Spoken

• Stages of acquisition


  • Every child learns language at a different rate
  • There are a number of accepted stages a child will progress through before becoming fluent
  • Every child will reach different stages at different ages
  • Children will often exhibit characteristics of more than one stages as they move to another stage
• Pre-birth


  • Hearing occurs nearly sixth months before birth as the baby's ear bones have formed
  • Babies can recognise the mother's voice and differentiate between native and other languages even before birth
  • This is explained by the different rhythms and intonations of every language every baby is attuned to from an early age
  • People believe playing classical music to an unborn baby will increase intelligence
• Pre-verbal


  • Crying
  • Cooing
  • Babbling
• Crying


  One of the first noises a child will make, often for a physical reason like hunger or tiredness, allows the baby to exercise its vocal cords and understand making noise gains attention
• Cooing


  Begins from around 2 months old, a baby begins to experiment with noise made when the tongue and the back of the mouth come into contact
• Babbling


  Begins at 6 months and follows cooing, resembles the vowel and consonant sounds we are familiar with in spoken language, includes reduplicated babbling (same sound repeated) and variegated babbling (variation in sounds)
• Holophrastic stage


  Usually between 12-18 months, a child uses a whole sentence-worth of meaning in a single word, requires context and skill of the caregiver to correctly interpret the meaning, often includes concrete nouns like 'Mummy' or 'Daddy', children rely on non-verbal communication to clarify meaning
• Phonological development - sounds learned by age

  • 3 years: m, b, y, n, w, d, p, h
  • 5 years: t, ng, k, g, f, v, ch, j
  • 6 years: sh, o, th, s, z, l, r, zh
• Articulatory ease and perceptual discriminability

  Main reasons why children acquire some sounds before others
• Non-standard phonological features


  • Reduplicated sounds
  • Diminutives
  • Substitution
  • Assimilation
  • Deletion
  • Consonant Cluster Reductions
• Two-word stage


  Around 18 months, children start to put words together to convey meaning, utterances are more refined than holophrases, children begin to understand grammar and the relationship between words, coincides with 'vocabulary spurt' where children gain 'naming insight' and rapidly acquire 2-3 new words per day
• Telegraphic stage


  Around 2 years, child moves from placing two words together to producing longer and more complete utterances, including key content words to convey meaning while omitting grammatical words
• Post-telegraphic stage


  Around 3 years, child's speech becomes increasingly like adult speech, grammatical words previously omitted are now included, more subtle nuances of language are increasingly accurate, by 4 years child is speaking in largely grammatically accurate and complete sentences
• Theories of language acquisition

  • Skinner's Behaviourism/Imitation
  • Chomsky's Nativism
  • Piaget's Cognitive theory
  • Bruner's Interactionism
• Skinner's Behaviourism/Imitation


  Children learn through imitation and operant conditioning, positive/negative reinforcement affects future behaviour, but issues with imitation and correction hampering development
• Chomsky's Nativism


  Proposed Language Acquisition Device (LAD), innate ability to learn language, universal grammar, 'virtuous errors' as evidence, but doesn't account for role of caregivers
• Genie case study


  Challenges nativism theory, girl locked up from 20 months to 13 years with no social interaction or language exposure, never able to fully develop language, reinforces idea of critical period
• Piaget's Cognitive theory


  Focuses on cognitive development and stages, children need conceptual understanding before language can reflect it, sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, formal operational stages
• Bruner's Interactionism


  Rejected Chomsky's LAD, focused on importance of child's interactions with caregivers as key to language acquisition
• There is no single definitive theory to explain how language is acquired
• Within modern linguistics, there has been an increased move to understanding language development within the broad context of other kinds of learning
• Sensorimotor Stage


  • 0-2 years
  • Child begins to interact with their environment
  • They use their senses and physical movement to do so
  • Children remain egocentric
  • Children experience object permanence
• Pre-operational Stage


  • 2-6 years
  • Children learn to speak and develop their imaginative focus
  • In play they become capable of representing the world symbolically
  • They remain egocentric
  • They begin to question frequently and develop understandings of things
• Concrete Operational Stage


  • 7-11 years
  • The child stops being egocentric and can understand others' points of view
  • They become more capable of logical thought
• Formal Operational Stage


  • 11-16+ years
  • There will no longer be an issue with logical thought
  • Thinking becomes increasingly abstract
• Bruner - Interactionism


