Child Language acquisition

Child Language acquisition

1. Theories

   • Lass Bruner -

2. The first year

   • Stage 1: 0-8 weeks – basic biological noises. Spluttering, rhythmic coughing, reflexive noises (hunger, pain, discomfort), vegetative noises (breathing, eating, excreting) – strengthening muscles and developing vocalization skills + different kinds of crying = universal
   • Stage 2: 8-20 weeks – cooing and laughing Quieter, low-pitched musical noises. ½ second to a few seconds. Long vowel-like sound with a preceding consonant sound made towards the back of the mouth. Often nasal quality [g] [k] [ch] as in ‘loch’, friction sounds [sh]; guu. Kuu – cooing. Later strings of cooing sounds, but not actual connected speech. Some syllable sounds of equivalents – [ga] [gu] often diphthongs [au] [ou]. Why is cooing important?: control of muscles of vocal organs. Tongue movements and the 100+ muscles involved in producing vowel and consonant sounds …Lip-thrusting – mistaken for trying to talk. Could be imitating the parents’ lip movement, but no sounds.
   • Stage 3: 20-30 weeks – vocal play …steady, longer and more confident sounds Varied vowel-like and consonant-like sounds, including nasal sounds [mmm] and [nn] and fricatives [fff]. Produces range of sounds including glides – low to high pitch and high to low pitch; practice a variety of sounds. Towards the end of the stage, noises of consonants and vowels sound like they are together – start of babbling …practicing range of sounds. Crystal: “oral pioneering work” – organs of voice mechanisms beginning to assume positions which will be fixed for the rest of life.
   • Stage 4: 25-50 weeks – Babbling [abababababa] [mamamamamamamama] also known as reduplicating monosyllables A much smaller range of sounds produced than Stage 3, but those sounds made are practised over and over: baby getting more skilled at making right sounds. After 9 months, sounds of consonants and vowels change with each syllable of ‘words’ made e.g. [adu] and [maba]. Friction sounds which are most difficult to make begin to be produced [s] and [sh] …Friction sounds often replaced by sounds which are easier to pronounce, e.g. ‘see’ is pronounced ‘ti’…Still no consonant clusters yet e.g. [sp] [gl] [tr]
   • Stage 5: 9 months – 18 months – melodic utterances From 9 months melody, rhythm and tone of voice develop. Occasionally, a chunk of babble stands out as having more shape, all of a sudden.

