SPOKEN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION by Saskia

THEORIES OF ACQUISITION

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Behaviourism (Skinner):
- Copying set expressions
- Positive reinforcement
- Complex grammatical structures (learnt by rote)
- Evidence for accent

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Nativism (Chomsky):
- Virtuous errors suggest LAD
- Lack of caregiver support
- Standard syntax

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Interactionism (Bruner):
- Caregiver = LASS (CDS)

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Critical period (Lenneberg, 1967)

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Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky):
- Interaction with more skilled partner
- CDS = scaffold
- Child may not respond to prompts (outside ZPD)
- Internal mediators: inner speech, pretend play

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Cognitive theory (Piaget):
- Does the child understand the concepts?
- Interaction with peers
- Egocentric speech
- Theory of mind

PRE-VERBAL STAGE

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Acclimatisation occurs in the womb:
- DeCasper and Fifer (1980): the foetus learns to recognise the mother's voice
- Mehler (1988): French newborns distinguished French phonemes

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During the first few months, the child is vegetative. S/he produces instinctive/reflexive sounds to communicate discomfort and needs

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Cooing begins at around 6 weeks, and enables the child to exercise their organs of articulation. It involves open vowel sounds and alternating prosody

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Babbling begins at 6 months, and involves:
- Reduplicated monosyllables
- Voiced bilabial plosives and nasals
- Intonation of interrogatives, adjacency pairs and exclamatives
- Phonemic expansion
- Phonemic contraction
- Jargoning
- Proto-words

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Pettito et al. (2004) found that deaf babies sign-babble

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Before the child can speak, s/he will become familiar with discourse and pragmatic conventions, e.g. turn-taking

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Pre-sleep monologues enable the child to experiment phonologically and process stimuli

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Volterra and Erting (1990): gesture usage precedes production and provides a cognitive bridge between comprehension and production

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Plowden (1967): Language development is pivotal to success in education

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Children lack the metalinguistic awareness to recognise their own language acquisition

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Comprehension precedes production: a child understands more than they can say

HOLOPHRASTIC STAGE (11-18months)

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12 months - first word, although may not be standard pronunciation

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Child produces single words with sentence-level meaning

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Child may adopt phonological simplification strategies, such as:
- Unstressed syllable deletion
- Assimilation: consonant/vowel harmony
- Addition: diminutive forms, reduplicated monosyllables
- Consonant cluster reduction
- Substitution of one phoneme for another

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Berko and Brown (1960): fis phenomenon - babies hear a word correctly even if they can't pronounce it

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Plosives and nasals are the first to be acquired, usually bilabial

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Fricatives, affricates and approximants are among the last to be acquired

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The voiced post-alveolar fricative /ʒ/ is typically the last to be acquired; a child may struggle with it until aged 8

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Proto-words will carry meaning for the child and their caregiver

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Katherine Nelson (1973), 4 categories for child lexical development:
1. Objects/people (60%)
2. Actions/events
3. Describing/modifying
4. Personal/social (8%)

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Spelke, 4 categories children find easiest to understand:
1. Continuity: doesn't disappear (continues existing)
2. Cohesion: clearly defined in shape (coherent with concept of shape)
3. Solidity: is solid
4. Contact: doesn't have a life of its own (doesn't contact!)

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Predominantly concrete nouns

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Very few grammatical items

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Eva Clarke: common adjectives are more likely to be in a child's first 50 words than spatial adjectives

TWO-WORD STAGE (18-24 months)

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Child's MLU is two words, yet these carry sentence-level meaning

TELEGRAPHIC STAGE (2-5 years)

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Grammatical/syntactical stage: child omits nonessential grammatical terms, e.g. determiners, inflexions, pronouns

VOCABULARY EXPANSION...

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Impossible to measure a child's passive vocabulary

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1.5yrs: 50 words

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2yrs: 300 words

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3yrs: 1000 words

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4yrs: 1600 words

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5yrs: 2200 words

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6yrs: 2600 words, passive may be 24,000

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Children acquire language exponentially

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From around 2yrs, they may be learning on average 10 words a day

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Carey (1978) called this rapid word-learning 'fast mapping'

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We never stop acquiring lexis!

SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT

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To prevent under-extension, a child usually makes two assumptions when learning words:
1. Whole-object assumption - the word represents the whole object
2. Type assumption - the word applies to all occurrences of that object

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Jean Aitchison's connection between lexical and semantic development:
1. Labelling: understanding that objects in space have a lexical label
2. Packaging: exploring the flexibility of each label (stretchy-net analogy)
3. Network-building: exploring connections between words, e.g. antonyms and synonyms

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Nonetheless, a child is likely to over-extend in the form of:
a) Categorical - extending one word to objects in the same semantic field (category)
b) Analogical - extending one word to objects resembling that object (analogy)
c) Mismatch statements - use of a seemingly random word, where the connection is tenuous

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A typical 50 word vocabulary may be 1/3 over-extended

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By 2.3, there is a marked decrease in over-extensions

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Basic-level assumption prevents over-extension, e.g. 'trousers' are clothes worn on the legs, not clothes in general

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Mutual-exclusivity assumption can lead to under-extension - the idea that an object cannot have multiple labels

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Piaget's 4 stages of semantic development:
1. Sensorimotor (<2) - child learns concrete nouns as they experience the world. Concept of object permanence develops (objects exist when out of sight)
2. Pre-operational (2-7) - Child develops language and motor skills. Language is egocentric
3. Concrete operational (7-11) - thinks logically about concrete events
4. Formal operational (11+) - Abstract reasoning skills develop

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Caregiver must rely on context, prosody and paralinguistic features

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Sometimes a child will say 2 words because they have been learnt as a unit, e.g. 'allgone'

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Follow standard syntactical rules

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Roger Brown found that children from all language backgrounds make the same syntacto-grammatical relationships between words:

subject + verb
subject + object
subject + complement

verb + object
verb + location

noun + location
noun + possession

nomination
recurrence

negation + noun/verb

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MLU = 3-5 words

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Child may repeat standard utterances telegraphically, disproving behaviourism and supporting ZPD

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Whilst most grammatical rules are mastered by 5yrs, the child may be yet to learn the passive voice

POST-TELEGRAPHIC STAGE (5+ years)

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Whilst a child is now relatively competent grammatically, they may still struggle with the following:

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1. Negation

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2. Pronouns

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3. Complex sentences

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4. Interrogatives

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A child must learn:
- That different negatory particles are used in different grammatical constructions
- not, no, do not, don't, cannot, can't
- Negatory particles must follow an auxiliary/copular verb, e.g. have, can, do
- After an auxiliary, the main verb becomes an infinitive
- The negatory particle doesn't change word order
- Double-negatives are grammatically incorrect

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Ursula Bellugi (1967):
1. Add negatory particle 'no' to beginning of affirmative sentences
2. Use of contracted negation (can't, don't) because learnt as units; negatory particle in correct position; omit auxiliary and verb tense
3. Struggle to change verb to infinitive in presence of auxiliary; limited use/conjugation of 'do'; double-negatives; 'not' instead of 'no'

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Hard to learn, because there are so many and they change according to context

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Probably learn first person first, because they are egocentric

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Demonstratives to refer to objects in immediate environment

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Second person last to be acquired

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Ursula Bellugi:
1. Not using pronouns
2. Subject pronouns in initial position, object pronouns in medial and final positions
3. Standard usage

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Must learn the nature and purpose of subordinate clauses, as well as appropriate conjunctions and relative pronouns

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Child must learn:
- Insertion of 'do' auxiliary or interrogative
- Conjugation of main verb to infinitive
- Inversion of pronoun/auxiliary

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Child expresses questions through intonation, and interrogative pronouns. They omit pronouns and copula verbs

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Interrogatives:
- Pronouns and possessives
- Incorrect conjugation
- Struggle to invert auxiliary
- Omission of 'do' auxiliary
- Adds negation, namely negative modals in closed questions

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Child will usually:
- Begin to invert auxiliaries but may conjugate incorrectly
- Struggle to invert when used with interrogative pronouns
- Struggle to conjugate main verb to infinitive

MORPHOLOGY

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Inflectional: grammatical affixes

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Omitted in early stages

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Brown (1973):
1. Present progressive -ing
2. Plural
3. Possessive
4. Articles
5. Regular past tense
6. Third person singular
7. Auxiliary 'be'

