English Language - Child language acquisition

English Language - Child language acquisition

1. Stages of development

   • Stages
     • First 2 months - Biological noises: Different types of crying can be identified to signal hunger, distress, etc...
     • 6 - 12 months - Babbling begins: Sounds begin to more closely imitate their native language
     • 2- 5 months - Cooing and laughing: The child is discovering their vocal chords making sounds such as 'coo'
     • 12- 18 months - Holophrastic stage: Say their first whole word, consisting of single word utterances which often mean more
   • The two word stage
     • Once children have around 50 words in their vocab they begin to put words together, most utterances at this stage are present tenses
     • When a child responds to an adult's sentence they often repeat the same words in the same order
     • 2 word sentences can express a range of idea
     • Pronouns are rare although they may use "me" to refer to themselves
   • Telegraphic stage
     • Children start to construct what we recognise as short sentences, however these are often incomplete
     • Children tend to use only context words (nouns and verbs)
     • They leave out the grammatical function words such as prepositions and determiners and tend to use incorrect pronouns, confusing the subject and object pronouns

2. Early phonological development

   • First sounds are often plosives - small explosions of air such as 'b' 'd' 'p' 't'
   • Plosive comes before fricatives - Passing air across closed mouth parts such as 'sh' 'f' 's' 'th'
   • An example would be that children will often pronounce 'that' as 'dat' as they are unable to do the fricative 'th'
   • Phonemic simplification
     • Simplify words in order to pronouce it
     • Difficult to end on closed sounds, therefore they will end on a vowel (CVCV STRUCTURE- Mum = Mummy)
     • Avoid consonant cluster i.e. "ckl" in 'pickle'

3. Theories

   • Behaviourist approach
     • B.F. Skinner, written in 1957 in his book verbal behaviour
     • Suggested that children learn to speak by copying the utterances heard around them
     • Their responses are strengthened by repetitions, corrections and positive reinforcement
   • Innate approach
     • Noam Chomsky - 1959
     • Born with an innate capacity for language development, the human brain is ready for language when children are exposed to speech.
     • They pick it up naturally and begin to work out the underlying rules themselves
     • Children are born with Language Acquisition Development (LAD) which enables them to make sense of the utterances they hear
       • i.e. "I eated" the morpheme "ed" is past tense, which is a virtuous error, creative not imitative
   • Cognitive approach
     • Jean Piagett
     • Language development is related to cognitive development
     • Ideas the child understands
       • Time
       • Space
       • Numbers
   • Katherine Nelson
     • A child's first words falls into 4 categories
       • Naming things, actions, describing, personal & social
       • Word class - Uses nouns, adjectives and concrete noun
       • Grammatical function words are noticeably absent in the early stages of lexical acquisition
   • Jean Aitchinson
     • A child's first words fall into 3 categories
       • Labelling
         • Child making the mental link of understanding that the verbal signs point to things in the world
       • Packaging
         • Signs or words that can be used in other situations
         • Semantic errors
           • Under-extension = Under-using nouns, as they are not ready to apply to other things, giving them a narrower meaning
           • Over-extension = Applying a term to a broader meaning.
           • Over-extension is most commonly used out of the two, 1/3 of 50 words are likely to be over-extended, by the age of 2 1/2 over-extension disappears as a child language increases and fills in the gaps.
       • Network building
         • Realisation the words are connected to other words and form groups of families (semantic fields)
           • Hypernyms [i.e.Animals], Hyponyms [i.e. dog, cat, rat]

4. Language

   • Trends
     • Deletion - Simplification of pronunciation by deleting certain sounds
       • Final consonants may be dropped, unstressed syllables are often deleted i.e. 'banana' = 'nana, consonant clusters are reduced
     • Addition - Sometimes children will add a vowel to break up a consonant cluster
     • Assimilation - Sounds are made to sound more like neighbouring ones
     • Substitution - Changing harder sounds with easier one i.e. 'that' = 'dat'
     • Metathesis - When sounds in a word are swapped round i.e. 'elephant' = 'efelant'
     • Reduplication - A syllable in a word is repeated, i.e. 'wee-wee'
   • Rate
     • 18th month - Vocab of about 50 words
     • 2 years - Vocab of about 200 words
     • 5 years - Vocab of about 2000 words
     • 7 years - Vocab of about 4000
   • Understanding
     • Each stage, the number of word understood by the child is expected to be higher
     • When a child adds new words to their vocabulary they don't understand the full use of the word
     • Understanding exceeds articulation
     • By 18 months they understand 250 words