Allophones of / t / Tom Burton tried to steal a butter plate. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 aspirated 2 glottalized 3 palatalized 4 elongated 5 unaspirated 6 flapped.

Allophones of / t /

Tom Burton tried to steal a butter plate.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 aspirated

2 glottalized 3 palatalized

4 elongated 5 unaspirated

6 flapped 7 unreleas

ed

Milestones in Motor and Language Development—Simplified

Age Motor Development Language, etc. months1 Can distinguish

consonants 3 Supports head when Smiles when talked to;

prone; no grasp gurgles / coos (vowels)

4 Shakes rattle; Responds to human supports head sounds: turns head,

eyes search

5 Sits with props Vowel-like cooing interspersed with more

consonantal sounds


Age Motor Development Language, etc. months6 Sits; can bear weight; Cooing becomes

reaches; grasps but no (reduplicated) babbling thumb opposition (babababa)

8 Stands holding on; Intonation patterns grasps with thumb distinct; can signal opposition emphasis and emotion;

reduplication; communicative

intentions


Age Motor Development Language, etc. months10 Crawls; side-steps holding Sound play: gurgling,

on; bubble blowing; seems to try to imitate; pulls self up to stand differentiates between

sounds heard

11-12 Variegated babbling (bi go da bu)

12 Walks with help; seats self; More reduplication almost stopped mouthing (mama); signs of things some words and simple

understanding; commands: Show me...


Age Motor Development Language, etc. months

18 Grasp fully developed; 3-50 words; ONE-word walks; sits on chair so-so; phase; several syllable

crawls down stairs babbling; intricate backward; difficulty intonation pattern; building 3 cube towers NOT frustrated when

not understood; understanding progressing rapidly


Age Motor Development Language, etc. months24 Runs; sudden turns Vocabulary 50+ words; not good; stand and TWO-word phase; sits easily; walks up phrases own creation; and down stairs increase in communicative

behavior

30 Jumps; stands on one Fastest increase in foot; good hand and finger vocabulary; frustrated if coordination; can build 6 not understood; cube tower; tiptoes a few two (even three or five) steps word utterances;

intelligibility not very good; seems to understand

everything directed to them


Age Motor Development Language, etc. months36 Tiptoes 3 yards; runs Vocabulary: 100 or so

smoothly; makes turns well; words; 80% intelligible jumps 12 inches; can ride even to strangers; tricycle grammar roughly like

adults, though still makes mistakes

48 Jumps over rope; hops on Language well one foot; catches ball in established; deviations

from arms; walks line adult norm tend to be

more in style than in grammar


Milestones Chart based on: Nick Cipollone, Steven Hartman Keiser & Shravan Vasishth, editors. 1998. Language Files, seventh edition. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, pp. 287-289.

Cipollone et al.'s version was based on Eric H. Lenneberg. 1967. Biological Foundations of Language. New York: John Wiley & Sons. With additions from Carroll, David W. 1999. Psychology of Language, third edition. Pacific Grove, California: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, Chapter 10: Early Language Acquisition.

Language Acquisition 1

“ ‘[The acquisition of language] is doubtless the greatest intellectual feat any one of us is ever required to perform.’ ”

—Leonard Bloomfield, Language (1933)

Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman & Nina Hyams. 2011. An Introduction to Language, 9th edition. Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, p. 324.

Language Acquisition 2

“ ‘The capacity to learn language is deeply ingrained in us as a species, just as the capacity to walk, to grasp objects, to recognize faces. We don’t find any serious differences in children growing up in congested urban slums, in isolated mountain villages, or in privileged suburban villas.’ ” — Dan Slobin, The Human Language Series, 2 (1994)


Language Acquisition Overview 1

1. Children DO NOT learn a language simply by memorizing the sentences of the language. (The list of words is finite, but no dictionary can hold all the sentences, which are infinite in number.)

2. Children DO acquire a system of grammatical rules. (a) Children learn to construct sentences, most of which they have never produced before. (b) Children learn to understand sentences they have never heard before. They cannot do so by matching the heard utterance with some stored sentence.

Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman & Nina Hyams. 2011. An Introduction to Language, 9th edition. Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, pp. 324-425.

Language Acquisition Overview 2

3. Children must therefore construct the “rules” that permit them to use their language creatively or we can say they “reinvent” the grammar of their parents.

4. No one teaches them these rules. Their parents are no more aware of the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules than are the children.


Input Problems in Language Acquisition

Sentence fragments

False starts

Speech errors

Interruptions

Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman & Nina Hyams. 2003. An Introduction to Language, 7th ed. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, p. 342.

Language Acquisition Theories

Imitation

Reinforcement

Analogy

Structured Input


Theories of Child Language Acquisition: Imitation?

Child: My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.

Adult: Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits?Child: Yes.Adult: What did you say she did?Child: She holded the baby rabbits and we patted the

m.Adult: Did you say she held them tightly?Child: No, she holded them loosely.

[ Courtney Cazden (1972) ]


Child language that could not have been imitated

holdedtooths goedchilds [plural of child] a my pencil two footwhat the boy hit?other one pants Mommy get it my ladder cowboy did fighting me


Theories of Child Language Acquisition: Reinforcement?

Child: Nobody don’t like me.

Mother: No, say “Nobody likes me.”

Child: Nobody don’t like me.

(dialogue repeated eight times)

Mother: Now, listen carefully, say “Nobody

likes me.”

Child: Oh, nobody don’t likes me. Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman & Nina Hyams. 2011. An Introduction to Language, 9th edition. Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, p. 326.

Theories of Child Language Acquisition: Reinforcement?

Child: Want other one spoon, Daddy.Father: You mean, you want the other spoon. Child: Yes, I want other one spoon, please, Daddy. Father: Can you say “the other spoon”?Child: Other…one…spoon.Father: Say… “other”.Child: Other.Father: Spoon.Child: Spoon.Father: Other…spoon.Child: Other…spoon. Now give me other one spoon?


Theories of Child Language Acquisition: Analogy?

HEAR: I painted a red barn.

CREATE: I painted a blue barn.

HEAR: I painted a barn red.

HEAR: I saw a red barn.

CREATE: *I saw a barn red.


Theories of Child Language Acquisition: Structured Input?

Baby talk

Motherese

Caretaker speech

Child-directed speech (CDS)


Characteristics of Caretaker Speech

Prosody, etc.Higher in pitch More variable in pitch More exaggerated in intonational contours SlowerSmoother pitch contours More rhythmicMore pauses

ContentMore repetitionsMore based in the here and now

Carroll, David W. 1994. Psychology of Language, second edition. Pacific Grove, California: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, p. 250.

First Steps in Acquiring a Language

Pre-linguistic

Babbling

First words

Segmenting the speech stream


Sixteen month-old JP’s Vocabulary

[aw] not [s:] aerosol spray[b]/[m] up [sju:] shoe[da] dog [haj] hi[io]/[sio] Cheerios [sr] shirt / sweater[sa] sock [s:]/[s:] what’s

that?/hey, look

[aj]/[j] light [ma] mommy[baw]/[daw] down [d] daddy


Allophones of / t / Tom Burton tried to steal a butter plate. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 aspirated 2 glottalized 3 palatalized 4 elongated 5 unaspirated 6 flapped.

Documents

language files

psychology of language

grammar slide

unreleased slide

word walks

good stand

word phase

human supports head