Child Language Acquisition

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Preverbal Stages

Phonology: Exploring vocal skills

Pragmatics/discourse: Practising pitch and intonation helps create conversation sounding utterances.

Stage. Features. Approx age (months).

Vegetative. Discomfort/reflexive sounds. 0-4.

Cooing. Comfort/open-mouthed vowels. 4-6.

Babbling. Vowels/repeated consonant patterns. 6-12.

Protowords. Word lie vocalisations/accompanying gestures. 12+.

10-14 months. Still believes attached to mother.

Most early words are nouns

Many related to everyday routine

Fits into semantic field of basic needs

Some specific to child's context (Piglet, Tigger)

Verbal Stages

Holophrastic (bottle). 1 w utt. 12-18

Two Word (my bottle). 2 w utt. 18-24

Telegraphic (want my bottle) 3+ ws. 24-36

Post Telegraphic (its mine, not yours). > complex grammatical constructions. 36+

Manslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Infinite Monkey Theory (Shakespeare)

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Skinner (1957) Behaviourism

Accounted for language development by means of environmental influence. He argued that children learn language based on behaviourist reinforcement principals by associating words with meanings. Correct utterances are positively reinforced when the child realises the communicative value of words and phrases

Chomsky (1965) Nativism

Criticised Skinner's proposals

Argued that children would never acquire the tools needed for processing an infinite number of sentences if the language acquisition mechanism was dependant on language input alone.

Consequently, he posed the theory of UG

A couple of decades later, contemporary linguistic researchers began to question the existence of UG

Language Acquisition Devices (LAD)

Suggested that language is an innate faculty and that learning takes place through a brain mechanism preprogrammed with the ability to acquire grammatical structures

Posed lang is fundamentally similar worldwide/human lang might vary across countries but also share many similarities which he claimed was 'Universal Grammar' (sentence structures etc)

Skinner (1957) Behaviourism

Accounted for language development by means of environmental influence he argued that

Conditioning/controlling pigeons and rats

David Crystal's Stages of Lang Development

Saussure research linguist

Satre theories

Wolf boy/girl language development

Patricia Kuhl The Linguistic Genius of Babies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-ymanHajN8&t=3s

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Lang is a cognition that highlights our humanity.

Other species are limited to the amount of meaningful vocalisations they can produce, as no other known species can express infinite ideas within a set of symbols.

This supposed mechanism, which enables children to segment syllables and words out of the strings of sounds they hear and to acquire grammar to understand and produce language is still quite and enigma.

A couple of decades later, contemporary linguistic researchers began to question the existence of UG. They argued that categories like noun and verb are biologically, evolutionary and psychologically implausible and that the field called for an account that can explain for the acquisition process without innate categories.

It is suggested that children are sensitive to patterns in language which enables the acquisition process, for example morphology acquisition (relating to morphemes), such as the -s marker to indicate pluralisation. When a child hears a sufficient number of instances of a linguistic construction, it will detect repeated patterns across the utterances she has heard and will acquire knowledge concerning the application of such features.

Researchers have still not agreed on a answer regarding how a child develops speech.

Simply Psychology website: https://www.simplypsychology.org/language.html