Child Language Acquisition

Child Language Acquisition

Key theories, concepts, and terms you need to know!

Review the Three Questions

• What am I learning?

• Why am I learning it?

• How will I know when I've learned it?

Transcription Key

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The 3 Areas of Focus:

The main stages of both language and cognitive development

The different functions of children's language

Theories of how children acquire language

Stages of Language Development

Piaget's stages of cognitive development

• Sensorimotor

• Preoperational

• Concrete operational

• Formal operational

Multiple Choice

Which of the following is not a stage of language development?

• Babbling

• Holophrastic

• Telegraphic

• Telepathic

Halliday's Functions of Language

• Instrumental: "I want pizza."

• Regulatory: "Don't touch my blanket!"

• Interactional: "Can I have a turn after you?"

• Personal: "I have a dog!"

• Heuristic: "Why does it rain, mommy?"

• Imaginative: "You are the queen and I'm the princess."

• Representational: "My mommy has blue eyes and likes Lifetime movies."

Multiple Select

Check all of the functions of language...

• Instrumental

• Regulatory

• Optimistic

• Interactional

• Personal

Poll

Do you think NATURE (your genes) or NURTURE (your environment) has a great effect on who you become?

• Nature

• Nurture

Who's down with L.A.D.? Noam Chomsky

• Suggests that language acquisition is an innate faculty

• Children do not simply copy the language that they hear around them.

• Children are born with the Universal Grammar wired into their brains. This grammar offers a certain limited number of possibilities - for example, the word order of a typical sentence. 

Who's NOT down with L.A.D.? B.F. Skinner

• As one of the pioneers of Behaviorism, he accounted for language development by means of environmental influence.

• Skinner argued that children learn language based on behaviorist reinforcement principles by associating words with meanings.

• For example, when the child says ‘milk’ and the mother will smile and give her some as a result, the child will find this outcome rewarding, enhancing the child's language development 

Jerome Bruner: Constructivist Theory

• suggests that the language behaviour of adults when talking to children (known by several names by most easily referred to as child-directed speech or CDS) is specially adapted to support the acquisition process

• Developed the LASS (Language Acquisition Support System)

• In his research he found that the turn-taking structure of conversation is developed through non-verbal communication long before actual words are uttered.

Sociolinguist Basil Bernstein and his codes

• Bernstein makes a correlation between social class and language.

• He reports that in the working class, you don't often find elaborated code, whereas in the middle class you find the use of both the restricted and elaborated codes.

• His research argues that the working class have access only to restricted codes,

Open Ended

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