Aitchison - Social Interaction

• Social interaction: the concept that caregivers will design speech for children.
• Child Directed Speech / caregiver language: linguistic features used to accommodate children.
• Social Interaction places emphasis on the social element to language acquisition. Children will signal the want to learn language, and can only learn language from someone who wants to communicate with them.
• Cultural development happens when children observe others interacting, then the child is later able to develop the behaviours to communicate in this way.
• Learners, whether they are adults or children, learn best when they discover knowledge for themselves.
• Interaction between adult and child builds the structure of language long before the child is able to produce any.
• Although there are observable benefits to caregiver speech, it has never been possible to identify precise links between language structures used by parents and their appearance in the child’s language.
• Aitchison suggests caregiver speech is often non-standard, and so may hinder a child’s acquisition of standard speech.
• Labelling involves making the link between the sounds of particular words and the objects to which they refer e.g. "mummy".
• Packaging entails understanding a word's range of meaning when over and under-extension become a hurdle in the development of language.
• Network building involves grasping the connections between words; understanding that some words are opposite in meaning.
• Aitchison believed that the speed of learning is influence by both innate abilities and environment. Language is partly learned by imitation so parents play a role in the acceleration of learning the language.
• Aitchison believed hearing parentese features whilst learning to speak could hinder the child's speech acquisition later on.