Theories

• Nelson's First Fifty Words:

  1. naming things or people
  2. actions and events
  3. describing
  4. personal and social words
• Principles and Parameter (Pinker): by hearing the principles and parameters of a native language, children can define and retain the rules.
• Stages of interrogatives (Kilma and Bellugi): questions are expressed prosodically with rising intonation.
• Stages of negation (Bellugi):

  1. children use 'no' to being an utterance
  2. negation moves inside the clause
  3. child achieves standard form
• Truth value vs reinforcement: parents often respond to the truth value of what their child is saying, rather than how standard the grammar is.
• Reading meaning into social situation (Macnamara): rather than having an in-built language device, children have an innate capacity to read meaning into social situations, making them capable of learning language.
• Sociodramatic play (Garvey): children often adopt roles and identities, acting out storylines, practising negation and social interaction.
• Roger Brown (1973):

  • longitudinal study of Adam, Eve, Sarah
  • 14 grammatical morphemes
  • similar order of acquisition
  • primary auxiliary "to be" most difficult
• Cruttenden (1979):

  • Stage 1 memorises words
  • Stage 2 is aware of inflection rules
  • Stage 3 uses standard inflections