Child Language Acquisition

• What is Nativism?

  The belief that children learn language naturally
• What is Behaviourism?

  Language is learnt through understanding right and wrong
• What is Social Interactionism?

  Language is learnt through parental influence
• What is Cognitivism?

  Language is learnt through exposure and schema development
• What did the Bard and Sachs study into Jim identify?

  Human interaction is necessary for speech development
• What did Clark-Stewart identify about vocabulary development?

  Children whose mothers talk more have larger vocabularies
• What is the ZPD?

  Zone of proximal development
• What does Vygotsky say about the ZPD?

  Children need an MKO to support learning
• What is Garvey’s sociodramatic play?

  Play that begins around four years old
• What is the LAD Model by Chomsky?

  Children are born with innate knowledge of language
• What criticism did Tomasello provide for Chomsky?

  Tomasello called Chomsky an armchair theorist
• Explain Berko Gleason’s Wug Test.

  Children apply suffixes to nonsense words
• What is Steven Pinker’s Nativist argument (1994)?

  Language is an innate human ability
• Explain the Genie Wiley case study.

  Genie never achieved full grammatical competence
• Explain the Oxana case study (1991).

  Oxana communicated through barking after rescue
• Explain Lenneberg’s critical period hypothesis.

  Language must be learned before puberty
• What is Skinner’s Behaviourist Theory?

  All behavior is conditioned through reinforcement
• Provide a criticism for Skinner’s Theory.

  Chomsky questioned validity of animal experiments
• What is Piaget’s attitude to language development?

  Cognitive development precedes language acquisition
• What are Piaget’s four stages of development?

  Sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, formal operational
• Explain these stages of Piaget’s development.

  Stages include sensory experience and logical thinking
• Define Egocentricity.

  Inability to see another's point of view
• Define Object Permanence.

  Understanding something exists without seeing it
• Explain a criticism of Piaget’s idea.

  Some with learning difficulties are fluent
• What is Repacholi & Gopnik’s criticism of Piaget?

  Children are sensitive to others' needs early
• Explain Bruner’s LASS Model.

  Language learning needs activating through LASS
• What did Catherine Snow focus on within her research?

  Ways mothers talk to children by age
• Define Child Directed Speech.

  Speech that attracts and holds a child's attention
• What did Vandam explore relating to motherese and fatherese?

  Male talk resembles adult speech more
• What does Schatz evaluate about correction in CDS?

  Only 4% of children's errors are corrected
• What are the features of CDS?

  Higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, simple sentences
• Explain the Papa New Guinea criticism of CDS.

  Kaluli Tribe speaks to children as adults
• Explain the Samoa criticism of CDS.

  Parents delay speaking to children until older
• What are the stages of Language Acquisition?

  Babbling, Holophrastic, Two-Word, Telegraphic, Post Telegraphic
• What does Desmond Morris say about Babbling?

  Babbling is similar regardless of nationality
• What did Katherine Nelson find about Holophrastic words?

  60% of first 50 words are nouns
• What does Bloom say about noun bias?

  Noun bias reflects frequency in language
• What did Aitchison identify about vocabulary acquisition?

  Three stages: Labelling, Packaging, Network Building
• What did Rescorla explore about overextension?

  Identified three types of overextension
• What did Roger Brown identify about Two-Word utterances?

  They follow a limited range of patterns