Child Language Acquisition

• Child Language Acquisition

  is devoted to learning how children acquire language early in life.
• Stages of Language Acquisition

  pre-verbal e.g. babbling and cooing

  holophrastic

  two word

  telegraphic

  post-telegraphic
• Proto-words

  'made up' words that a child will use to represent a word they might not yet be able to pronounce.
• child-directed speech (CDS)

  Higher or melodic pitch

  Repetition

  Slower and clearer speech

  Questioning

  KAO and Mitigated imperatives

  Diminutives

  Expansions and recasts

  Grammatically simple sentences
• communicative competence

  the ability to communicate in a personally effective and socially appropriate manner using the grammar system
• Substitution

  The process of swapping one sound for another
• Assimilation

  one consonant or vowel is swapped for another
• Deletion

  Omitting a particular sound within a word
• consonant cluster reduction

  This is a major phonological error; it is where a child reduces a consonant, e.g. green-geen.
• content words

  words that carry majority of meaning
• Skinner and Behaviorism

  Children learn through operant conditioning which consists of positive and negative reinforcement
• Chomsky and Natvism

  Children have a LAD and innate ability to understand grammar which is evidenced through virtuous errors
• Bruner - social interactionism

  Language Acquisition Support System (LASS), caregivers are important to lang development, scaffolding is supporting children to learn
• Vygotsky: Social Learning

  every aspect of children's cognitive development is embedded in the social context
• Piaget's stages of cognitive development

  sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational
• Halliday's Functions

  Instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, representational, imaginative, heuristic.
• IRF

  Initiation Response Feedback. A pattern of discussion between the teacher and learner. The teacher initiates, the learner responds, the teacher gives feedback. This approach to the exchange of information in the classroom has been criticized as being more about the learner saying what the teacher wants to hear than really communicating.
• Wug Test

  A test of a child's knowledge of morphology (word formation). Children were shown a picture of a Wug, and then shown a picture of 2 of these creatures and asked "There are 2...". Unanimously the children said Wugs with the plural ending of -s.
• Hyponym

  a more specific word within a category or under a hypernym
• Hypernym

  a word that is more general than another (e.g. animal is a hypernym for horse, plant is a hypernym for flower)
• underextension

  the failure to apply a new word more generally to objects that are included within the meaning of the word
• Analogical overextension

  Associating objects which are unrelated but which have one or more features in common (e.g. both being the same colour)
• Categorical overextension

  The most commonly occurring form of overextension in a child's language, and relates to confusing a hypernym (broad category, e.g. fruit) with a hyponym (specific example)
• Codeswitching

  moving back and forth between registers, dialects, or languages. change languages at phrase level
• Inferential Frameworks

  Knowledge built up over time and used in order to understand meanings that are implicit
• pragmatic rules

  rules that govern how people use language in everyday interaction e.g. turn-taking
• diphthong

  The sound produced by combining two vowels in to a single syllable or running together the sounds.
• Monophthongs

  single vowels
• Paralanguage

  vocalic behaviours that communicate meaning along with verbal behaviour alongside non-verbal behaviour
• Face-threatening acts (FTAs)

  linguistic strategies that threaten the negative or positive face of another participant such as commands, threats, warnings etc
• Corpus

  a collection of searchable language data
• Seriation

  Arranging objects in sequential order according to one aspect, such as size, weight, or volume.
• Children begin to understand the meaning of grammatical morphemes (e.g., plural -s) around age two.
• The child's first words are usually nouns, followed by verbs.
• By age three or four, children have acquired most of their native language's vocabulary and syntax.