#L1 acquisition

Language Acquisition

When you think about it, it's pretty amazing that you're able to read the writing on this page, and understand that I'm informing you about language acquisition. Yet, across all parts of the world, where there's a language, children will pick it up, and, unless something goes wrong, become articulate and eventually literate language users. ...if not, we wouldn't have this topic...

Regardless of location or language, there are a number of stages that all children go through, at roughly the same times.

Patterns in Speech

Berko and Brown (1960) found that even if a word sounds indistinguishable in the child's pronunciation, the child can actually distinguish the difference. Look at the following:

Child: fisAdult: this is your fis?Child: no - my fisAdult: oh your fish?Child: yes my fis

This would support Piaget's theory that understanding comes before articulation...(take a look here).

That's it for phonetics... the alphabet might seem scary, but you will get the relevant parts in the exam, so don't worry about it too much!

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Stages of Acquisition

The curious thing about Language Development is that it occurs in stages, regardless of the language or other external influences. Though the stages are only guides, meaning that some children do show variation on the times, broadly, all children go through the following:

Pre-linguistic stage (0-12 months)

This stage comes before the child starts speaking. The child starts experimenting with sounds. At 6 weeks, cooing develops - a sound from the back of the throat - and between 6-9 months babbling develops, where the child starts making a range of phonemes. If they ever say "Dadadadada" they're not actually saying "Dad" at this stage, just repeating the sound. Babbling has intonations (rising and falling pitch) which makes it sound almost like sentences.

Phonetic expansion occurs in this period, where a child is capable of producing every type of phoneme. Following this, at 9-10 months, phonetic contraction occurs, where the child's utterances become restricted to their native language.

Holophrase (12-18 months)

In the holophrase, children finally start to utter one word sentences. In this early stage, there is one theory that children are simply 'labelling' the things they see around them, but in reality, their use of language is often more complex: either a request for something or a desire to attract attention. We'll look at the pragmatics of early language use later.

Two-word stage (18-24 months)

As the stage's name suggests, at this period, children begin to string words together into two word utterances like "Daddy run". At this stage, their utterances are quite understandable and grammatical - in the earlier example, it's highly probable that the child means "Daddy is running". Though unable to form questions yet, children are quite able to use rising intonation to express them, such as "Daddy gone?" meaning "Where has Daddy gone?"

Telegraphic stage (24+ months)

By this stage, a child is well on the way with speech development. Children's utterances sometimes sounds like a telegraph, missing out lesser ‘glue’ words, and giving the stage its name. Simple utterances might be completely correct, like: “Lucy likes tea” and “Daddy is tired” but “Daddy home now” shows the child still has some progression to make.

At 2-years-old, the child will learn his or her first question words, “what,” “where,” and, of course, the dreaded “why”. By three-years, the child will be able to utter more sophisticated questions, like “Why’d you never buy me a guitar?” and the ‘glue’ words they previously dropped are much more frequent.

Finally, by five, children will have a firm grasp of language. They may still struggle with passive tense, though quite understandably.

... when you're presented with a transcript, it'll probably give you the age of any children speaking. One of the useful things to be able to do is categorise where the child is in terms of stages, and also consider whether they're at the 'average' for their age, or if their language is more or less developed. So this stuff is useful to learn!

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The Critical Period

The Stages of Acquisition are great for children who develop normally, but what if something goes wrong? If they miss the age guides given, can they still learn language at a later age?

A linguist called Lenneberg came up with the idea of a critical period for language acquisition. Today, we accept this critical period to be up to seven years old. After the critical period is over, children find it very difficult to learn language, and if they do succeed, their success will be limited - they'll never have the full mastery.

Feral children give us the evidence for the critical period. A girl called Genie, for example, was imprisoned without contact with anyone by her father for thirteen years. When she was found and freed, she couldn't speak. Over the years, though she began to learn, she never mastered language. Feral children also seem to suggest both a LAD and interaction are important in language development (see later Theorists).

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Lexical Developments

We never stop our vocabulary development. Even while studying this course, your own language will have increased by a significant amount: lexis, syntax, graphology, etc... (all of which should be very familiar by now!). For children's acquisition of lexis, the general trend looks like this:

12 months: Child begins to speak.

18 months: Vocab of approx 50 words. 2 years: Vocab of approx 200 words.

Then there is an explosion:

5 years: Vocab of approx 2,000 words. 7 years: Vocab of approx 4,000 words.

These figures only refer to the language that children use, however; the amount of words they understand is higher. At 18 months, for example, despite only uttering 50 words, they can understand 250.

When it comes to the semantics of new words, children don't immediately learn the entire range of meanings for the word.

While they still have a limited vocabulary, they will often also over-extend their language, giving words broader meanings than they actually have. For example, a child might call "Daddy" any male member of the family, not realising it only refers to a particular person. It makes sense that if they don't have a word for something, they'll use something that has a logical connection in its place. When a child has a 50-word vocabulary, a third of words are likely to be over-extended.

The reverse can occasionally happen, though, called under-extension. For example, a child might think "shoes" refers to just one particular pair of shoes. This is less frequent, unsurprisingly.

Research has shown that children's first words tend to be learned in predictable patterns. They fall into the categorise (useful for describing utterances in the Two-word Stage):

entities - a thing properties - words about entities actions - verbs personal - social words

For example:

"clever boy" is a property and an entity."hit floor" is an action and an entity.

The large proportion refer to their environment: the people and objects around them, and the social aspects.

The first word classes learned are nouns (concrete, abstract nouns don't come until around 5-7 years), and dynamic verbs. The things in a child's environment. Then adjectives come. Grammatical function words, like prepositions, determiners and conjunctions don't come until much later (see the section on Grammar...).

Because the early utterances are limited in syntactical choice, children often combine word classes that wouldn't normally be seen together. For example "you little" is a pronoun followed by an adjective. Linguists have devised "semantic relations", a better "grammar" for describing children's early utterances. Rather than nouns, verbs, adjective, pronouns, etc, we have a new set of labels:

Agent = someone or something who performs an action. Action = something done, which may not necessarily be a verb. Affected = someone or something that the action is being done to. Location = where something happens. Entity = someone or something that just is (i.e. not an agent, affected or possessor). Possessor = someone or something that owns something. Attribute = a word that tells us about someone or something. Nomination = attach a label to something.

Recurrence = something happens more than once or more than one of something. Negation = when something isn't there or doesn't happen.

From these, we can take the following and describe them:

1. take bikky = action + affected2. mummy give = agent + action3. clock ticking = agent + action (or entity + attribute, if "ticking" is an adjective, rather than noun).4. big hand = attribute + entity5. me little = entity + attribute6. eat crips[crisps] = action + affected

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Theories of Early Language Use

As with most aspects of language, there are various theorists who have ideas about what's going on with children's early utterances.

Jean Aitchinson (1987) suggested that there are three stages to vocabulary usage:

1. Labelling - learning the word.2. Packaging - learning about its meanings.3. Networking - seeing how it connects to other words.

