Child language

• Stages in vocal development:

  • Biological noises (0-2 months): coughing, crying, vomiting, burping. Different cries indicate the baby's needs. Crying stops when needs are met, evolving from a reflex to a means of communication. In later months, crying can be combined with gestures.
  • Cooing (2-5 months): Gurgling/mewing as the baby develops vocal cords and tries to gain control of them.
  • Vocal play (5-8 months): Controlled vowel-like or consonant-like sounds with varying pitch.
  • Babbling (6-12 months): Production of phonemes, sounds that appear in the child's native language. Most crucial during the first year, resembling adult language with repeated sounds.
• Holophrastic stage (9-18 moths): children begin to use individual words to convey meaning
• telegraphic stage (24-30 months)-child can string two or more words together, however not a full sentence
• Nativist: Children have innate ability to put grammar/syntax together
• Socioculturalist: environment + culture influences language
• Behaviourist: children learn through imitation + positive or negative reinforcement
• Cognitive: Primary drive behind actions are our thoughts, so mind needs to understand the world before being able to talk about it.
• Nativist:

  • Chomsky- every child has LAD (Language Acquisition Device), principles children born with helps them learn language, virtuous errors helps them learn
  • Gleason- Wug test was testing how well children learned plural and other inflection morphemes, virtuous errors, using wrong tenses
  • Steven Pinker- Lang acquisition only understood if we take a 'learnability theory', considers what mental operations children must perform to learn language
• socioculturalist:

  • Vygotsky- Zone of proximal development (ZPD), zone between what the child can do + what child can do with help, MKO
  • Bruner- children born with an ability to develop lang but require regular interaction with caregivers to learn + understand it, LASS (Lang Acquisition Support System), CDS
  • Aitchison- no exact dates a child reaches c certain stage of learning lang, some learn faster on others the speed of learning influenced by both innate abilities+ background, 3 stages, labelling, packaging + networking
• Behaviourist:

  • Skinner- children imitate adults, correct utterances are reinforced, positive + negative reinforcement helps them learn + develop lang skills
• Cognitive:

  • Piaget- assumes children born with little cognitive, but minds develop + build new schemas (idea or outline of something in your mind about how world works) as they age + experience world around them. Cognitive development had to come before lang development, have to be able to think before speaking.
• Tag question: small question attached to end of a sentence
• Crystal: children learn in amorphous (no definite form) stages by trial and error to successfully learn the language
• Two-word stage (18-24 months): Child begins to string together two words to create basic sentences