Model answer for CLA

At three years plus Sam is using more complex language and ideas in the story on the tape. It is full of information and he is using longer and longer utterances. He is able to use verbs but the tense is still problematic (‘I drawed’ instead of ‘I drew’) where the endings are irregular. The overused rule at this stage is that children ten to assume that all past tenses end in –ed. Adjectives are used (pretty, red) and he uses conjunctions to allow additional information into the story but they are limited as shows by the repeated use of ‘and’ and ‘and then’. There is still some difficulty with irregular pluralisation (mens).

CLA quick summary

Summary

The first three stages children tend to go through in acquiring language are:

·         Crying, (a child’s only form of communications in the early weeks of life.)

·         Cooing (through which a child gains control of their vocal chords.)

·         Babbling (where reduplicated monosyllables (mama dada) often sounds like a child is calling a parent.

Further Stages that children tend to go through are:

• One word stages: first words usually reflect a child’s environment and they are often holophrastic in meaning.
•     Two-word stage: demonstrates a child’s first sentences and contains a primitive grammar.
•  Telegraphic stage: sees utterances made up of words that tell us the main message but leave small unimportant bits out.

Theories:

• Theories of child language acquisition (Skinner):  Imitations and reinforcement theory- Skinner though that children learn by imitations language. When this is successful they are rewarded by praise and are motivated to do it again. Largely discredited now.
• Theories of child language acquisition (Chomsky): Innateness theory- all children are born with the capacity to learn underlying grammatical rules which govern their language. This is called the LAD device.
• Theories of child language acquisition (Piaget): This theory emphasizes the importance of a child’s intellectual development regarding its learning of language.
• Critical period (Lenneberg): Critical period hypothesis- This theory suggests that there is a critical time in a child’s life, during which time they are capable of acquiring language. However, this time is limited- evidence suggests that the cut off age is around 13 years old. 

Stages of CLA

Year one:

The first year sees babies working on speech sounds. By the time they are six months old they are making the characteristic burbling sounds we associate with ‘baby talk'. The first year can be roughly divided up into the stages: crying, cooing and babbling. Click the stages in the timeline to find out more.

Crying:

The first sound a human baby makes is to cry. Often known as vegetative noises, this is the only way it can express pain, pleasure or hunger. It is an instinctive noise and is therefore not considered a language.

Cooing:

A baby's brain development is in front of its body development and it therefore has to exercise the 100 different pairs of muscles it takes to produce speech sound. Cooing (or gurgling) is a sound development that occurs at around six to eight weeks old. Babies experiment with ‘coo', ‘goo' and ‘ga' and gradually gain more and more control over their speech organs (or vocal cords).

Babbling:

Babbling begins at six to nine months old. It is not learned or copied but pre-programmed. The work-out of the vocal cords means babies repeat syllables over and over. Combinations of vowels and consonants, such as ‘ma', ‘pa', ‘da', are produced and repeated and therefore ‘mama' and ‘dada', known as reduplicated monosyllables, often sound like adult language, and proud parents believe it is baby's first word.

Year two:

The second year of development sees an increase in the ability to manipulate speech sounds and more of a shaping of sound into familiar pronunciations. The second year can be roughly divided up into the stages ‘one-word', ‘two-word' and ‘telegraphic'. Click the stages in the timeline to find out more.

One-word:

At this stage, children begin to concentrate on building phonemes into words, beginning largely with nouns, that reflect their needs and interests. Often words for objects a child encounters everyday are the first. Basically, they build a personal vocabulary to deal with their world. Single words convey more than one meaning - “milk!” may mean “I want some milk.” or “I've spilt some milk.” Words used in this way are called holophrases. They substitute a complex grammar.

Two-word:

This stage, during which the major speech pattern is of two-word utterances, happens around 18-24 months old. This is particularly significant because here young children are demonstrating an understanding of the rules that govern how we communicate meaningfully. An example of a two-word utterance might be “Daddy ball!” which could mean a variety of things including “Daddy get the ball”, “That's Daddy's ball” and “Daddy throw the ball”.

Telegraphic:

A few months after the two-word stage (age varying from child to child) comes what is known as telegraphic stage. Children begin to utter increasingly complex multi-word sentences and grammatical words and endings are also present. This speech is considered to be ‘telegraphic' or like a ‘telegram' in that it includes all the important function words, leaves out ‘little' words like conjunctions, auxiliary verbs and prepositions.

Year three:

By year three, children are effective language users: still needing to practice, still needing to develop additional lexis, but fundamentally with the building blocks for all future language use. At this stage they begin to crack the code of implied meaning: to understand that, sometimes, language contains messages which can seem to contradict their face value statements.

Year four:

Children are sophisticated language users by year four. They understand that language carries a multiplicity of meanings, that it can be manipulated and that different audiences require different language use including variations in lexis and intonation. In other words, by year four, their use of language is purposeful.

Year five:

A critical factor in year five is that it is the age that most children start school. So here we see a shift from spoken language as the complete focus to written language: learning to read. This shift towards literacy sees children beginning to make links between print and meaning.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jamila_lyiscott_3_ways_to_speak_english

Theories

Chomsky’s LAD-

First proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the instinct or "innate facility" for acquiring language.