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Derivational: affixes which change a word's class or meaning

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Children are morphologically creative, yet logically so (virtuous errors)

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Berko-Gleason (1958), Wug Test: analysed children's acquisition of inflexional morphemes. 3-4yr olds correctly applied the plural 's'

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a) Children first memorise the (correct) unanalysed form by rote.
b) As they become aware of inflexional principles, they overgeneralise
c) They must then learn irregularities

PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT

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Children must learn to recognise:
- Politeness
- Sarcasm
- Subliminal meanings
- Humour
- Hinting
- Being economical with truth

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To begin with, they are egocentric. They must develop a theory of mind

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Bilingual children have slightly delayed development, but learn to code-switch from a young age

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Youseff (1991) found that a 3.9yr old in the Caribbean could switch registers between her English-speaking mother and Trinidadian English-speaking caregiver

FUNCTIONS OF SPEECH

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Halliday (1975)

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Dore

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instrumental
(satisfy needs)

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regulatory
(control others)

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interactional
(engage)

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personal
(express)

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heuristic
(enquire, explore)

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imaginative
(creativity)

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representational
(convey information)

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labelling

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greeting

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repeating

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protesting

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answering

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practising

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requesting action

DISCOURSE

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Turn-taking and adjacency pairs learned before speaking

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Peek-a-boo parallels turn-taking, response, pleasure, and common understanding

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Starting school introduces a child to:
- Cueing and bidding
- Tripartite exchanges (IRF)
- Code-switching registers
- Being sensitive to the needs of a listener

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Pretend play begins around 2yrs, and is typically based on veridical situations

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Leslie (1987) found that for a child to pretend that one object is another, s/he must detach the primary representation from the pretend representation. The latter is thus a metarepresentation: it represents a representation in child's parallel objective world. Pretend play therefore marks the emergence of metacognition

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Jenkins and Astington (1996): children with siblings develop a theory of mind more quickly. Pretend play with siblings is thought to make high demands for imaginative cooperation

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Usha Goswami: children with imaginary friends have richer language skill and are better at constructing narratives

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Pretend play requires adherence to the rules within the play world, promoting self-regulatory development

CHILD DIRECTED SPEECH

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Likely to respond to all forms of communication from the child

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Not a linguistic universal

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Exaggerated intonation, varied + animated prosody, stress on key syllables

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May adopt phonological simplification strategies, e.g. diminutive suffixes, unstressed syllable deletion

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Concrete nouns in immediate environment

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Dynamic verbs denoting common activities

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Deixis to direct child's attention

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Simple sentences, omission of auxiliary verbs, direct interrogatives/imperatives, nomination instead of pronouns, omission of inflexions

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Scaffold by recasting non-standard utterances

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Adjacency pairs and tripartite exchanges

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Model and encourage politeness

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Known-answer questions to elicit speech

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Clarke-Stewart (1973): children whose mothers talk more have larger vocabularies

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Hart and Risley (1995): children from HSE families hear up to 44 million utterances, compared to the average 12 million from LSE families

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Fernald and Mazzie (1991): higher pitch and exaggerated intonation facilitate learning

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Nelson (1973): children whose mother corrected them during the holophrastic stage acquired language more slowly

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Brown, Cazden and Bellugi (1969): caregivers respond to the truth-value of an utterance, rather than its grammatical correctness

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Kuhl (1992): Swedish, English and Russian parents exaggerated the important vowel sounds, especially in minimal pairs

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Babies turn towards singsong intonation and ignore regular conversation

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Chouinard and Clarke (2003): adults spend more time unconsciously reformulating a child's utterance than they do correcting it

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Fivush and Schwarzmueller (1998): verbalising events as they unfold is critical for long-term retention in memory

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The caregiver is competing for their child's attention

COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

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Dell Hymes (1996)

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Effective language acquisition means:
- Using the right language in the right context
- Learning to interpret subliminal meanings

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1. Linguistic competence: i.e. linguistic methods

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2. Sociolinguistic competence: understanding which register is right for which context

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3. Discourse competence: manipulating language according to mode and genre

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4. Strategic competence: being able to recognise and repair communication breakdowns

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A child must be “able to accomplish a repertoire of speech acts, to take part in speech events, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others.” (Hymes, 1972)

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calling

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