TRUE OR FALSE ? Copyright © 2009 + At around 18 months, a child learns about 10 words a day. ...

TRUE OR FALSE?

Copyright © 2009 www.englishteaching.co.uk + www.english-teaching.co.uk

At around 18 months, a child learns about 10 words a day.

Deaf children exposed to sign language show the same stages of language acquisition, as do hearing children exposed to spoken languages.

If a person develops his/her language after puberty, he/she will never be able to fully acquire language.

Sixty percent of a child’s first 50 words are adjectives.

Children at the age of 18 months will have a productive vocabulary of around 50 words.

A child’s first recognisable word usually appears at the age of 5 months.

A child understands more words than he/she can speak.

A child’s language development is only affected by his/her social environment.

During Stage 1 (18-30 months) of a child’s language development, he or she can use the subject + verb + object sentence structure.

The average 17 year old person knows about 20,000 words.

If you expose a baby to two languages at the same time, he/she will learn both.

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TRUE OR FALSE?


At around 18 months, a child learns about 10 words a day.

Deaf children exposed to sign language show the same stages of language acquisition, as do hearing children exposed to spoken languages.

If a person develops his/her language after puberty, he/she will never be able to fully acquire language.

Sixty percent of a child’s first 50 words are adjectives. nouns

Children at the age of 18 months will have a productive vocabulary of around 50 words.

A child’s first recognisable word usually appears at the age of 5 months. 12 months

A child understands more words than he/she can speak.

A child’s language development is only affected by his/her social environment. genetics are also a factor

During Stage 1 (18-30 months) of a child’s language development, he or she can use the subject + verb + object sentence structure.

The average 17 year old person knows about 20,000 words. 60,000

If you expose a baby to two languages at the same time, he/she will learn both.

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THEORISTS


?

?

?Behaviourists believe… language is developed through

imitating others’ language and gaining positive and negative feedback from adults.

Social Interactionists believe… children’s early language can be influenced and improved by adult carers adjusting their own speech patterns.

Nativist Theorists believe… language is innate; we are ‘pre-programmed’ to acquire it.

Cognitive Theorists believe… language will grow when children’s ideas about the world develop.

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Write a 1-2 sentence definition for each of the key terms (language development theorists) below. Also, state which linguist or psychologist is primarily associated with each theory.

1. Behaviourists2. Social Interactionists3. Nativist theorists

NA

TIV

ISM


All children have an inbuilt language acquisition

device (LAD) that enables them to extract the rules of

the particular language from the words and structures

they hear.

universal grammar: a theory that all languages share a

similar grammatical structure under the surface.

critical period: children’s LADs must be activated with

sufficient input before the age of 12, or the child’s

language acquisition will be impaired.

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BEH

AV

IOU

RIS

MFather: Urr, that food’s disgusting!

Ruby: Dat’s digusting.

Ruby: When dinner ready?

Father: In about 10 minutes.

Ruby: 10 minutes? Boys! Dinner ready

in 10 minutes!

But, one must ask: does

Ruby really know the

exact meaning of these words?


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B.F. SKINNER


Skinner coined the ‘Skinner Box’ where he tested positive and negative reinforcement with rats and pigeons; therefore, some people are sceptical of his findings, as he did not focus on humans.

He believed that language is learnt through positive and negative reinforcement.

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http://blsolutionsaba.org/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/skinner_Smiling.35130931.jpg


Parents do not say, “I breaked glass” or “I fighted my toy

soldiers”; the behaviourist’s theory cannot account for

children’s invention of language.

Children find meaning and truth more important than

grammatical correctness, whereas parents focus on correct use

of grammar.

Child: I putted the plates on the table.

Mother: You mean, I put the plates on the table.

Child: No, I putted them on all by myself.

Some Problems with Behaviourism

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SO

CIA

L I

NTER

AC

TIO

N

TH

EO

RY


LANGUAGE ACQUISITION SUPPORT SYSTEM

(LASS):

a system that states that interaction helps support

a child’s language acquisition (“scaffolding”).

Father: Have you done a wee wee?

Daughter: (smiles and maintains eye contact)

Father: Shall we have a look in your nappy?