However, as other theorists have pointed out, children never really go through a stage where they are just 'labelling' things to learn the words. There is usually a reason behind the words, perhaps a request for something or a desire to attract attention.

Other theorists suggest that children's language has three functions:

Children use language for practical purposes - to get what they want. Children use it for social purposes - to talk for the sake of interaction and the sake of talking. Children use it for learning purposes - to extend their understanding of the word around them and

build up their own ideas. The classic "why?".

For example, a child might utter “juice”. Depending on the context, it could mean, “I want some juice,” “I’ve spilled some juice,” or even, “I’ve had enough juice.”

Michael Halliday subdivided these broad categories further:

Practical Instumental - "I want". Regulatory - "Do what I tell you to do".

Social Interactional - "Me and you". Personal - "Here I come" or opinions like "That's funny".

Learning

Heuristic - "Tell me why". Imaginative - "Let's pretend". Referential - "Let me tell you about this".

John Dore did similar research on 12-18 month children, and came out with another set of criteria, which refined Halliday's.

Labelling - utterances that don't seek a response. Repeating - repeating an overheard word. Answering - responding to a question. Requesting (action) - asking for help with an action (Halliday's instrumental/regulatory). Requesting (answer) - asking a question. Calling - calling to someone far away (Halliday's interactional). Greeting - welcoming a newcomer (Halliday's interactional). Protesting - shouting at something unwanted (Halliday's personal). Practicing - saying a word, out of context, just to practise it.

That's it for theories here! Make sure you can talk about them, and apply them if appropriate. Comment on their strengths and weaknesses - how well they apply to a particular text!

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Syntactical Developments

Strangely, lots of people find syntax (grammar) one of the most difficult frameworks to analyse. Make sure your grammatical knowledge is up to scratch before going into this topic!

As with lexis, there are particular stages children go through, relating back to the stages of acquisition.

Holophrase

In the one-word stage, the child may just be 'labelling', though as the theorists above suggest, it can be more complex. The single utterance, through intonation, could be used as declarative, imperative or interrogative: "Juice." (I have juice) "Juice?" (can I have some juice?) or "Juice!" (give me some juice!)

Even as early as the one-word stage, children can convey negation, though it is dependent on "no" or "not" alone.

Another important thing to note is that understanding is ahead of syntactical development. Despite being only able to utter one word, children can respond to two-word utterances, for example.

Two-word stage

Though they only utter two words, their sequences (word order) are generally accurate, even if they miss out the 'glue words' in between. For example:

subject + verb = "daddy sleep"verb + object = "draw birdie"subject + object = "Suzy juice"subject + complement = "daddy busy"

Of these, the only one that would perhaps cause any problem is the subject and object, with the elision of the verb. Is it saying that the juice belongs to Suzy, or that she has the juice, or that she's drinking it? Without the context, we can't know for certain, and it's perfectly acceptable in the exam to point out the different interpretations.

Other ambiguities arise from the lack of inflectional affixes - a posh term for suffixes that form different tenses, allow possession and pluralisation. "daddy sleep" for example, should really be, in singular present tense, "daddy sleeps". If "Suzy juice" is possessive, there should be an apostrophe and a 's': "Suzy's juice."

Even when children repeat the people around them, they omit the 'lesser' words but retain the correct order.

Mother: Look, Ben's playing in the garden!Child: Play garden.

It's a case, for the child, of picking out the 'key words'.

Though still limited, children are capable of a range of meanings. Above, "Suzy juice" could be an example of possession (it is Suzy's juice), and "daddy sleep" gives action, while "Teddy bed" gives is a sense of location (the teddy is in bed). A child can also form simple interrogatives through the use of intonation, such as "Suzy juice?" (is it Suzy's juice?) and more complicated negations, "no juice" (I don't want juice!).

Telegraphic stage

By this stage, children's simple utterances are often grammatically correct. For example:

subject + verb + object = "Lucy likes tea." subject + verb + compliment = "Teddy is tired."subject + verb + adjective = "Mummy sleeps upstairs."

However, like telegraphs, children will utter the key words but will still often drop:

determiners auxiliaries prepositions

For example, "Daddy home now," drops the auxiliary "is".

Berko (1973) did research into children's inflectional use during this stage, at ages 20-36 months. He found that they master them in the following order:

1. -ing2. plural -s3. possessive -s4. determiners5. past tense -ed6. third person singular verb endings -s7. auxiliary 'be'

From the rising intonations of the two-word stage for interrogatives, the children begin to develop the more complicated question constructions in the telegraphic stage. By two years, they learn the 'question words': what, where, and then why.

By three years, they start to make rapid progress, using determiners more regularly, stringing together more than one clause per utterance with use of coordinating conjunction ("and"), and even including the inflectional affixes. For questions, they acquire the auxiliary and grammatical inversion, for example, "Joe is here" would be inverted to, "Is Joe here?" Sometimes, in this early period, confusion can occur with "question words" and inversion, such as, "Why Joe isn't here?"

As the children acquire auxiliaries, they learn more sophisticated negations, such as "can't" and "don't":

"I don't want it.""Sammy can't have it."

Later still, they learn more negation auxiliaries "didn't" and "isn't".

By five years old, children will have mastered most grammatical structures, though they might still struggle with passive tense... now you just have to learn it all, and we'll all be happy!

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Pragmatic Awareness

Why do children acquire language? Because they realise early on - hearing speech around them - just how important and useful a tool it is.

You may recall Grice's maxims from all the way back in ENB1 (everything comes back to haunt us eventually!). The maxims of quantity, relation (relevance), manner (clarity) and quality (truth). They're a good thing to consider when you look at the pragmatics of what children are saying, because it takes a while for children to grasp pragmatics.

Young children also don't have much control of topic management. One feature of adult child-directed speech (see the next section) is use of topic management such as, "That's right, you have to kick it don't you," in order to keep a child focused on the task or conversation of the moment.

Other features of young children's lack of pragmatics and control include:

repetition demands (imperatives) and no negotiation erratic, distorted utterances

Though pragmatic development begins before a child can speak, it is slower than some of the other aspects because some of it has to be 'taught' rather than developing naturally. By three, children begin to make some headway however, learning how to initiate a conversation with someone else, to obtain attention and listen to others, and the idea of 'turn taking' in a conversation.

Between three and five, they will develop the 'social factors', such as the correct ways to address people, politeness tokens, indirect requests, mitigated responses (helped by their acquisition of modal verbs!). They learn how to makes conversational repairs and cope with situations that don't go their way (rather than crying and kicking feet...hmm, clearly I've forgotten this stage of late).

After five, they still need to acquire the manipulative devices like "you know" or "actually", but the basic pragmatic devices of when to speak, how to respond and the appropriate register will be mastered.