Deb Roy-

Professor Deb Roy of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is recording his son's development to shed light on how babies acquire language. The Human Speechome Project, as it is known, uses cameras and microphones installed in the scientist's home. The project will eventually gather 400,000 hours of material. There is still a considerable amount of debate about how infants acquire language. Although listening to the cooing of parents is thought to play an important part, most scientists believe it cannot be solely responsible for the rapid progress seen in most children. Instead, language-specific genes and environmental factors have both been put forward as additional factors that help children to learn to speak. Until now, the environmental influences on development have been very difficult to test because scientists have been unable to observe a baby for long enough in its home environment. The Speechome Project will change that by generating and analysing vast tracts of recorded material. For example, to understand how Professor Roy's son learnt his first words, the scientists will be able to mine their records to see who used those words around the child, where they were and what the child was doing at the time. Frank Moss, director of MIT's Media Lab, believes the project has close parallels to the Human Genome Project. "Just as the Human Genome Project illuminates the innate genetic code that shapes us, the Speechome Project is an important first step toward creating a map of how the environment shapes human development and learning," he said.

How ‘gaga’ became ‘water’

http://www.wired.com/2011/03/deb-roy-at-ted/

http://specterofreason.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/ted-talks-deb-roys-birth-of-word.html

Skinners operant conditioning-

Behaviour which is reinforced tends to be repeated (i.e. strengthened); behaviour which is not reinforced tends to die out-or be extinguished (i.e. weakened). B.F. Skinner (1938) coined the term operant conditioning; it means roughly changing of behaviour by the use of reinforcement which is given after the desired response. Skinner identified three types of responses or operant that can follow behaviour.

• Neutral operants: responses from the environment that neither increase nor decrease the probability of a behaviour being repeated.

• Reinforcers: Responses from the environment that increase the probability of a behaviour being repeated. Reinforcers can be either positive or negative.

• Punishers: Responses from the environment that decrease the likelihood of a behaviour being repeated. Punishment weakens behaviour.

Michael Halliday-

Halliday functions of child language:

·         Representational - "I've got something to show you" - language showing how they feel, declarative

·         Regulatory - "Do as I tell you" - requesting/asking for things

·         Instrumental - "I want"- expressing needs/wants

·         Interactional - "Me and you" - speaking to other, establishing personal contact

·         Imaginative - "Let's pretend" - imaginative language, used with play, to create imaginary world. Crystal talks of 'phonological' function as playing with sound.

·         Personal - "Here I come"- child expresses their feelings/expressing personal preferences

·         Heuristic - "Tell me why"- uses language to explore environment/ seeking information

Most commonly used in children's language is instrumental and regulatory, which are learnt, along with interactional and personal, at a young age. Representational is used by 6-8+ year olds.

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/wiki/Revision:Language_Change_and_Language_Acquisition

Jean Berko ‘Wug test’-

The Wug theory: Berko drew a picture of an imaginary creature and called it a 'wug'. She asked children what more than one wug would be called. 3/4 of them said 'wugs', applying a rule to a word they could never have heard before. It was designed as a way to investigate the acquisition of the plural and other inflectional morphemes in English-speaking children.

Piaget-

Interactionalism: Linked linguistic development with an understanding of the concepts surrounding the words' meanings, meaning that speech development is linked to the development of the brain (cognitive capacity). The stages were: sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, formal operational. He also talked about egocentricism in children and the idea of games such as peekaboo demonstrating the idea of object permanence.

David Crystal-

Addition to negatives: once pragmatic competence is achieved, youngsters learn to copy parents' use of words like 'maybe' when they really mean 'no'.

Lenneburg-

Critical Period: Furthered Chomsky's nativist argument by saying that there was a 'critical period' during which children should pick up language. He argued that is they did not evolve language skills by the age of five, full grammatical fluency is never achieved. He tested on feral children. One example to look at is Genie. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_%28feral_child%29)

Bruner-

Bruner created and argued for the Language Acquisition Support System (LASS). Bruner states through LASS that parents often use books and images to develop their child’s naming abilities and their ability to get involved in conversation.

·         Gaining attention- drawing the babies attention to a picture

·         Query- asking the baby to identify the picture

·         Label- telling the baby what the object is

·         Feedback- responding to the babies utterances

This is also called SCAFFOLDING, where the child is supported in their learning of language by carers and once they have learnt it, the support is taken away.

http://quizlet.com/22954520/english-language-a2-theories-flash-cards/

TED talks

Anne Curzan- What makes a word real?

One could argue that slang words like ‘hangry,’ ‘defriend’ and ‘adorkable’ fill crucial meaning gaps in the English language, even if they don't appear in the dictionary. After all, who actually decides which words make it into those pages? Language historian Anne Curzan gives a charming look at the humans behind dictionaries, and the choices they make.

https://www.ted.com/talks/anne_curzan_what_makes_a_word_real

John Mcwhorter- Is texting killing the English Language? (language change)

Does texting mean the death of good writing skills? John McWhorter posits that there’s much more to texting — linguistically, culturally — than it seems, and it’s all good news.

https://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk

Deb Roy- The birth of a word (CLA)

Debroys speechome project with his son. How the word 'gaga' develops into 'water' over a three year period.

https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word

Bristol University Grammar Exercises

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tutorial/index.htm