Daughter: (vocalises and smiles)

Father: Let’s get the baby wipes then, shall

we?

Daughter: (vocalises and looks after dad as he

goes to get the wipes)

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT


Theorists Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget Language comes with understanding; a child cannot linguistically

articulate concepts he/she does not understand A child needs to understand the idea of the past in order to use

past tense

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THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT

The Examination Board wants you to know this term

Who? Vygotsky What? The difference between what a child can do with

help and what he can do without guidance

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Object permanence the ability to understand that an object still exists

even though it is no longer in sight

Vygotsky believed that collaborative play is essential to children’s learning. He believed that, “What a child can do in co-operation today, he can do alone tomorrow”

Virtuous error: a logical mistake made by children based on the rules they

already know (i.e. mouses or forgeted)


English Language

Child-directed speech


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THE FEATURES OF CHILD-DIRECTED SPEECH


More pronounced intonation that draws attention to key morphemes or lexemes.

Simplified vocabulary that helps establish keywords (‘dog’ rather than ‘German

shepherd’).

Repeated grammatical ‘frames’ that help draw attention to new elements within

those frames (e.g. ‘What animal lives in a kennel? What animal lives in a sty?).

Simplified grammar – shorter utterances.

Actions that accompany speech: pointing, smiling, shrugging shoulders).

More obvious lip and mouth movement.

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Meaning Example

EXAGGERATING

PROSODIC CUES

using more exaggerated intonation

patterns and slightly higher

frequencies, greater pitch variations.

Uh oh!

RECASTING phrasing sentences in different ways,

such as making it a question.

“dada byebye daddy…

Is daddy going byebye?

ECHOING repeating what the child said.

EXPANSION restating what the child said in a more

linguistically sophisticated form.

“ball all gone” = “Yes,

we lost the ball.”

EXPATIATION expounding further on the word by

giving more information.

(baba hot) > Yes, the

bottle is hot. We’ll wait

until later.

LABELING providing the name of objects, using

simplified vocabulary

OVERARTICULATING using more precise sounds contained in

the words, stretching out sounds,

sounding out ‘super-vowels’

yees

fahr

good


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FACTS ABOUT CHILD-DIRECTED SPEECH: WHAT DO YOU THINK?


High-SES mothers use longer utterances and more different words when they talk to their children than low-SES mothers and, in turn, their children have larger vocabularies.

Low-SES mothers are found to talk less and use less varied vocabulary during interaction with their children than high-SES mothers.

It is estimated that children from the high-SES families they observed heard approximately 11,000 utterances in a day, compared to 700 utterances for the children from low-SES families.

Low-SES mothers more often use speech to direct their children’s behaviour and high-SES mothers more often use speech to elicit conversation from their children.

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CULTURE CAN ALSO HAVE AN EFFECT


Linguists have studied striking differences in the way middle-class mothers in the US communicate with their children compared to Gusii mothers of Kenya, with the Gusii mothers rarely making eye contact with their children and only responding to child vocalizations if the children are in distress (Richman, Miller & LeVine, 1992). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The communicative actions (or non-actions) of the Gusii mothers follow from their beliefs that babies cannot understand speech and thus it is senseless to talk to them before they are older and can understand what is being said (LeVine, 2004). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Similar conclusions have been drawn based on research with the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984), who believe their children to be helpless and have no understanding, and thus do not engage them in dyadic communicative interactions.

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Baby talk contributes to mental development, as it helps

teach the child the basic function and structure of language.

Studies have found that responding to an infant's babble

with meaningless babble aids the infant's development.

While the babble has no logical meaning, the verbal

interaction demonstrates to the child the bidirectional

nature of speech, and the importance of verbal feedback.

RESEARCHERS BELIEVE …

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DATA EXTRACT 17


1 Can you notice any patterns of ‘virtuous error’?

2 What are the characteristics of their speech?

3 What can they do?

4 Link what the children are saying to the different theoretical models we have explored.

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Liam: The goodies are going on their ship cos they’ve catched a baddie.Stan: Yeah, they’ve caught him and throwed him in the dungeons.Liam: The cavemans are laughing. This one’s much more braver than the baddies though…I’m going to build a whole army of goodies.Stan: Yeah, cos the baddies are coming.Together: Charge!