3. The second year

   • (12-24 months) Research by Benedict: by 18 months a child can speak about 50 words, but can understand about 5 times this (250). But: problems trying to identify whether children do comprehend a word or not. Example of child who says ‘bowl’ whilst mother is dishing out dinner. Child is able to label the bowl and appears to comprehend what it means. When asked the same whilst the mother is washing up, child is puzzled and unable to answer. What reasons could there be for this apparent confusion? [Perhaps he thought ‘bowl’ meant ‘food’ or ‘dinner’.] Context is vitally important. Early stage is a labelling- process – attaching names to things and seeing if they fit What do children talk about during the second year? Usually children will talk about what is around them; put simply: the here and now. Different ‘fields’ of meaning in new speaker’s language are evident. People: relations e.g. mummy, granddad, grandma, baby, milkman, Actions: (a) way things move
   • Generally, in second year, words can be divided into two key groups: action words and naming words Katherine Nelson (1973) 60% of words are naming things, then events/actions, then modifiers, then personal/social words
   • Overextension and underextension occur in the second year – lasts into the first half of the third year-Underextension: Joanna’s shoes: Joanna calls her shoes ‘shoes’. When shown a pair of her own shoes and a pair of her mothers shoes, and asked to point to the shoes, she will always point to her own. Narrowing of the meaning of a word.
   • Problem of production and comprehension: the child has got to get the sense of what a word actually means – the concept, the actual object etc in context. This is what goes on for most of the second year.
   • Grammar development Starts with a single word. One word stage usually lasts for about six months. Building up vocabulary. 60% utterances at this stage are nouns and 20% express actions (Nelson 1973). Sometimes these one-word phrases seem like actual sentences, e.g. ‘biscuit’ could mean ‘I want a biscuit’ or ‘There is a biscuit over there’ etc. Known as holophrastic stage or a holophrase. This means using single words as if they are whole phrases. Dada? – is that Daddy? Dada! – There’s Daddy! [statement] Da-da – pick me up Daddy [insistent]
   • Two-word phrases (about 18 months) When begun, this stage will usually be moved through very quickly – often only a few weeks. The two-word phrase has the same pattern as adult language – usually S+O. ‘My bed’ not ‘Bed my’. Inflectional verb endings acquired at this stage e.g. plurals on words and verbs endings for progressive tense walk-walking
   • Jean Berko’s Wug (1958) – Presented child with strange looking animal called a Wug. Child had never seen this before or heard the name. The researcher called it Wug – then showed picture of two Wugs and said ‘Two…?’ to the child. If child has learned plurals with –s ending, then child would says ‘two wugs’. This proves that children don’t just learn plurals off by heart, there is a rule that the child internalises and then uses in unrelated circumstances.
   • Children begin to play around with word order in a sentence e.g. use of prepositions (in there, on head). Possession (my cat, me sore). Articles (a/an or the) appear before nouns. Basic [subject]+[verb] structure emerges: It gone, Man run, or [subject]+[verb]+[object]: Teddy sweeties (=Teddy wants some sweets).
   • Trends in sound development – Year 2 Children change the sounds of words if they can’t make the actual sound: don’t like friction sounds [f] – prefer stopped consonant e.g. pish for fish; tii for sea don’t like sounds at back of mouth [don] gone; [tii] key [w] and [j] instead of difficult [l] and [r] leg – jeg harmonisation of sounds, so sounds in one part of word replace other ones, e.g. [d] in dog becomes [g] – [gog] tii – tree; kai – sky – children don’t like consonant clusters don’t like consonant clusters at the end of words [ha] hat; [bu] bus dropping of quiet syllables e.g. banana – nana; giraffe – raf
   • Reduplication takes place when children pronounce the different syllables in a word the same way. Usually, at this stage, these words have two syllables. Water, for example, might come out as [wowo]… bottle might be [bubu]. Sometimes, the words sound quite unlike their adult counterparts, e.g. [mumu] for window. Sometimes, even words with one syllable and reduplicate that… e.g. ball becoming [bobo]
   • Berko and Brown (1960) – Talked to child who called his inflatable plastic fish ‘fis’. They imitated pronunciation as per child and said ‘Is this your fis’. Child said ‘No. My fis’. Child rejected his own pronunciation when said by adult. Adult then said ‘this is your fish’ and the child replied ‘Yes. My fis.’ – Reveals that children can’t make the right sound but expect adults to say the word correctly and see what they are saying as what the adult is saying, even though it isn’t.

4. The third Year

   • he most important aspect of the third year is the sheer amount of progress and development which a child makes. Year 2 Year 3 Open it Daddy comed to see it in the garden Put in box I can see Mummy and Daddy in the mirror Fall down car Can me put it in like that?
   • Obvious differences: sentences are longer. They get longer because children have more to say and they need increasingly more complex grammar in order to be able to say these things.
   • Child begins with sentences that usually have two parts: an object and a verb: kick ball. Later on this sentence is extended by adding a subject at the start: man kick ball, boy kicki ball. This is extended further by including something like an adverbial, indicating time, place or manner in which something is done: e.g. man kick ball fast; boy kick ball now; me kick ball later etc. The same process is at work for commands , which start off as very simple sentences ‘Push car’ to ‘Push car into the garage now’. The process of making longer, more complex sentences can be called ‘sentence filling’ where the child builds up longer sentences by adding to shorter ones. For example: The white car The big white car The three big white cars The three big white cars with shiny wheels
   • Children learn questions during this stage: the three stages of learning questions are first with no grammar but with emphasis or rising intonation at the end (possibly mimicking what adults do in questions); second stage is understanding and being able to use wh- words (who, where, what, why, when etc) and finally, being able to invert or rearrange the auxiliary verb and the subject of a sentence to make a question e.g. ‘Mummy is…’ becomes ‘Is mummy…’?
   • The telegraphic quality in children’s speech at two years old has been lost by this stage. This means that sentences are fuller and more grammatically correct, with prepositions being used instead of omitted. ‘Man kick ball’ becomes ‘Man is kicking that ball.’