  • Jerome Bruner was a psychologist born in 1915
  • He rejected Chomsky's LAD
  • He focused his research on the importance of a child's interactions with caregivers as the key to language development
  • He suggested the importance of a Language Acquisition Support System (LASS)
  • This refers to the caregivers and other important participants in a child's life
  • Bruner put emphasis back on social situations in which a child takes part to explain how a child is presented with countless opportunities to acquire language with the help of significant adults who provide meaningful input
  • The way in which carers question, encourage and support the child through scaffolding helps children acquire speech
  • Rather than focusing on imitation and reinforcement like Skinner, Bruner concentrated more on the need for quality input from caregivers to facilitate learning
  • Caregivers give support in terms of correcting language misuse to prevent misuse on future occasions
  • Caregivers may also use Child Directed Speech (CDS) to help children conceptualise language independently by making it more accessible
• Vygotsky - Scaffolding


  • Vygotsky (1896-1934) was a Russian developmental psychologist whose ideas only became influential in the 1970s
  • He suggested the importance of doing for a child to be able to develop, and also focused on the importance of the caregiver to act as a more knowledgeable other
  • Through supporting the child from a position of having more knowledge and understanding, the adult (or perhaps older child) can direct the child to move within the zone of proximal development
  • This is the area just beyond what a child is able to do already, so a caregiver might provide the necessary support, or scaffolding, for the child to venture beyond their current level of ability
• Tomasello - A cognitive linguistic approach

  • A further rejection of Chomsky's ideas on universal grammar comes from researchers working in cognitive linguistics
  • For example, Michael Tomasello (2003) outlines a usage-based model or language acquisition and development, arguing against language being a special 'instinct'
  • Instead, the ability to learn language is both primarily social (driven by the human pre-disposition to be cooperative and collaborative)
  • It relies on using the same kinds of cognitive processes as other forms of learning, to example, walking, drawing etc.
  • Tomasello identified that by the age of 9-12 months children make use of a pattern-forming ability (which is not limited to language and used by a child in a range of other learning contexts)
  • It enables them to learn about the different forms and functions of single words, and to understand the intentional aspect of language (I.e. that language is a way of conveying meaning)
  • From that, children build generalisations about now those words form large syntactic constructions or schemas, which become the building blocks for using various grammatical patterns
  • Rather than being the result of some kind of built-in grammar that supports the learning of language with little input, a usage-based linguistic advocates a 'bottom-up approach with the child actively building, and then using, templates for grammatical structures based on sensory input and interaction with caregivers
• Child Directed Speech (CDS)


  • The specific way in which caregivers talk to children
  • Key features of CDS: higher or melodic pitch, more frequent and longer pauses, slower and clearer speech, repetition, grammatically simpler sentences, more questions, use of diminutives, use of nouns rather than pronouns, more frequent use of plural pronouns, expansion, recasts, politeness features, mitigated imperatives
• Berko and Gleason (1975) identified that fathers tended to use more commands and teased children a little more, while mothers tended to be more sensitive and responsive to their children
• Pragmatics


  • Politeness is a learned behaviour that is encouraged from a very early age in children
  • Politeness moves beyond the words used and extends to accepted discourse conventions and ways in which conversations are maintained
  • Pragmatic awareness is also important within the notion of politeness
  • A child may disobey Grice's maxims and speak out of turn as they may find it difficult to keep it in when they have something to say
  • Adults often forgive politeness errors in children
• Sarcasm


  • Although children might identify sarcasm at the age of 6, they are not thought to fully understand the intended humour of it until the age of about 10
  • The reason for this could be connected to the complex processes that have to take place for the humour to be understood
• Importance of play


  • A child who spends time alongside other children is more likely to engage in play that will support language development
  • Vygotsky proposed that social interaction with others was absolutely critical in developing understanding and that play facilitated learning
  • Pretend play can help vocabulary growth
  • Imaginative play is critical for children to experiment with language in unfamiliar and different ways
• Discourse


  • Playing peekaboo can be seen as one of the first ways that children engage in discourse and turn-taking
  • Through CDS, children will quickly become familiar with question and answer adjacency pairs
  • The IRF structure (initiation, response, feedback) was suggested by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) as a way of analysing educational discourse
• Halliday's Functions


  • Instrumental - where the child is trying to fulfil a need
  • Regulatory - used to control the behaviour of someone
  • Interactional - used to develop relationships with others
  • Personal - used to express views and preferences
  • Heuristic - used to explore the world around them
  • Imaginative - used to explore something creatively
  • Representational - used to describe
• Childhood conversation


  1. Initiation

  2. Response

  3. Feedback
• Initiation


  Mother asks child What do we say to a question. Granny?
• Response


  Child provides a response to the question
• Feedback


  Mother praises child for giving an appropriate answer
• Responses


  • Thank you for the sweets Granny.
  • Well done John.