Childrens Spoken Language Development

Question 1

What are the states of speech development

Answer 1

Vegetative, cooing, babbling, Proto-word, holophrastic, two word stage.

Question 2

What is vegetative

Answer 2

Ages 0-4 months - reflex crying noises

Question 3

What is cooing

Answer 3

Ages 3-6 months, open-mouthed vowel sounds

Question 4

What is babbling

Answer 4

Ages 6-12 months, repeated consonant-vowel sounds and combinations of these; babababa, gagagaga, dudududu.

Question 5

What is proto-word

Answer 5

Ages 9-12 months, babbling sounds that seem to match actual words - a grey ares between pre-verbal and grammatical stages. Not necessarily meaningful.

Question 6

What is the holophrastic stage

Answer 6

Around 1 year, genuinely using one word to signpost things, including more complicated, functional aspects of language.

Question 7

What is the two word stage

Answer 7

Around 18 months, two word utterances make up mini sentences. The beginnings of syntax.

Question 8

Baby’s first words - Nelson

Answer 8

Nelson placed the early words of children into 4 categories:
1. Naming
2. Action
3. Social
4. Descriptions.
She found that far and away the largest category was naming words, with around 60% of a child’s first 50 words being nouns.

Question 9

Baby’s first words - Bloom

Answer 9

Bloom argues that environment plays a big role in determining which individual words are spoken by children at this age - children growing up in the countryside perhaps use different words from those growing up in the city in their productive vocabularies.

Question 10

Baby’s first words - Saxtons table of patterns examples

Answer 10

Food and drink - bread, cookie, drink
Family - mama, dada, baby
Routines- bye-bye, night-night, peekaboo
Sound effects- yum-yum, ouch, moo, woof

Question 11

Over extension theory- rescorla

Answer 11

Rescorla notes 3 forms:
Categorical overextension- the most common form. The label apple may be given to any kind of round fruit.
Analogical overextension- related to function or perception of an object, a scarf may get labelled a ‘cat’ as its soft.
Mismatch or predicate statements- using the word doll when pointing to an empty cot, so that’s where a baby would be located.

Question 12

Building meanings - aitchinson

Answer 12

Identified three stages in children’s acquisition of words and their meanings;
Labelling- associating sounds with objects in the world around the child, understanding the concept of labels.
Packaging- starting to explore the extent of the label - often the stage during which overextensions occur most frequently.
Network Building - making connections between the labels they have developed. Understanding opposites and similarities, relationships and contrasts.

Question 13

Common phonological errors

Answer 13

Addition- adding extra vowel sounds.
Deletion- leaving our the last consonant of a word
Reduplication- the repetition of particular sounds and structures
Substitution- one sound is swapped with another.
Consonant cluster reduction- children find it difficult to produce consonant clusters so will reduce them to smaller units.
Deletion of unstressed syllables- the removal of an entire syllable
Assimilation- a process in which substitution occurs but the sound changes because of other words around it

Question 14

Telegraphic stages of development

Answer 14

Telegraphic - 2-2 1/2 years- utterances containing three or more words in which key content words are used while grammatical function words are omitted.
Post telegraphic - 3 years - utterances where grammatical words missing from telegraphic stage start to appear, and clauses begin linking to form longer sentences.

Question 15

Ursula bellugi and David McNeill-questions and negatives

Answer 15

Theorised that children progress through distinct stages as they develop, and apply certain rules to the creation of negatives and questions.
Where to place the negative word or clitic morpheme
How to invert syntax and verb

Question 16

What’s missing from the telegraphic stage

Answer 16

Auxiliary modals - Verbs deriving from the infinitive ‘to be’ (am, are, is, was, were) and modals (would, might, will, can, could etc).
Morphology- suffixes may be non standard in verb conjugations.
Articles and prepositions- both indefinite (a/an) and definite (the) articles and prepositions.

Question 17

Post telegraphic stage - features that start to appear

Answer 17

Prepositions- in, on, to, by, near
Auxiliary verbs - is, are, were, was, could, should
Articles- a, and, the, that, those, these
Tense, aspect, voice and phrases- past and future tense; continuous and perfect aspects; passive voice more complex noun phrases

Question 18

Virtuous errors and logical mistakes

Answer 18

Morphology- the process of using morphemes (prefixes and suffixes) to change the sense of the word.
Conjugation- the process of changing the tense of a verb. Sometimes verbs are regular using the ‘-ed’ suffix, and sometimes they are irregular.
Pluralisation- most of the time this uses the morphology of applying the ‘s’ morphemes, pluralising sheep to sheep’s when the pluralised version is sheep.
Virtuous errors- a child applies logic morphology of a new construction. The mistake is understandable because of three nature of language.