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Child Directed Speech

CDS, a.k.a. Motherese a.k.a. Caretaker Language is the language that parents or guardians use to children. Although I was brought into this topic by Chomsky and Pinker, and thus, much prefer Motherese, I'll use CDS to stay politically correct...

If you ever listen to someone talking to a child, you'll notice some quite distinctive phonological features...and in fact, have probably laughed about them... Phonologically, CDS characteristics include:

separating phrases distinctly with longer pauses, speaking more s-l-o-w-l-y, exaggerating the differences between interrogatives, imperatives and declaratives, and using a higher and wider pitch.

In terms of lexis, adults tend to:

use concrete nouns ("chair" "table") and dynamic verbs ("give" "put"), and limited to words the adult knows the child will understand,

adopt the children's own lexis: "ickle babies," and use the child's name frequently (to keep their concentration), while avoiding confusing pronouns.

CDS's syntax:

repeats sentence frames: "That's a dog. That's a cat." uses simple sentences that are generally grammatical, has few complex sentences, and little passive voice usage, sometimes omits past tense and other inflections, usually consists of imperatives or interrogatives (to keep the child focused), and uses expansions - repeating a child's utterance, but 'filling it out'.

Child directed speech might also use more gestures and exaggerated body language, and have frequent pauses for the child to respond. As the children's utterances increase, so too, do the adults'. Adults will also adopt their conversation to topics the child will be interested in.

Although Chomsky (see later Theorists) didn't believe CDS has much to do with child language acquisition, there have been a number of researchers that suggest CDS does play a part.

Clarke-Stewart (1973) found that children whose mothers talked to them had larger vocabularies than other children.

Kuhl (1992) did a study of exaggerated sounds to six month olds in English, Swedish and Russian. He found that babies turned towards adults who spoke in a sing-song voice, but ignored those who spoke normally, and that mothers in all countries used exaggerated sounds.

But do children learn by imitation as Behavourists suggest (see later)? Not at all.

Children tend to make up words using rules that apply to other words, "it's the baddest." "you don't say badder, you say worser." These are known as virtuous errors and an adult would never say them, so children can't simply copy.

Positive and negative reinforcement (correcting a child's utterances) doesn't work either. Nelson (1973) found that if a mother constantly corrected a child on word choice and pronunciation, the child actually developed more slowly.

But enough of this debate in this section, just scroll down to the next section for more!

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Theories of Acquisition

There are a number of key theories and theorists that you should be aquatinted with, and able to talk about if the question opens up to them, much like those in ENB2. The theories involve explaining how language acquisition actually occurs. Is it an innate part of us, something we are born with? Is it that children learn by copying? A mixture of these two? There is only so much evidence, and the theories can only offer suggestions...

What you believe on the matter, personally, doesn't really matter as long as you're able to talk about the different theorists (so no guessing where my bias lies!).

Behavourists

In 1957 (immediately, dated research!), B.F. Skinner put forward the Behavourists argument of acquisition. This view is that children acquire language through something called "operative condition", that language is learned in much the same as any other form of learning.

Children, he claimed, start as "blank slates" and through positive reinforcement whenever they speak a correct utterance, and negative feedback whenever they speak an ungrammatical utterance, they learn what was "right" and "wrong" in terms of speaking. Much like a dog can be taught tricks, using treats as rewards...and indeed, Skinner tested his theory on pigeons and rats.

There is some evidence in support. Stacets and Stacets (1963) found that parents are excited to hear a child utter a 'correct' sentence, and then reward a child with attention/feeding. This seems to suggest that the positive feedback part of Skinner's approach holds some truth.

However, there are many problems with a Behavourist view. Nelson (1973) found that children's vocabulary development actually slowed if children were subjected to systematic correction. Other researchers suggest that parents are more concerned with truthful that grammatical utterance. When Chomsky came along later, he pointed out that children of all languages and backgrounds tended to acquire language at roughly the same times, regardless of parent feedback. This ruined Skinner's theory, and left room for a new one to be developed...

Innate

Noam Chomsky radically changed the world's thinking about many aspects of language acquisition and syntactical development. He challenged Skinner's view about language development, suggesting that children learn instead through an innate part of their brains, a device he called the LAD (Language Acquisition Device). When exposed to spoken language in the environment around them, children's LADs are turned on.

Through a process of hearing language around them, the brain develops a number of rules, first about how words are built up from their phonemes, and the rules of morphemes, then to putting words together such as the subject verb object string found in English. Though you don't need to know the details, it is quite a fascinating topic...

There's lots of evidence to support language acquisition being innate. First and foremost is that children of all languages and backgrounds acquire language at roughly the same time. We've already seen the stages of acquisition, and this too, suggests that it is something in the brain that develops. It doesn't matter whether a child has Motherese thrown at them or not - as long as they're in an environment that uses language, they will pick it up.

One test that supports Chomsky's LAD is the wug test by Berko (1958). In this, the linguist showed children an image of an imaginary creature:

He told them that the creature was called a 'wug'. Showing them two, he said, "Now there is another one. So there are two _____." The children would respond with "wugs".

Though they've never come across a wug before, they know a rule that to pluralise a noun, you have to add "-s". This is never taught to them, but somehow they learn it - it suggests that a LAD is present.

Another strong piece of evidence for the LAD arises from virtuous errors, also know as Linguistic Creativity. If a child says, "I runned" or "I felled", they are using language in a way that they would never hear their parents express it. Instead, they seem to be using an inbuilt rule that past tense is formed by adding "-ed". Until this rule is blocked for a particular rule with an irregular verb ending ("ran" and "fell"), Chomsky suggested, the child would use the automatic rule.

But is it purely innate, as Chomsky originally suggested? A clue might be in that he later amended his theory...to incorporate more those external influences...

Social Interactionist

The most well known linguist behind this approach was Jerome Brunner. Social Interactionists believe in the importance of interaction, as the title suggests. Although they agree that there may be a LAD in all children's brains, they think it is through interaction with those around them that they learn how language is used (the pragmatics, turn taking, non-verbal communication, etc).

Brunner suggested that children have a system called LASS (Language Acquisition Support System), born from Chomsky's LAD, in which interaction "scaffolds" children's language development.

Where Chomsky was dismissive of the role of parent-child interaction, Brunner, and other social interactionalists like Snow, stress its importance. They claim that the rituals of conversation occur between children and parents even before the children acquire language, such as in the example:

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 wipes)

They also consider the characteristics of CDS, such as Kuhl's research that suggested children turn to mother who speak with a higher intonation. The parent instinctively speaks in the higher tone, while the child instinctively responds to the higher tone.

Not all cultures have CDS, however. In some (non-western) societies, babies are expected to 'blend in' with the adults, and are talked to and treated like adults. Despite this, they still pick up language at roughly the same time as children who are subjected to CDS: the main criticism of the interactionist approach. However, a child will not learn from television or radio, but needs to be exposed to language, which seems to stress that interaction does play a role in language development. Social interactionists don't contradict Chomsky's theory, but merely add an extra dimension to language acquisition.

