CLA revision

CLA revision

1. BEHAVIOURIST (B.F.Skinner)

   • Based on conditioning and reinforcement - child imitates lang and gets attention, motivating them to repeat the behaviour
     • Children repeat the lang structures they hear
       • Parents reinforce the right behaviour
       • Could result in a Virtuous Error
         • irregular verbs, they over-extend the standard language pattern
           • Steal = stealed (stole)
           • Grow = growed (grew)
     • Doesn't explain how children produce structure they haven't heard before
   • COGNITIVE APPROACH (Jean Piaget) concept
     • language acquisition is linked to intellectual/cognitive development suggesting that children only use linguistical structure when they understand the concept involved
       • Children only understand the past tense that have understood the concept of past time
         • CHILD UNDERSTANDING STAGES
           • Sensimotor
             • Pre-operation
               • Concrete Operational
                 • Formal Operational Stage
                   • 11+
                   • thinking about hypothetical scenarios and processing abstract thoughts. can manipulate ideas in head and creatively solve problems. Piaget - progression of thinking now stops but complexity keeps growing with age.
                     • Abstract logic - Piaget gave children different liquids, one called the indicator. The child had to find a combination that turned the indicator yellow. They solved it, a younger child texted in a haphazard way.
                 • 7-11 years
                 • logical thinking about concrete events, can understand something is the same, even through different appearance
                   • Conservation - 4 yr will focus on what they see, not what they know.
               • 2-6 years
               • child begins to use symbols to represent things
                 • Animism (play)
                 • Egocentrism - seeing the world from children's perspective and the world as an extension of oneself
             • Exploring through 5 senses. grasping and sucking reflexes. These skills develop and become more complex.
               • Object Permanence - awareness that an object existed even when you can't see it
             • 0-2 years
     • COGNITIVE APPROACH (Lev Vygotsky) language
       • Zone of proximal development - social interaction is needed for cognition
         • The caretaker scaffolds the child's behaviour (support it structurally whilst internal developments occur)
           • Bonnie is completing a 3 piece puzzle. One of the pieces doesn't fit. The caregiver says "try turning it, Bonnie" she looks confused. The caregiver puts her hand over and turns it "see? like that."
             • Her zone of proximal development has expanded through this scaffolding
         • PIAGET
           • Different
             • Doesn't see the child as an independent leaner but as a person learning within social interactions
           • Similar
             • He saw children as active in their own learning

2. NATIVIST (Noam Chomsky)

   • Language development comes easier to most children because of a combination of 'innate biological endowments' and encouragement
     • Language Acquisition devise
       • Developed through- Gaining attention, Query, Label and Feedback
   • CONTRADICTIONS
     • Poverty of stimulus - feral children
       • Genie (born in1957)
         • Father concluded she was mentally disabled, so he disliked her and withheld attention and care. At 20 months he isolated her strapped to a child's toilet/crib without stimulation and servery malnourished.
           • LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION TESTS - she had no difficulty giving the correct meaning of sentences containing familiar homophones, demonstrating that her comprehension is better than her production
           • She could identify rythmes
           • EEG - activity from the brain's right hemisphere in the Broca's and Wernike's area
             • So she was using her right hemisphere to acquire language
           • However, even after her years of growing a lexicon , she struggled with pragmatics and syntax - she never had a first language
             • 1972 - "Father hit big stick. Father is angry"
               • the omission of basic verb structures (personal pronoun "me", prepositions "with" , underextension of "father"

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