Question 19

Gleason- the wug test

Answer 19

Gleason carried out an experiment to test children’s use of the -s plural.
She found that when faced with imaginary animals, children would apply grammatical rules.
Of the four to five year olds tested, 76% formed regular pluralisations, and 97% of the seven year olds did too.

Question 20

Do animals have language - Margaret Howe-Lovatt

Answer 20

• tried to teach dolphins to speak human language in a NASA funded project. Lovatt lived with male dolphin “Peter” in a converted apartment. For various reasons, Peter couldn’t be taught language, became persistently sexual towards Lovatt, and eventually the experiment focus shifted in favour of trying Peter on LSD.

Question 21

Do animals have language

Answer 21

Alex (Avian Language Experiment) involved a prodigious African Grey Parrot. Linguists taught Alex as best they could to speak beyond simple mimicry.
Alex essentially communicated in a holophrastic sense, and made some loose combinations of words, but didn’t master any particular sense of grammar. It is difficult to say it constitutes a full language.

Question 22

Do animals have language - Chomsky

Answer 22

Neam “nim” Chimpsky was a male chimpanzee who researchers tried to teach human language. His name was a pun on Noam Chomsky, the linguist who suggested that language was unique to humans.
Although Nim was clever, emotive, kind (and violent and aggressive, just like any other Chimpanzee) he was more adept at drinking beer and smoking pot as he was learning human language.

Question 23

Nature debate- Chomsky

Answer 23

Chomsky (1959) and fellow nativists who followed, argued behaviourism doesn’t explain how children’s language develops, partly because the language they hear is not a useful model (poverty of stimulus) and because they can produce completely new utterances never heard before.
Language is innate to all humans (it’s built in).

Question 24

Nurture debate- skinner

Answer 24

B. F. Skinner (1957) argued children’s language was the same as any other conditioned behaviour in the animal world.
Children hear language, and are either positively reinforced by their environment (encouragement and praise) or negatively reinforced (punishment or correction).
Selective reinforcement conditions child’s words, phrases and utterances towards full adult speech.

Question 25

Nature vs nurture evaluation

Answer 25

According to the behaviourist model, a child would never say “I falled over and hurted my knee...” (virtuous errors) because they would never hear this, or would be corrected out of doing so, yet children make these mistakes all the time. They are clearly generating their own language based on rules they’ve intuited. These over-generalisations (sheeps; falled; mouses; runned) are evidence to nativists that humans have an inbuilt facility for grammar and are showing the workings of these inbuilt structures here. Chomsky called this inbuilt facility a language acquisition device (LAD) - once the child is exposed to their native language, it kicks in. Children also are learning an incredibly complicated process at an age where cognitive faculties are underdeveloped, supporting the nativists. As well as this, children the world over tend to learn language in the same systematic order of stages. This universal aspect negates a behaviourist take somewhat.

Question 26

Child directed speech

Answer 26

The Interaction Model focuses more on the language directed by caregivers to children. They argue it has its own characteristics. ● More pronounced intonation, drawing attention to key morphemes or words. ● Simplified vocabulary, to establish key words (‘dog’ rather than ‘Labrador’ or ‘Spaniel). ● Repeated grammatical ‘frames’ that help to draw attention to new elements within those frames (e.g. ‘what animal lives in a kennel? What animal lives in a stable? etc) ● Simplified grammar and shorter utterances ● Tag questions used to initiate turn-taking. ● Actions that accompany speech: pointing, smiling, shrugging shoulders, paralanguage etc. ● ‘Recasting’ of children’s errors to make them grammatically accurate. ● More pronounced lip and mouth movements to help younger children copy.

Question 27

Critics of child directed speech

Answer 27

Critics of the interactionists cite cultures like Samoa and Papa New Guinea in which CDS interactions don’t tend to take place. Here children don’t seem to be impeded. Others such as Wells (1986), Hart and Risley (1995), Thiessen et al (2005) and Henrichs (2010) have all found a positive correlation between CDS at an early age and subsequent educational or linguistic achievement.