Cognitive Development

Cognitive development is the approach that considers children's language acquisition as closely connected to their psychological and intellectual (to give it a posh name 'cognitive') development. The theory states, reasonably enough, that a child can only develop complex utterances, when their intellectual development reaches a point where they can consider such complex ideas.

The forerunner of cognitive development was Jean Piaget. He split language development into four stages:

1. Sensorimotor period (years 0–2) 2. Preoperational period (years 2–7) 3. Concrete operational period (years 7–11) 4. Formal operational period (years 11 and up)

At each stage, the child's cognitive awareness grows, and their language reflects this, Piaget claimed. In the first stage, the sensorimotor period, for example, he says that children learn to classify experiences in the real world, and therefore, their language is full of concrete nouns, but there are a lack of abstract nouns.

As they gain awareness of new concepts, like time, size, heat and cold, their language expands to express these.

Piaget said that is was futile to teach a child a complex form before it is ready, for it will not be able to grasp the idea. Although there may or may not be something 'innate' in us for learning language, Piaget would argue that forming a complex sentence requires more than the 'rules' of grammar; a child also needs an understanding of the logical relationships involved.

As well as communicating for social purposes, Piaget also said that children had something called egocentric speech - where they speak to themselves with no one else present. He said that this speech was to help them make sense of the world around them.

Thought and Language

A book by the Russian linguist Leo Vygotsky entitled Thought and Language developed on Piaget's idea of egocentric speech. Cognitive and innate linguists would agree that speech is very different from the language of thoughts, and in fact, Pinker labelled thought language as 'mentalese'. They don't agree with George Orwell's prediction that one day, governments will use language to control thought: that without a word to describe it, an idea cannot be expressed or thought.

However, Vygotsky saw egocentric speech as the first stage of thinking. He believed that as a child grows older, and come to understand that it wasn't socially acceptable to speak out loud to oneself (though some of us clearly still haven't quite mastered that...*whistles innocently*), they take this external egocentric speech inwards, and it becomes the basis of our thought process. Although it changes and develops as time passes, becoming much more compressed than normal speech, it is very closely linked to language. His idea is based on the Saphir-Whorf research in the 1930's.

Of course, this research is dated...and Pinker makes a very good argument as to why we have 'mentalese'. Even before children can speak, they can respond to their surroundings, suggesting that there is some kind of language is the mind before speech is learned.

...

That's all you have to learn, really. Not too bad, huh? And quite fascinating.

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Learning to Read

So far, we've looked at things that naturally occur... Now we're moving into the parts of acquisition that are taught: reading and writing. In some cultures, there are no traditions of reading and writing at all, such as in South America, and if we think across to Language Change, for a long time only the upper levels of society learned to read and write.

Imagine if you were faced by this:

Looks pretty much unrecognisable at first glance and only through a process of logical guesses can we attempt to make out any meaning. The numbers, for instance, we recognise and the letter 'A'... so:

One ... .... ... half ten a man ... a woman .... ... ... ... ... .

The + like one between 'a man' and 'a woman' is likely to be 'and' and this is transferable to the s-and = sand. So:

One ... ... ... half ten a man and a woman ... ... ... sand.

'half ten' probably refers to a time, so there will need to be a 'at' in there, before it. But the AB bit suggests 'about'. At about half ten'? In the morning or the evening? Well, it starts with 'N', which suggests 'night':

One night at about half ten a man and a woman ... ... ... sand.

Now, we notice there's a symbol from 'about' later on, representing the 'out':

One night at about half ten a man and a woman ... out ... ... sand.

Now filling in the remaining gaps might become clear...

One night at about half ten, a man and a woman were out on the sand.

The method we just used was a type of decoding and it's the closest we, as readers, can come to understanding the process. Children have to decode a string of seemingly meaningless symbols, and then, when it comes to writing later, reproduce them in a conventional way. The process starts at birth, and is all about interaction. If a child isn't given the right interaction, and exposed to the written art, they will struggle when it comes to schooling. Language acquisition may occur without CDS, but reading can't occur without a parent's help.

So, what can parents do to help?

Well, first of all, children need to be exposed to written language. Adults should point out words in the child's environment, point out words in books, and let the child see that reading is both a pleasurable and necessary activity everyday.

Children also need to develop a love of books. Adults can help stimulate this by reading to the child everyday, and reading aloud in front of the child in general. Books that have predictable words and repeating phrases and refrains are good for interaction, for after a few readings, children will be able to join in and 'read' themselves. Letting children have books on tapes and taking them to the library also help, as does encouraging a child to dictate a story to a parent, who then reads it back.

They need to develop an 'ear' for language, so encouraging rhymes and songs is a good idea. Playing music while children nap also has positive benefits, and Mozart is supposed to be particularly good.

Particularly important for writing, children need to develop good hand-eye coordination. Parents should encourage them to draw, play sorting games, jigsaws and catching games. They should help with crawling and encourage the child to ride tricycles and scooters.

Parents should also show children how to follow lines of a book with their fingers, and these 'tracking' skills can also be helped by patterning games with blocks and beads.

An expanding vocabulary is also important for reading. Parents should introduce new words to children wherever possible, and explains things to the children.

Finally, children need sufficient cognitive abilities - reasoning, problem solving and ability to recall. Parents can help here by discussing what a book might be from its cover, ask questions throughout to check understanding, and talking about the success of the prediction at the end. Also, they might encourage children to find different ways to solve tasks, play games like board games and card games with them, and get children to 'review' their day.

Phew! There certainly is a lot to being a parent! The most important is read, read, read to children and show them a love of books.

Stages of Reading

There are two theories about how reading should be taught: the phonetic theory and the whole word theory.

Phonetics teaches children the regular letter-sound relationships, and encourages them to 'sound out' when they come across a word they don't recognise. The argument for this method is that children have the rational for sounding out words. The argument against phonetics is that blending can't be done, and books that aim at practising a particular sound often sound silly due to being so limited: 'Pat and Dad ran.'

Whole word schemes are based on teaching children to recognise words as a whole. Through this, larger and more meaningful sentences can be produced in books, through the frequently occurring words and some larger words. The only problem is that the word choice is often randomly selected and aren't always linked to a child's own experiences.

Children go through a number of stages as they start to read. They will start to:

Recognise letters - usually at the beginning of the name: Elizabeth. Associate letters with sounds. Realise that letters make words. Realise that sounds combine to make words. Learn that a word says the same thing, no matter the book or type of print. Learn that words go together to form sentences. Learn the conventions of punctuation and layout.

When children reach this point, they are well on the way to becoming independent readers.

Books

The exam might ask you to look at pages from a children's reading book. There are various characteristics that you might comment on.

Graphologically, you might consider the text size and word density. As children get older the amount of words per page increases, the font size decreases and the amount of 'white space' decreases. Images also decrease in size and frequency as the stories get 'older'.

