension

Answer 29

The child attempts to cover too many objects with similar item properties
-Refers to any round fruit as apple

Question 30

Under extension

Answer 30

The child over narrows the meaning of a word
-Knowing what a banana is while they are eating it but not recognising it in a photo

Question 31

Michael Tomasello

Answer 31

Combines cognition and input approaches while also disagreeing with the existence of the LAD.
Social constructivism-> argues that children acquire chunks of language rather than single words and then rules. Our knowledge of the world emerges from our experiences of

Cognition

Question 32

What % of first words did Nelson find were nouns?

Answer 32

60%

Question 33

Haliday

Answer 33

Looked at the different functions of children language: Instrumental, Regulatory, Interactional, Personal, Heuristic, Imaginative, Informative

Question 34

Piaget

Answer 34

Children can only use certain linguistic structure when they understand the concept involved. E.g. children will only understand the past tense when they understand the concept of past time.

Cognition theory