Speech Flashcards
(39 cards)
B. F Skinner (1957) - behaviourist
- Suggested that children engage in language with caregivers.
- Language is a conditioned behaviour which can be positively reinforced or negatively reinforced by caregivers.
- Positive reinforcement - care, praise, attention;
- Negative reinforcement - punishment, correction.
By positively reinforcing ‘correct’ speech or phrases, this will therefore condition a child’s utterances closer towards adult speech
Nativist; Noam Chomsky
- A ‘poverty of stimulus’ - what they hear isn’t a useful model to pick up. Children only hear a
narrow range of language from parents BUT able to understand and produce grammatically
correct utterances very quickly- Children can say things that they have never heard before. Chomsky’s theory explains why
children make ‘virtuous errors’, which you will learn more about later in the course. These are phrases that they would never hear an adult say nor would it be positively reinforced, such as “I falled over.’ - This led Chomsky to conclude that language development is innate, or built in. Chomsky and
other nativists argue that this proves we have a LAD, or Language Acquisition Device. An inbuilt grammar which helps us to apply familiar rules.
- Children can say things that they have never heard before. Chomsky’s theory explains why
Bard and Sachs
studied a child called “Jim”, who was the son of deaf parents. Jim was not deaf himself, and his parents taught him little sign language. Jim spent a lot of time watching TV and listening to the radio. However, Jim’s speech development was seriously delayed until he started attending sessions with a speech therapist. Once he did attend them, his development improved at a rapid pace.
In Papao New Guinea and Samoa
adults speak to parents like adults not in ‘motherese’
New York University
Results revealed brain activity changed depending on whether the volunteers had listened to a sentence, a phrase, or a word list. This showed that the subjects were able to process the grammar minus the obvious learned cues. “Because we went to great lengths to design experimental conditions that control for statistical or sound cue contributions to processing, our findings show that we must use the grammar in our head,”
Halliday (functional theory)
- Halliday claims that children acquire language because it serves certain purposes or functions for them.
This comes under a child’s pragmatic development, concerning social situations and relationships. Halliday identified seven functions that language has for children in their early years.
Halliday’s functions
Instrumental function - language that is used to fulfil a need, such as to obtain food, drink or comfort. This typically includes common nouns “Want milk”)
Regulatory function - language that is used to influence the behaviour of others including persuading, commanding or requesting (“Come here)
Interactional function - language that is used to develop relationships and ease interaction (“I love you mummy”)
Personal function - language that expresses personal opinions, attitudes and feelings including a speaker’s identity (“I is brave girl”)
Representational function - language that is used to relay or request information (“that car red”)
Heuristic function - language that is used to explore, learn and discover. This could include questions or a running commentary of a child’s actions (“Where the boat go?”)
Imaginative function - the use of language to tell stories and create imaginary constructs. This typically accompanies play or leisure activities.
Vygotsky
- More knowledgeable and experienced adults (‘expert others’) help the intellectual development of younger people by interacting with them, passing on not only knowledge and skills but also the values of their culture. So children discover not just what to learn but how to learn, within the context of what matters in a society.
- This is an intermental process - it happens between two (or more) minds, Eventually the child symbolically represents sociocultural values, learning and knowledge internally. This is intramental because it happens within the child’s mind.
- Language is a crucial tool in this learning process, and Vygotsky placed greater emphasis on it than Piaget did. From the age of 2, language is necessary for thought and therefore at least partly drives cognitive development.
- Zone of proximal development (ZPD).
- He believed that no matter what a particular developmental level a child is currently functioning at, they can progress further with relevant social interaction with adults (or a MKO).
- He argued that the greatest development of thinking takes place in the gap between what a child understands now on their own, and what they could understand in collaboration with an expert other.
- This gap is the ZPD - it represents the difference between abilities which are fully developed and those which are yet to mature.
- Learning in the child’s ZPD causes existing cognitive structures to be reorganised intramentally at a higher developmental levels, so they acquire more advanced reasoning capabilities. The concept of ZPD was developed further by Bruner in his notion of scaffolding (explored through the key research)
- To help learners be independent, Vygotsky outlined scaffolding as a tool for
growth. Learners complete small, manageable steps in order to reach the goal - Vygotsky advocated that teachers use paired or group activities to enable children to benefit from more knowledgeable others (MKO) and develop the skills to achieve the task themselves.
What we call ‘collaborative learning’ is based on Vygotsky’s core belief that learning is a social process. Working with peers on paired group activities allows us to question, evaluate and generate new ideas, the process or outcome becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Collaboration can be as simple as a five minute discussion of a story in pairs, or as complex as a lengthy project where students work in a team to design, conduct and analyse a piece of research.
Bruner
- Chomsky: Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
- The capacity to develop speech is innate inside the human brain; it just needs to be triggered.