For lexis, consider the individual words. Monosyllables or polysyllabic? Are they mostly using a particular phoneme to practice it as we saw in the phonetic scheme of teaching children to read? What semantic fields are there? A general trend with semantic fields is that early books are naturally centered around a child's environment, while older books move away from this and are more imaginative.

Syntax might involve patterning in sentence structure. What types? As the texts get older, they will move from minor to simple, to compound and complex.

The texts, especially those for younger readers who will probably read aloud, might also use phonological features like alliteration and assonance.

Back to the Top

Learning to Write

For writing, children need to be a few steps more advanced. They need to have the good hand-eye coordination we saw in the earlier section as well as the ability to control a pencil, to reproduce the symbols and to hold a thought long enough to write it down.

Children go through a number of stages, and if you're faced by a handwritten piece you should try to identify at which stage the child is.

Phase One - Preparation (until age 5-6)

In this stage, children learn the basic skills of handwriting and spelling. Skills are developed in the following order:

drawing and sign writing making letter-like forms writing capital letters writing the child's name and letter strings

forming words forming sentences, and finally writing short texts.

Phase Two - Consolidation (ages 6-7 years)

In this stage, as the name suggests, writing catches up with speech. The child will write as they speak, in a colloquial context-bound style. Their writing will also be longer than the first phase.

Phase Three - Differentiation (ages 9-10 years)

Again as the title indicates, in the differentiation stage, children learn to distinguish between speech and writing - that writing may be changed depending on a specific purpose and audience (something you should be well aware of if you plan to do well on ENB5!)

Phase Four - Integration (11 years)

Children begin to develop their own personal styles.

Spelling

"Spelling conventions" is a posh way of saying the rules of spelling. Spelling is a big part of learning to write. J.R. Gentry (1982) suggested there are five stages in learning how to spell, and these depend upon the individual, teaching techniques, etc...

1. Precommunicative stage: The child realises that symbols can be used to create a message and have meanings. They may, however, invent symbols.

2. Semi-phonetic stage: The child begins to realise that letters "have" sounds. In writing, they may abbreviate words and use pictures for words they don't know.

3. Phonetic stage: The child spells through sound-symbol correspondence. They may not be aware that some strings of letters aren't acceptable in English.

4. Transitional stage: The child uses the basic conventions of the English language system. They start to become aware of the patterns in language spelling, that extends further than using phonetic spellings.

5. "Correct" stage: Finally, children understands the basic spelling patterns and knows something about word structures, using visual strategies to spell. They have a large automatic spelling vocabulary and can distinguish between homonyms and homophones. They also have control over 'loaded language' (language that attempts to evoke the emotions) and latinate lexis.

At a young age, children may placehold, which means to use some of the letters, usually the consonants, to represent the word, such as "bcs" for "because". It's often done because the child is unsure of the spelling.

What can go wrong with spelling? It depends on the individual.

Though poor spellers with a weak visual memory might have a fairly clear idea of which symbol represents which sound, they don't remember what words look like and get confused when writing them down.

Poor spellers with weak auditory memories have problems understanding which symbols represent which sounds, and can't hear individual sounds in words. They make random guesses at spellings and are often poor spellers as well.

Some errors might include:

getting the initial letter wrong - this suggests the child isn't ready to write, and is a serious problem if the child is older than seven,

using phonetic alternatives - a common error. There are two types of phonetic alternatives:

1. a form of spelling is chosen that follows a pattern from another word, but is wrong in the context of the word, such as "nessessary" as in "lesson",

2. a form of spelling is chosen that isn't possible in English, like "perfikt". This is a more serious error.

problems with prefixes and suffixes before children understand how words are put together, such as in "dissappear" and "mispelt", and "makeing". Ance/ence are frequently confused as they sound the same,

misspelling unstressed vowels, a far more common mistake than stressed vowels, dropping consonants where they aren't stressed, such as "ofen" and "chrismas", misspelling words that include double or single letters.

Of course, errors might not always be formed through misspelling. If a child produces something on a computer, it may just be a typo!

Graphology

Gaphology as a framework is discouraged in most areas of English Language, as it's seen as the "easiest" framework to analyse. For this section, however, it's essential.

There are a few aspects of handwriting that you might want to comment on.

Ascenders are parts of letters that go up from the line, like in "b" and "d", while descenders are parts of letters that go below the line, as in "p" and "q".

Directionality is an understanding that, in English, we write from left to right and linearity is learning that we write in horizontal lines.

Lower case letters are small letters, while upper case letters are capitals. Do the children use capitals at the beginnings of sentences or randomly in the middle of a sentence? Are they using punctuation correctly?

Other things to look out for is the size of the handwriting, and its density on the page. Generally, the older the child is, the smaller the handwriting, and the more writing there.

National Literary Scheme

For some reason, we're supposed to know something about the four stages of the national literary scheme. They are:

1. Phonetics2. Knowledge of Context3. Syntax4. Word Recognition

With that, we reach the end of Learning to Write and the end of Language Acquisition. Let me know if there's something I've missed!

1. Stages of

Child Language

Acquisition

Children can not acquire language all at once, but they have their language

acquisition by stages, and each stage more closely apptoxemias the language that adults

use. Observations of children in different language areas of the world reveal that the

stages are very similar, possibly universal. Linguists working on child language

acquisition have made many observations, experiments and studies of the process of

children's acquiring language. They generally divide the stages of language acquisition

into the babbling stage, the holophrastic stogie, the two-word stage- the telegraphic

stage and the full language-acquisition stage.

　 1. 1 Babbling Stage

When a child is around six months old, he begins to babble. During the babbling

stage- the child produces a large variety of sounds, which seems to include the sounds

of human language, though many of them do not occur in language. It is interesting that

babbling is common to all infants, including deaf children. Normal children horn of deaf

parents, who do not speak, also babble. Therefore, we may say babbling is not the

imitation of outside sounds, since deaf-parents can not input such babbling sounds into

their children. As for the role of babbling in child acquisition of spoken language，

some linguists take the view that babbling is a necessary prerequisite for normal

language acquisition, others consider it to be less crucial. So far it is still a controversial

problem.

During the babbling period, which usually lasts to the twelfth month, children learn

10 maintain the speech sounds and give up others. By the end of the babbling period

most children will have acquired some of the intonation-patterns of the language spoken

by the adults around them.

　 1. 2. Holophrastic Stage

　 Sometimes around one year, average children begin to use the same string of sounds

repcauvdly to "mean "the same thing. At the- time they have learned that sounds are

related to meanings and they are producing their first "words". Most children seem to go

through the one-word stage- during which children produce what are traditionally

thought of as one-word sentences, which are usually termed holophrastic sentences.

This stage may last from the age of about twelve to eighteen months. At this stage

children use just one word- which is generally monosyllabic with a consonant -vowel

(CV) form, to express concepts or predications. If you make a careful observation of

some Chinese children at such an age, you will hear them often say [ba] （爸）, [ma]

（妈） , [man] ( 猫) (饱), [qi]（起）, [do] (打) [teng ](疼) and many other

monosyllabic words. The words used during the holophrastic stage usually convey the

following ideas:

　 (a) children's own action or desire for action.