A conversation between twin boys aged 3 years 6 months

English Language

Lexical and semantic development


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KEY TERMS


Utterance a stretch or continuous unit of speech.

Morphology the study of word structure, especially in terms of morphemes.

Pre-verbal the stages before actual words are uttered.

Referent: the object or person in the real world to which a sound consistently relates.

Plural the marking of a noun to indicate how many are being talked about.

Possession the marking of a word to indicate that it possesses or owns something.

Cooing open-mouth vowel sounds made by babies of about 3 to 6 months old.

Babbling repeated consonant-vowel sounds and a combination of these made by babies of about 6 to 12 months old.

Proto-words sounds that resemble actual words but that are not consistently applied to their referents.

Productive vocabulary the words a child can actually speak.

Holophrase a one-word utterance that is used to communicate more than the one word on its own.

Overextend to stretch the meaning of a word (i.e. labeling rats and rabbits as ‘mouse’).

Underextend to contract the meaning if a word.

Overextension a feature of a child’s language where the word used to label something is stretched to include things that aren’t normally part of that word’s meaning.

Hyponym a word within a hypernym’s category (i.e. apple or broccoli)

Hypernym a category into which other words fit (i.e. fruit or vegetable)

Telegraphic the stage during which children use three or more words, usually omitting grammatical words (i.e. determiners, auxiliary verbs and prepositions) but keeping lexical words (i.e. nouns, verbs and adjectives)

Post-telegraphic the stage after telegraphic during which many of the omitted words from the stage before start to appear (i.e. auxiliary verbs, prepositions, etc.)

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1. What could be some influences on language acquisition?

2. What words might a child brought up in the country say?

3. In the city?

Child’s words Context to utterance

“Tiger” Used when looking at pictures of tigers, lions and leopards in a picture book.

“Socks” Used when referring to gloves.

“Duck” Used when talking about feeding ducks, pigeons and other birds in a park.

“Cat” Used when pointing at door where cat normally waits.

“Shoes” Used when referring to own pair of shoes but not when talking about any other type of shoe.


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What sort of characteristics do the objects named in List A have which might account for them being among the first to be labelled by children? Why wouldn’t words from List B be used as frequently?


A: clock, key, blanket, shoe, sock. horse, car, ball

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TASK

B: sofa, floor, lamp, nappy, pants, house, tree, park

FACTS: THE DEVELOPMENT OF A CHILD’S

VOCABULARY


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A child’s first recognisable word usually appears at about 12 months of age, but this varies depending on the child.Once children reach 18 months, they will have a productive vocabulary of around 50 words.At 24 months, most children will have reached at 200-word productive vocabulary, and by 36 months, it will be around 2,000 words.On average, children will learn 10 words a day.The early words of children fall into four categories: naming, action, social and modifying.

GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT

Syntax


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What do we mean

by syntax?

Syntax is another name for word order

A child’s development of syntax refers to how a child puts words into patterns and he/she develops an understanding of how words control meaning

THE TWO WORD STAGE

At around 18 months of age, babies begin to combine words to form two word utterances.


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WORDS endings on words such as

‘dropped’ and sleeping’ articles (a, the) prepositions (in, on, with, at) the verb ‘to be’ (I AM happy, you

ARE silly) auxiliary verbs (DOES run, CAN

run, IS running)

DROPPED

AT THE TWO WORD

STAGE:

DERIVATIONAL MORPHOLOGY: MAKING NEW WORDS

Conversion -> Using word as a different word classe.g. ‘I jammed the toast’

Affixation -> Applying endings to words to create new ones‘It’s crowdy in here’ or ‘He’s shooting his shooter.’

Compounding -> Joining existing words together into new combinationse.g. ‘horsey-man’ and ‘tractor-man.’



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PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT


Studies on infants have shown that newborns have a natural preference to attend to the human voice above all environmental sounds. When listening to the human voice they show a distinct preference for listening to speech over non-speech sounds like laughing and coughing. Linguists have demonstrated that 3-day old babies can distinguish between utterances in their mothers’ language and those in another language.

Children are born universal; they are capable of producing any sound in the human language (i.e. rolling their ‘r’s in Spanish or saying the ‘ch’ sounds of Scots). At the age of 12 months, they contract their range to the language in their native country; they concentrate on the phonemes used in the native language.

