Paul Heselton 18 Theories OfCLD

Question 1

Behaviourism

Answer 1

• B.F. Skinner
• the theory that all learning happens through operant conditioning
• a child can be trained to repeat certain actions or utterances if they get a favourable response (positive reinforcement)
• a lack of any positive response will discourage repetition of the action/utterance (negative reinforcement)
• everyone is born with a ‘blank slate’ and children learn to speak through imitation

Question 2

Evaluating behaviourism

Answer 2

• look in the data for examples of children copying older peoples lexis, grammar and phonology
• limitations:
  Children rarely simply repeat what adults say
  Children often make virtuous errors, logical but non-standard utterances which suggest they are creatively working out grammatical rules not just copying
  Children appear to go through the same predicatible stages of development regardless of input
  Few children receive explicitly grammatical correction
  Nelson- parents more interested in politeness and truth value

Question 3

Nativism

Answer 3

• Chomsky and pinker
• argued the human brain has a naturally programmed ability to learn language and ability to work out language systems
• coined the term LAD (goes against blank slate)
• universal grammar = used to describe this global capacity to learn languages at similar rates

Question 4

Limitations of nativism

Answer 4

• Isaac Slabin argued a child is not born with a set of linguistic categories but instead some form of process mechanism
• chomskys work was theoretical not based on linguistic data
• chomskys theory downplays the part played by interaction + functions behind children’s language
• Bard and Sachs 1977 Jim case study

Question 5

Cognitivism

Answer 5

• jean Piaget (1936)
• suggest that children would not develop until particular stages of cognitive development had been reached
• sensorimotor (0-2), pre-operational (2-6/7), concrete operational (6/6-11/12) formal operational (11-16+)
• focused on the need from conceptual understanding to be present before language can reflect it

Question 6

Evaluating cognitivism

Answer 6

• it’s possible to link a child’s language to their conceptual development in the early stages (e.g. the child’s realisation of ‘object permanence’ at the end of stage 1 which enables the child to articulate abstract ideas about non-deictical concepts)
• as the child gets older t becomes harder to make clear links between cognitive level and language
• some studies have focused on children who have learnt to speak fluently despite having a relatively low cognitive level - some studies have called ‘cocktail party chatterers’ (jean aitchison)

Question 7

Social interactionism

Answer 7

• Bruner
• focused on the importance of a child’s interaction with caregivers as the key to language development
• LASS
• scaffolding (vygotsky)
• concentrated more on the need for quality input from caregivers to facilitate learning rather than on imitation and positive/negative reinforcement

Question 8

Evaluating social interactionism

Answer 8

• look out for data for evidence which supports and challenges the idea that the caregivers language is enabling progression in the child’s language
• CDS: repetition of key lexis, simplification of sentence constructions, over-articulation of certain phonemes
• children of all backgrounds and language tend to progress through similar stages predictably
• some cultures e.g. in papa New Guinea don’t appear to use CDS. At all to young children yet they develop language at the same rate

Question 9

Pre-verbal stage

Answer 9

Crying, cooing, babbling - reduplicated and variegated

Question 10

Holophtastic stage

Answer 10

One word utterances

Question 11

Two-word stage

Answer 11

Word order starts to follow conventional English syntactical patterns
Roger browns eight categories of 2-word utterances incl:
- agent + action
- action + location
- possessor + possession

Question 12

Telegraphic stage

Answer 12

Omission of grammatical lexis

Question 13

Halliday (1975!!!!!)

Answer 13

• suggested that having an intended outcome or motivation for using language, a child will then be motivated to further use language
• instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative, representational

Question 14

John Dores (1978) speech acts

Answer 14

Labelling, repeating, answering, requesting action, calling, greeting, protesting practising

Question 15

Critical period hypothesis

Answer 15

Eric lenneberg
- believed that in the first few years if life, sufficient social interaction and exposure to language was essential that a child might gain full master of the language
- case of genie often used, discovered in 1970

Question 16

The WUG test

Answer 16

• jean Berko Gleason, 1958
• wanted to test the notion that children have a more sophisticated understanding of linguistic morphology than they have been taught explicitly
• pseudo words like wug
  76% of 4-5-year-olds able to use -s inflection
• results suggest that children have an ability to understand grammatical rules and transfer them to other examples they’ve never heard before

Question 17

The ‘fis’ phenomenon

Answer 17

• berko and brown, 1960
• researched the extent to which children can hear the correct pronunciation of words but are unable to always articulate phoenemes accurately themselves - could be through physical limitations or the inability to recognise the errors that are occurring
• showed a child rejecting an adults articulation of the noun ‘fish’ as ‘fis’
• goes against skinners behaviourist theory and that sometimes they can’t simply imitate language

Question 18

IRF structure

Answer 18

• Sinclair and couthlard
• initiation, response, feedback
• demonstrated that questioning and evaluating are important aspects to CDS

Question 19

Early lexis - Katherine Nelson

Answer 19

• found that 60% of first words were nouns
• verbs formed second largest group
• modifiers theirs
• personal/social words only 8%

Question 20

Eve Clark

Answer 20

Over extension + under extension

Question 21

Rescorla

Answer 21

Categorically vs. Analogical overextension

Question 22

Jean aitchison

Answer 22

Three stages in children’s lexical development:
- labelling
- packaging
- network building

Question 23

Roger brown 1973

Answer 23

Suggested that children learn to use inflections in a predictable order:
1. Present participle (running)
2. Plural -s
3. Possessive -s
4. Articles
5. Past tense
6. Third person singular -s
7. Auxiliary verb

Question 24

Bellugi - pronoun development

Answer 24

Discovered that children developed their use of pronouns in predictable stages:
1. Gives a name rather than a pronoun
2. Will start to use subject and object pronouns but no accurate consistent application
3. Correctly apply subject and object pronouns

Question 25

Bellugi - constructing negative sentences

Answer 25

Discovered that children developed their use of negative sentence constructions in predictable stages Stage 1: use ‘no’ or ‘not’ at the start of an utterance Stage 2: start to use ‘no’ and ‘not’ in front of verbs in the middle of utterances Stage 3: children become more standardised using primary and modal auxiliary verbs

Question 26

Bellugi - interrogative development

Answer 26

Discovered that children developed their use of interrogatives in predictable stages Stage 1: rise in intonation Stage 2: starts to include interrogative pronouns such as what, where, why Stage 3: starts to do subject-verb inversion and use auxiliary verbs