　 (b) others' action,

　 (c) addressing somebody (usually parents), naming or calling things.

　 1. 3. Two-word Stage

On the basis of one-word sentences children gradually begin to produce two-word

utterances at the time when they are close to the age of two. Some children may

produce two-word utterances some months earlier. At first they just reduplicate what

they have acquired at the holophrastic stage, or just string two of their earlier

holophrastic utterances, with each word having its own meaning to make actual two-

word sentences which are not random combinations of words, but show definite

syntactic and semantic relations and the intonation contour of the two words extending

over the whole utterance rather than being separated by a pause between the two words.

For example, English children at such an age are often beard saying： mammy there,

daddy here, doggie gone, hat table, me go, it ball, toy table- water hot, cat jump and so

on. And the Chinese children at the same age would often say，[ma lai] （妈来）, [bo

zou], （爸走）, [he" shui](喝水), [chi fan](吃蛋), [kan ying ]（看（电）影）. [chi

gt.o](吃果), [mao chudng]（帽床）, [hei mao](黑猫), [bdi mao](白猫).[da moo]（大

猫 ）. [moo jido]（猫叫）. [got, yfio](狗咬), [du e](肚饿). [dan xiang]（蛋香） and

so on.

During the two-word utterance stage children do not use syntactic or morphological

markers, that is. no inflections for number, person or tense and so on, but the syntactic

and semantic relations in the two-word sentences are clear. The two-word sentences

children of almost all languages produce have very similar or almost ihe same patterns;

noun + noun : mammy book, hat tahle. [mao chuang](帽床 ), noun-f-verb : ceil jump,

doggie gone, [gou yao] (狗咬 ), noun + adj: water hot, candy sweet ,[dan xiang]（蛋香

） . noun+ adv; daddy here, mummy there [ba near]（爸哪儿）, adj. +noun: good

doggie, new hat, [bai mao] (白猫), verb + noun :love Jane- [he shui]（喝水） [sa niao]

撒尿 pron +verb: me go, me want ,[ta da](他打), Each pattern of the two-word

sentences shows clear grammatical relations between the two words.

　 The two-word stage is very crucial for language acquisition, for the structures of

two-word sentences reflect the basic sentence structures and the basic syntactic rules of

a language, including choice of appropriate words.

　 1. 4. Telegraphic Stage

The two-word sentence stage is followed by the telegraphic stage. There docs not

seem to be any three (or four)- word stage in the process of children's acquisition of

language. When a child is about two years and a half, he starts stringing more than two

words together to make longer utterances. These utterances may he composed of two,

three, four, five or even more words.

The term "telegraphic'' derives from the observation that the child speech throughout

this period lacks inflections marking tense, aspect, number, mood, the, and function

words, such as prepositions (in, at, on), determiners (this, that, the, a. an), auxiliaries

(will, shall- da- does) and conjunctions (and- but. or). for such speech is rather like the

language used in telegrams, in which function words are usually missing and only

content words carrying the main message are used. As the child proceeds during the

telegraphic period from the two-word stage to later stages characterized by the

production of longer utterances, his speech, in terms of word order, etc, will

approximate more and more to that of adults' speech. If the language he is acquiring has

inflections and function words, ru-will also gradually come to vise these words

appropriately that by the time when he is about four or five years old, his speech, though

still defective compared with that of adults, is no longer describable as telegraphic.

　The utterances that are longer than two words appear to be sentence-like. There are

many such examples:

　 Mammy love me.

　 What that?

　 John play piano

　 No heat me.

　 Daddy no go.

All the sentence-like utterances produced at the telegraphic jttape are not simply

randomly strung-together words, but have hierarchical constituent structures similar TO

ihe syntactic structure"' found in the sentences produced by adults. At the end of this

stage children have gradually grasped the principles or rules of sentence formation.

　 1.5. Full Language-acquisition Stage

　 As children acquire more and more of their language and their language becomes

more and more close to adults' speech, they not only begin to use syntactic or

grammatical function words but also acquire the inflectional morphemes of the language

(if the language is inflectional). But now they have only learned how to use the

inflectional morphemes That are regular. At this stage, they often say: Daddy good.

Mammy bayed atoll for me, They arc nice peoples, and so on. This is because they have

not acquired the knowledge of irregular inflections. So some of the sentence;- they

produce are still defective. But in the process of using language they come to realize ihe

irregular inflections. At the age of about five the sentences they produce sound like

those spoken by the adults around them.

　Though we divide the process of children's acquisition of language into different

stages, all the. stages are closely connected, with every two related stages overlapping

each other and each proceeding on the basis of the former.

StagesFor the following four stages, answer these questions:

1. What happens to the child's language during this stage?2. When does it occur?3. What distinguishes this stage from the previous stage?4. What distinguishes it from the subsequent stage?

• Cooing and babbling

1. What happens during this most incredible of the stages?During the "cooing and balling stage" the child does not speak but begins making what some claim to be experminetal noises that are crucial to the development of language. During this stage the larynx begins this descend, enabling infants to create the broader spectrum of sounds experienced at this age2. When does it occur?Infants typically begin babbling around five months of age and continues through the eleventh month, around which time it's replaced by the one-word stage.3. What distinguishes it from the previous stage?Technically babbling is the first stage of language, but it can be distinguished from the first four months of age which are typically characterized by screaming and crying. On the more physiological level, the larynx descends, giving infants the broader vocal track and also removing the ability to drink and breathe at the same time.4.What distinguishes it from the next stage?The primary difference is simplt that I don't like those one-word stage guys. The big difference really could be left to the lack of any truly recognizable and consistent words. Infants become much less well behaved during the one-word stage as they continue to poop themselves and shout "no" at people all the time. Rude.

• The one-word stage

1. What happens to the child's language during this stage?During the one-word stage, children use such single terms as "milk," "cookie," "cat," "cup," and "spoon," for everyday objects. While children may be able to use single-unit terms, they are not ready to produce more complex phrases. For example. children may know how to say "eat" and "cookie," but they don't know how to form complex phrases, incorporating those words together.

2. When does it occur?Cooing and babbling dissipates around a child's first year of life and marks the one-word stage; between twelve and eighteen months, children begin to generate several recognizable single-unit utterances.

3. What distinguishes this stage from the previous stage?Cooing/babbling sounds like a really drunk person on the verge of passing out on the couch while 1-word speech has an occasional word that is recognizable by our English language. Going from babbling to 1-word speech is the first big step in making your parents proud while babbling is just adorable gibberish. With 1-word speech now the child is on the fast track of living up to their parents expectations. Next thing they know their parents are making them pick a university to go to after high school.