- Bruner developed the concept of the LASS - the Language Acquisition Support System which he believed supported Chomsky’s idea of a predisposition to learn language.
Proto-conversations - A basic form of scaffolding before the child can function as an effective producer of language; could include non- verbal responses.
Scaffolding - A form of linguistic support; adults provide the child with conversational material and patterning
Recasting - not correcting but reframing what the child said wrong
Framing - Controlling the agenda of a conversation, or making utterances that allow the child to
ill in the blanks.
Dore (functionaism)
LABELLING
REPEATING
ANSWERING
REQUESTING
ACTION
CALLING
GREETING
PROTESTING
PRACTISING
Stages of development (structuralist approach)
1) Vegetative - involuntary or reflexive noises - crying, coughing, etc
2) Cooing - deliberate vowel sounds, “Qooch. Aaaah”
3) Babbling - deliberate mixing of vowels and consonants in long strings, “Babababababa.
4) Proto words - distinct, word-like noises, used with intention, “Da!”
5) Holophrastic - individual words used to convey whole phrases. E.g. “Milk!” Could mean “
want milk.” or “There is milk” or “That looks like milk.
6) Two word - Early, simple phrases. Noun & possessor, “My teddy,” noun & descriptor, “Nice
mummy.” agent and action, “Birdie go “ etc
7) Telegraphic - Simple clauses made up of lexical words, “Baby want milk”
8) Post-telegraphic - Introduction of structural words, like adult speech, “I’m going to have milk
and cake.
Clarke-Stewart
Found that children whose mothers talk more have larger vocabularies
Katherine Nelson
Found that children at the holophrastic stage whose mothers corrected them on word choice and pronunciation actually advanced more slowly than those with mothers who were generally accepting
Brown, Caden and Bellugi
Found that parents often respond to the TRUTH value of what their
baby is saying, rather than its grammatical correctness. For example, a parent is more likely to respond to “there doggie” with “Yes, it’s a dog!” than “No, it’s there is a dog.”
Berko and Brown
Brown spoke to a child who referred to a “is” meaning “fish”. Brown replied using “fis” and the child corrected him again but saying “fis”. Finally Brown reverted to “fish” to which the child responded “Yes, fis.” This shows that babies do not hear themselves in the same way that they hear others and no amount of correction will change this.
Rescorla’s Overextension
- Categorical Overextension: The name of one item in a category is applied to all items in that category (“Apple” for all round fruits and “Dog” for all quadruped animals)
- Analogical Overextension: The name of an item in one category is applied to items in another category, by comparison (“Apple” for all shiny, red, round objects “Moon” for all lights in the night sky)
Mismatch Overextension: an item is referenced using the name of something associated with it (Calling a tree “Apple” Saying “Duck” while pointing at an empty pond)
Roger Brown
found that children from all language backgrounds make
the same grammatical relationships between concepts:
- Agent + action (subject + verb) e.g. daddy kick
- Action + affected (verb + object) e.g. throw balt
- Agent + affected (subject + object) e.g. me ball
- Action + location (verb + location) e.g. sit chair
- Entity + location (noun + location) e.g. spoon table
- Entity + attribute (subject + complement) e.g. kitty big
- Possessor + possession e.g. Daddy coat
- Nomination (labelling) e.g. that coat
- Recurrence (repeated) e.g. more ball
Negation e.g. no ball
JEAN BERKO
- Children apply grammatical rules in new situations
- The all do this in the same order of development. Nobody teaches kids to do this
Pseudo-words
- The all do this in the same order of development. Nobody teaches kids to do this
CDS
repetiton, tag questions, interrogatives, simple vocab, short sentences, plural personal pronouns, proper nouns, concrete language
David Crystal
first stage of learning language, speech is for 3 purposes:
- to get what they want
- to get someone’s attention
- to draw attention to something
basic statements where nomination, relation of objects and events begins
Bellugi questions
Theory relating to questions:
- Rising intonation
- Inversion of auxiliary verbs to signify question
- Formulaic ‘wh-‘ questions
Tag questions
Aitchinson
Identified a model of 3 stages in children’s acquisition of words and their meanings:
1. Labelling - associating sounds with objects - concrete nouns
2. Packaging - Starting to explore the extent of the label - adjectives
3. Network building - Making connections between the labels they have developed
Intention reading and pattern finding
Tomasello - usage-based
theory states that children listen to language and do two things:
Intention reading – children learn how to use language to achieve social ends
Pattern finding – children look at many utterances and develop schemas based on patterns in language
Braine
Braine’s theory proposed that children learn language in a ‘slot and frame’ manner.
Essentially, the child develops a schema in which variables can be placed to suit the situation.
For example, a child may the learn the scheme ‘I + want + a + non-specific item’ to form utterances like ‘I want a drink’ or to form the past tense, use a scheme like ‘I + Xed + it’ and substitute a verb into the X – like ‘I liked it’.
