CD - input and interaction part one

CD - input and interaction part one

1. CDS - CHILD DIRECTED SPEECH is a special register adopted by adults and older children when talking to young children.

   • learning language from parents is only the fuel that allows language to function. CHOMSKY - 1965 - the input available to the language lraning child is fairly degenerate in quality. fraghments and deviant expressions.
     • SNOW - 1972 - parents adapt their speech in numerous ways at every level of linguistic analysis.
   • CHARACTERISTICS OF CDS - distinct mode of speech, we talk in different ways to different people in different settings. adopt a special register for each occasion. CDS is a distinct register when comparing it to ADS (ADULT DIRECTED SPEECH) - SNOW - 1972.
     • PHONOLOGY - people tend to exaggerate their intonation, producing great swooping sounds over an extended pitch range. overal pitch tends to be higher than normal. - GARNICA - 1977. raise pitch when infant shows signs of positive emotional engagement.
       • infants prefer to listen to it.
       • VOCABULARY - adult-child conversation with a toddler tends to be about here and now rather than future. there is an emphasis on concrete rather than abstract concepts. object words are placed at the end of sentences. topics are dictated by the interests of the child.
         • MORPHOLOGY - complex system of word endings in russia. instead will rely heavily on diminutive forms such as doggie, horsie etc... alternate between diminitive and morphologically simplified forms within the same sentence so as not to overwhelm the child
           • sentences in CDS are well formed grammatically. noun phrases, more grape juice are grammatical and short. MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE (mlu) IS LOWER. shorter and simpler sentences. the subject of CDS sentences has a strong tendency to be an agent or "doer".
             • SEMANTIC BOOTSTRAPPING - BROWN - 1957 - SYNTAX comes when children use semantic knowledge they have developed. learners use knowledge of the meaning of a word to infer its syntactical category.
   • DYNAMIC REGISTER - adult speech changes continually in concert with the child's developing language. change from infant-directed speech to child directed speech. changes are subtle but continue all the way through childhood until the speech directed to the child is more like adult-directed speech.
     • CHILD-DIRECTED SPEECH SUMMARY
       • CDS benefits from confining to topics that interest the learner / child. presents the child with a series of lessons. the complexity of speech addressed to the child is largely determined by cues from the children themselves. language acquisition is a self paced lesson. the input of the child is NOT as CHOMSKY - 1965 - assumed DEGENERATE.. there is variation in the quantity and quality of cds available.

2. LINGUISTIC NATIVIST CLAIMS - poverty of the stimulus, minimal input necessary.

   • the poverty of the stimulus problem. only minimal input needed to trigger parameter setting.

3. USAGE-BASED CLAIMS - the importance of input frequency, input frequency in lexical development, input frequency in grammatucal development. 2. the importance of interaction, joint attention and language development, television and language development and pragmatics (where language and social cognition interact.

   • THE INPUT IS CENTRAL to the language learning process. input frequency is important for syntactic development as well as for lexical and morphological development.
     • children learn the grammatucal categories and sentence structures of their target language entirely based on the language they hear.
       • usage based theories focus on the role of joint attention and the role of input frequency.

4. LANGUAGE INPUT AND LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT - the most frequent word in english is NOT the word that english speaking children learn first. other factors, semantic salience (prominence) and complexity. joint attentipon and intention reading and memory issues. other biases - mutual-exclusivity and whille object bias

   • SALIENCE OF THE FORM IN THE INPUT AND LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT. - LOW phonological salience = unstressed words or morphemes, words or morphemes which are not sentecne-final. words or morphemes of brief duration in time.
   • LANGUAGE INPYT AND LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT - not controversial, all theorists of lexical development agree that the input frequency must play an important role in word learning.
     • FREQUENCY EFFECTS IN GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT.
       • COMPARING ACROSS LANGUAGES - ALLEN AND CRAGO - 1993 - particular types of sentence structures which are learnt relatively late by english speaking childre, are learnt early by children learning languages in which those sentence structures are heard very regularly.
       • HUTTENLOCHER ET AL - 2002 - CHILDREN studied from age 42 months to 50 months. looked at syntax comprehension - picture pointing and teacher observation. correlation between teacher observation and change in syntax comprehension.... ???
       • MATTHEWS ET AL - 2005 - children hear high, medium or low fequency verbs and FOUND that two year olds were more likely to produce ungrammatical orders with low frequency verbs than high freq / familiar verbs.
       • BANNARD AND MATTHEWS - 2008 - studied children age two and three and heard frequently occurring chunks or infrequent chunks (sit in chair . sit in truck). measured correct repitition and duration of repetition.. FOUND correct repition more likely to frequent sequences than to repeat infreq ones. 3 year olds faster to repeat the first three words of an frequent sequence than an infrequent one.

5. input = the particular language forms that the child hears, while interaction refers to the way in which those forms are used in adult-child discourse. imitation is a form of interaction.

6. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES RESULTING FROM DIFFERENCES IN PARENTAL INPUT.

   • QUANTITY AND DIVERSITY OF WORDS IN CHILD DIRECTED SPEECH. correlated with quicker word learning in children at 14 - 26 months.. parents from upper middle class families say 1000s more words - HART AND RISLEY - 1995
     • HART AND RISLEY - 1995 CONT... grouped parents into three bands of socioeconomic status. found high SES children were exposed to more words and more variety of words. high levels of parental prohibition are associated with poor language growth. HIGH SES children produce complex structures themselves at an earlier stage than low SES children.
     • HURTADO ET AL - 2008 - children of talkative mothers were more efficient at producing speech. tendency for high SES parents to be more talkative and use more gestures.
   • individual children have different experiences of language, variation in the amount and quality of child directed speech provided. TWO POINTS RAISED - CDS might be a minority phenomenon not universal. 2. parents who do supply CDS differ in quality and quantity in how they speak to their children.

7. SUMMARY

   • INTERACTION - facilitative and essential for word-learning, essential for grammatical development.
   • INPUT FREQUENCY - facilitative for word learning, facilitative for grammar learning.
   • PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS - speak to children a lot.