In all seriousness there should be a definite difference between the formation of one recognizable word that can be tagged with some object or person—most likely ‘mama’ or ‘dada’—compared to indistinguishable unconnected combinations of sounds that is babbling.

Around four/five months old the tongue starts to wiggle around a lot more and the child starts to realize they are making sounds with their windpipe and tongue creating hard consonant sounds and light vowel sounds. Then the child starts to recognize patterns and can express emphasis and emotion, which then leads to the 1-words stage around 12 months old with utterances of single word terms used for everyday objects like ‘milk’, ‘cat’, ‘dog’, ‘milk’, ‘cup’, and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Just kidding, that is further down the line. While many 1-words utterances can be to used to name one object, there should also be circumstances that show the kid is expanding their vernacular and are on the brink of word connection. Babbling is experimentation of sounds while 1-word stage is experimentation with words.

4. What distinguishes it from the subsequent stage?The most apparent distinguishing factor between the one word stage and the two word stage is that the one word stage consists of children utter a single unit, while the two word stage has them combining two words. Another distinguishing factor is that the one word stage is more often about the children just naming objects while the two word stage has them bringing words together which will form an idea (depending on the social context) that causes adults to respond back.

• The two-word stage

1. What happens to the child's language at this stage?During the two word stage children begin to communicate by speaking in two word statements. This is a sign that the child's vocabulary has expanded to at least fifty words, though they can usually understand more words than they can use. The two word stage is the first stage in which children begin to demonstrate an ability to link separate words together to form novel ideas. In this stage not only does the child start communicating with more language, but also reads the behavior of the adult for feed back. The two word stage is also a stepping stone for telegraphic speech where the child begins to build sentences.

2. When does it occur?The two word stage usually begins when the child is 18-20 months old.

3. What distinguishes this stage from the previous stage?

This stage is different than the one word stage because words aren't standing alone anymore; they are two word sentences. The child in the one word stage can refer to bed and baby separately but isn't ready to put the two words together

4. What distinguishes this stage from the subsequent stage?The main difference between the two word stage and the telegraphic speech phase is the lack of any grammatical inflection. While telegraphic speech is characterized by the appearance of simple prepositions and articles, two word speech is mostly made up of nouns and verbs.

• Telegraphic speech

2. When does it occur?From 2 - 2.5 years of age, children begin developing beyond the two-word stage. However, the stage never really ends from there; the child just begins learning more vocabulary. At 2.5 years, the child's vocabulary begins expanding. And by 3 years of age, the child has a much larger vocabulary and is able to pronounce words closer to that of adults.

4. What distinguishes it from the subsequent stage?Telegraphic speech distinguishes itself from the subsequent stage because word order and grammatical inflections are refined, but there is still a lack of inflectional morphemes (such as "-ing") and syntax.

DevelopmentFor the following three kinds of development, answer these questions:

1. What changes do we notice in this stage?2. What "mistakes" occur?3. How can we understand these as reasonable, rather than mistakes?

• Morphological development

The child is starting to use various grammar rules, such as adding -ing to verbs and also making words plural such as boys or cats. They also begin using the possessive -'s and "to be" verbs like are and was. Past tense forms of words begin appearing, using -ed. After the age of four the child begins to distinguish between regular and irregular word forms.

The child may use the plural form incorrectly, talking about foots or mans or even footses or boyses. The child also makes mistakes with irregular forms of past tense words saying things like goed instead of went and comed instead of came. Overall, the child may say a lot of odd phrases like "I wented" or "some mens."

During this stage, the child is focused on his interaction and communication with others, not on saying things correctly. He is simply trying to say what he means. When a child makes a mistake and says "look at the fishes" for example, it isn't a mistake because it is proof that the child actually knows what plurals are and how to form them, even if he doesn't know the irregularites yet.

• Syntactical development

The changes that are noticeable in the syntactical phase involve children progressing through three recognizable stages (labeled 1-3) that incorporate forming questions and negatives. During the development of syntax, the child goes through three very distinct stages when learning how to form questions and negatives. The first stage is between 18-26 months, the second stage is 22-30 months, and the third stage is 24-40 months. During the first stage the child simply adds a Wh- form to ask a question or uses a raised intonation towards the end. The child cannot form the complex sentences that would allow for the question to be completed (a ‘mistake’, if you will). In the second stage the same principle applies, but the expressions are becoming more complete. In the third stage, the child is learning the movement of the auxiliary English questions while still having difficulty with the morphology of the verbs (i.e., Did I caught...).

Along with forming questions, children can also have difficulty forming negatives. Stage one involves children simply putting ‘no’ or ‘not’ in front of nouns. In the second stage, contractions are added to the child’s vocabulary (e.g., can’t and don’t). In the third stage, children start to include more difficult contractions such as ‘didn’t’ and ‘won’t’, although not always paired with the correct verb tense.

Though the words may be out of order or in the wrong verb or noun form (tenses are wrong, identifying plurals with the wrong word, etc.), the information is still all there for the listener to be able to make sense of what the child is saying. One can still understand what "Did I caught it?" means, even though the verb is in the wrong form.

• Semantic development

WHAT HAPPENS: Children begin to attach meaning to the words within their growing lexicon.

5.1.1 Child Language Acquisition The study of child language acquisition is known as the development of psycholinguistic. It seeks to understand how children, although born completely without language, by the time they are about 5 years

old, they will typically acquired an extensive vocabulary, complex phonology, and grammatically systems, and equally complex rules for how to use their language appropriately in social settings. It also seeks to explain how these accomplishments could occur in every known society, whether literate or not, in every language and in almost children, regardless of the way they were brought up.

5.1.2 Perceiving Speech Studies show that infants can actually hear before they are born. They demonstrate a preference for their mothers’ voices shortly after birth and can discriminate between utterances spoken in the mother’s native language as opposed to a foreign language by about 4 days of age. This implies a certain amount of ‘in utero’ learning. They can discriminate between male and female voices between stimuli with different intonation patterns. Infants shows an early preference for language that is broken into clausal chunks, rather than segmented randomly. They also appear to understand the phonotactic regularities of their language. More impressive, however is the infant’s ability to make fine distinctions among speech sound, for example, between the English voiceless /p/ and the voiced /b/ as early as the first weeks of life. This is to us may not seem anything special , until we consider the fact that the difference between the two sounds is a matter of less than tenth of a second. This ability to distinguish speech sounds must be inherent in the human as it is possible for infants to pick it up so speedily from the speech they hear during the first few days of life. But a more concrete piece of evidence come from studies that show that infant can discriminate phonemes that are not in the language used by the parents, whereas the adult in community cannot. This ability begins to disappear by the end of first year, when infants have begun to learn the sounds of the language around them. Apparently, infants came prepared to hear all possible distinctions. This is logical, as these infants cannot know what language community they will be born into. When they learn their native language this special phonetic sensitivity disappears.

5.1.3 Producing Speech

Parents around the world tend to understandably anticipate with bated breath their baby’s first recognizable words, so much that they assume burps are conversational turns and assign intentions to vocalizations long before the intentions are actually there. We can generally divide children’s language development into a number of approximate stages as in the diagram below.