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THE HUMAN VOICE

SOME FACTS ABOUT PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT


Vowels are acquired before consonants.By the age of 2½, the average child has

acquired all of the vowels and two thirds of the consonants.

By the age of 4, only a few consonants are causing a problem.

By 6 or 7 years of age, the child is confident in the use of both vowels and consonants.

Initial consonants in a word are much easier to master than final ones.

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INTONATION AND MEANING


Intonation is particularly important at the one and two word stages. Why?

A child who says ‘my car’ may use different strengths of intonation to produce a different meaning for each utterance. How could a child say it differently?

Pitch is an important component of intonation. Mandarin Chinese can have as many as four different

meanings for one sound depending on the intonation that is being used.

Cruttenden (1974) demonstrated that understanding of patterns of intonation is still developing in the teens.

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Task:Use intonation to express

different meanings for each phrase:

1 Want cookie

2 Dat doggie

3 His baba

4 Daddy bye bye

EARLY MISTAKES IN SOUNDING WORDS:


Consonant cluster reduction

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Addition

Substitution Deletion of

unstressed

syllables

Assimilati

on

Deletion

SUBSTITUTION AND ADDITION


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This vowel sound, ә, sounds like the ‘a’ at the end of vanilla

Correct Spelling

Adult Child

egg eg egә

pig pig pigә

blue blu bәlu

apple apl apo

button butn butu

WHY DO THE MISTAKES HAPPEN?


FRICATIVE a sound that is created by the slow and controlled release of air through the mouth, creating friction.

STOPS sounds where the air flow is completely stopped. They are created in the throat (e.g. glottal stop), at the back of the mouth (e.g. ck), at the alveolar ridge (e.g. t) or by the lips (e.g. p)

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Which mistakes are being made?


1 ‘Dat’s a circle.’2 ‘Me want nother bissie.’

3 A baby says ‘bootoo’ for ‘button’.4 ‘Glue’ becomes ‘goo’.

5 ‘Chocolate biscuit’ becomes ‘cocker bisik’.6 A baby called Francis attempts to say his

own name. It comes out as ‘Sassy’.7 ‘Wing a wing a woses!’

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Berko and Brown (1960) described how a child referred to his plastic fish as a ‘fis’. When the observer responded, “Is this your fis?” the child said, ‘No – my fis.’ He continued to reject the adult’s mimicry of his speech until he was told, “Is this your fish?” He then replied, “Yes, my fis.”

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In another study, a child whose pronunciation of

‘mouse/mouth’, ‘cart/card’ and ‘jug/duck’

were indistinguishable but could nevertheless

point to pictures of the objects in a

comprehension task.


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PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY PRAGMATICS?

Pragmatics is an area of language study linked to the things people mean rather than what they actually say.

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Pragmatics refers to:

implicature expressing meaning indirectly

inference what someone thinks you are saying

humour

politeness

HOW CAN PRAGMATICS BE DIFFICULT?Why would these statements be difficult for a child?


A woman asks where the post office is and is told in

reply, “It’s a Sunday.”

A student says to her friend: “Mmmm, nice jacket. Are there lots of charity shops in Peckham?”

A father says to his daughter, who has just dropped his mobile phone in the paddling pool, “Thanks very much, that makes life a lot easier.”

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THE FUNCTIONS OF CHILDREN’S EARLY LANGUAGE


The linguist Michael Halliday broke down children’s early language functions into what he termed a ‘taxonomy language’

Instrumental expresses needs (e.g. ‘Want juice’) Regulatory used to tell others what to do (e.g. ‘Go away’)

Interactional used to make contact with others and form relationships (e.g. ‘Love you, mummy’) Personal used to express feelings, opinions and individual

identity (e.g. ‘Me good girl’)Heuristic Language used to gain knowledge about the

environment (i.e. ‘What the tractor doing?’) Imaginative Here language is used to tell stories and jokes,

and to create an imaginary environment.Representational Use of language to convey facts and

information

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TRUE OR FALSE ? Copyright © 2009 + At around 18 months, a child learns about 10 words a day. ...

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