Language stage Beginning ageCrying BirthCooing 6 WeeksBabbling 6 MonthsIntonation patterns 8 MonthsOne-word utterances 1 YearTwo-word utterances 18 MonthWord inflections 2 YearsQuestions, negatives 2 ¼ YearsRare/Complex instruction 5 YearsMature speech 10 YearsDuring the first four weeks of life, a child’s first recognizable vocal activity is crying. Babies cry when hungry and when they are in pain. However, it is perhaps misleading to consider crying as a language stage as it seems to be instinctive communication and more akin to an animal call system. So, although crying may help to strengthen the lungs and vocal folds (both needed for speech production), it should not perhaps be regarded as part of speech development. Next, the child goes through a cooing phase, producing

superficially vowel-like sounds. Some call it ‘gurgling’ or ‘mewing’. Cooing seems universal and like crying, may help the child over his/her speech mechanism. Gradually, consonant-like sounds become interspersed in the cooing. By around 6 months, the child has reached the babbling stage. The consonant are often made with the sequences sounding like ‘mama’,’dada’, or ‘papa’. When hearing this sounds, parents the world over ecstatically but wrongly assumed that their child is addressing them .Although we cannot always tell what a baby may be trying to express ,research believe that these early attempts at communication include both protodeclaratives (language about something) and protoimperatives (request that something be done or given). Simultaneously with babbling, and from around 8 months, the child begins to imitate intonation patterns. This makes his/her vocal output so much like speech that mothers are often heard to comments, “I’m sure she is talking. I just can’t catch what she’s saying.” The next stage is known as the one-word or holophrastic stage by which time (18-20 months), children typically have acquired approximately 50 words. Despite the different communities in the world, the first words spoken by children are similar both in their phonetic form and in the kinds of meaning that underlie them. Among the common features of this stage are:

Phonologically, these first word rarely contain consonant cluster; are more likely to be an open syllable

Syntactically , first word are inevitably concrete word Functionally, first word tend to refer to objects within the child‘s environment that she/he can

actively interact with .First words are also used to convey a variety of intentions such as negations, recurrence, nonexistence and notice.

In addition, studies of this stages how that children understand more than 5 times as many words as they actually produce. Some time during their second year, children begin to put together the approximately 50 words they have acquired into basic two-word utterance across speech communities suggest that they are expressing the same kinds of thought and intentions in the same kinds of thought and intentions in the same kinds of utterances. At first, the utterances mirror the meanings expressed at the one-word stage: Negations: “No bed” Recurrence: “More milk”Nonexistence: “All gone cookie” Notice: “Hi, Daddy!”

These are then followed by another dozen or so kind of meanings such as :Naming an actor and an action: “Mommy eat”Modifying a noun: “Bad Kitty” Indicating possession: “Daddy shoe” Specifying a location: “Kitty table” Describing an action and location: “Go school” Naming an action and a object: “Eat apple” Naming an actor and object: “Mummy…. Lunch.”

As at the one-word stage, two-word utterance are limited in meaning, i.e they are not generally about past or future events and produce without function words or inflections.

Stages of Language development- Małgorzata Szulc-Kurpaska

Biological foundations of language

Eric Lenneberg 1967

The Biological Foundations of Language

      The behaviour emerges before it is necessary.

      (The law of anticipatory maturation)

      Its appearance is not the result of a conscious decision.

      Its emergence is not triggered by external events (though the surrounding environment must be sufficiently ‘rich’ for it to develop adequately).

      There is likely to be a ‘critical period’ for the acquisition of behaviour.

      Direct teaching and practice have relatively little effect.

         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?

      There is a regular sequence of ‘milestones’ as the behaviour develops, and these can usually be correlated with age and other aspects of development.

Stages of language development

      The incremental nature of first language development          The length of the utterances increases step by step          The grammatical complexity gradually increases

Caretaker speech Motherese, Fatherese, Parentese

Two functions:      To communicate with the child       To direct child’s behaviour

Features of caretaker speech:

      higher pitch      explicit intonation      careful articulation      slow pace      using gestures and facial expressions

      simplified vocabulary      diminutives, 'baby talk', onomatopoeic words      short utterances       simple sentences      grammatical correctness       topic referring to the 'here and now'      general questions and imperatives      attention getters      repetitions      paraphrases      comprehension checks      expansions      redundancy

Stages of language development

      Crying      Cooing      Babbling      Intonation patterns      1-word utterances      2-word utterances      Word inflections      Questions, negatives      Complex constructions      Mature speech

Birth6 weeks6 months8 months1 year18 months2 years2 and ¼ years5 years10 years

      Babbling drift a child’s babbling gradually moves in the direction of the sounds he hears around him

One-word utterances

Four theories

      the child has overgeneralised the word ‘ba’; that is the child has learned the name ‘ba’ for ‘bath’ and has wrongly assumed that it can apply to anything which contains liquid

      Russian psychologist Lev Vygotski (1893-1934) suggested that when children over-generalise they do so in a quite confusing way – they appear to focus attention on one aspect of an object at a time

      according to David McNeill, the child is uttering holophrases – single words that stand for whole sentences

      Lois Bloom put forward another hypothesis – the meaning of a one-word utterance varies according to the age of the child

Two-word utterances

      Roger Brown       Adam, Eve and Sarah

  Eve Adam

Two words 20 months 26 months

Three words 22 months 36 months

Four words 28 months 42 months

      Telegraphic speech (18-28 months)

      One explanation (Martin Braine)

          Pivot grammar       a small number of words such as allgone, this, more, no which occurred frequently, never alone and in a

fixed position- pivots, because the utterance appears to pivot round them;      many more words which occurred less frequently but in any position and sometimes alone (often nouns),

e.g. open class words, since an ‘open’ class is a set of words which can be added to indefinitely;

      Relations          Mummy push          Agent action         Eat dinner         Action and object          Mummy pigtail          Agent and object          Play garden         Action location          Cookie plate          Entity and location          Mummy scarf          Possessor possession          Green car         Attributive and entity          That butterfly          Demonstrative and entity

      Operations

         This (is a) truck          Nomination          More milk          Recurrence          Allgone milk          Non-existence

Grammatical morphemesIn the acquisition of grammatical morphemes:

      -ing progressive and –s plural are early acquired       past irregular is acquired earlier than past regular       copula ‘be’ is acquired earlier than auxiliary ‘be’      uncontractible ‘be’ is acquired earlier than contractible ‘be’      3rd person present tense is late acquired

      Why is the plural –s early early acquired and the third person singular present tense -s late acquired?

Because plural ‘s is more frequent than third person singular present tense.

      Overgeneralisation – the use of a grammatical form in all contexts even if it does not apply, e.g. childrens, wented, goed.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/109451830/First-Language-Acquisition-%28PowerPoint-download%29

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