Process of Language Acquisition PDF

Recap 1: Process of Language Acquisition Cross-sectional research: studying and comparing across groups of children of different ages. Longitudinal research: studying children over a long period of time (typically concentrating on a small number of children, often 1 or 2). Stages of Language Acqui...

Recap 1: Process of Language Acquisition Cross-sectional research: studying and comparing across groups of children of different ages. Longitudinal research: studying children over a long period of time (typically concentrating on a small number of children, often 1 or 2). Stages of Language Acquisition Factors contributing to variability in language acquisition in children: biological; social; cultural. All children (universally) learn language in a series of predictable stages that do not depend on the particular language being learned or the society in which the child is learning it. Transitions between stages is gradual. Precise ages for each developmental stages can be quite variable and should only act as a rough guide to child language acquisition. Pre-linguistic Stage: The time before children start to use their first words. Rough timeline - from birth until about 12 months of age. In terms of perception, infants are highly sensitive to speech sounds and can distinguish between similar consonant or syllable sounds from around 1 month old. The range of sounds produced by young infants is very limited - until 2 months old crying is the primary means of communication and parents can become very skilled at determining different types of cry. Cooing - vowel sounds that vary in tone and volume (e.g., 'ooooo') - associated with pleasure - onset around 2 months old. Babbling - sounds that combine vowels and consonants (e.g., 'ba' or 'pa') - constitutes a large part of infants' vocalisation from 6 months (onset) until the production of words. Universality of babbling onset and types of sounds produced - both are similar regardless of culture or even whether the child can hear or not. Babbling is therefore considered to be the result of maturational processes (unfolding of a biologically pre-specified developmental trajectory) rather than learning. Sound learning does occur (in addition to the unfolding of maturational processes) - infants stop using some of the sounds they do not hear in their linguistic environment - deaf infants stop babbling. Echolalia - stringing together of babbling sounds - sequences can show speech-like intonational patterns despite the absence of words, reflecting the intonational patterns in the language the infant is exposed to - onset around 10 months of age. In general the ability to understand speech (receptive language) exceeds the ability to produce speech (expressive language) throughout the stages of language development. Communication through gestures onsets around 9 months of age. One-word Stage: Children start to use words among the babbling - the majority of vocalisation is still babbling - onset around 12 months old. Early words often don't resemble adult words but are instead approximations of them - consistency of use to refer to an object or action is the key criterion for constituting a word. Vocabulary Explosion - the initial rate of acquisition of new words is slow (approximately an additional 10 new words 3-4 months after the first word) but it starts to accelerate between 16-18 months of age - coincides with production of 2-word sentences. Estimates of vocabulary size at different stages is quite variable, but around 18 months it is placed around 50 words, and grows to around 300 words by age 24 months. There appears to be a consistent pattern in the types of words children learn - these have been classified into 6 categories in the 1-word stage - 3 of those categories are: 1. general nominals - names of objects (e.g., bottle) - constitute over half the words children use, a trend observe across many languages. 2. specific nominals - names unique to people or animals (e.g., Fido). 3. action words - describing action (e.g., look). Early words are often context-bound - they can be used in certain situations only (e.g., a child may use the word book for an open book on a desk, but not for a closed book on a bookshelf). Holophrases - the use of single words to convey a variety of messages - the message may change depending on the context in which the word is used, the tone in which it is said, gestures that accompany the word, etc. Two-word Stage (Development of Grammar): Children start to produce two-word sentences - marks the development of syntax (grammatical rules for how to combine words) - onset around 18 months of age. Grammar is learned very quickly after children start to combine words - they pass rapidly through many phases of increasing complexity of grammar and increasing sentence length. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) - the average number of words children use in their sentences. Vocabulary size also continues to increase - children around 2 years of age have a vocabulary size of about 300 words - by 6 years old this has increased to on average around 13000. Early (Stage 1) Grammar 1. Sentences are short (most are only 2 or 3 words long) and simple (most consist of only essential words to convey meaning like nouns, verbs, and adjectives). 2. Lasts from around 18-30 months (but quite difficult to pinpoint). 3. Many features of adult speech are not used - inflections are omitted. 4. Consists largely of telegraphic speech - only critical words in the sentence are used (e.g., "play doll"). 5. Sentences are short and simple but are created following rules (grammar) - may not be the same as adult grammar but the rules are used consistently. Later (Stage 2) Grammar 1. Grammar Explosion - children start to use more complex grammar. 2. Onset around 30 months of age. 3. Sentence length increases and inflections (e.g., plural '-s') and function words (e.g., 'the' or 'an') are added. 4. Different forms of sentences (e.g., negatives or questions) start to be used. 5. Overregularisation - regular rules of grammar are incorrectly applied to irregular examples (e.g., adding the past tense '-ed' to 'go' or 'sing'; adding the plural '-s' to 'sheep' or 'foot'; superlatives like 'bad', 'badder', 'baddest') - this usage is never hear in adult language, which provides evidence against the idea that children are just imitating adult speech - they must instead be applying grammatical rules. 6. In preschool children sentence length increases further and children start to use conjunctions (e.g., 'and') to combine ideas within sentences. 7. Most of the grammar that will be used as an adult has already been learned by around 5 years of age. 8. Some forms of sentences are not learned until later - passive sentences (e.g., 'The cat was chased by the dog.') are rarely used by children aged 5 years and they can be confused about the meaning of passives. Meaning The question of how children develop an understanding of word meaning is another fundamental question about language learning/acquisition. Children have to learn that a particular combination of sounds refers to a category of objects or a type of action - how do they do this? The problem - even when a parent points to an object and uses a particular combination of sounds (e.g., 'dog' to refer to a dog in a picture) to try to teach the child the the relationship between those sounds and the object (the same applies to actions), there are a number of possibilities for what the combination of sounds might be referring to: 1. the dog. 2. a part of the dog (e.g., the tail). 3. a property of the dog (e.g., has a wet nose). 4. something the dog is doing (e.g., chasing a stick). Assumptions/Principles used by children when learning the meaning of words: 1. Reference Principle - words refer to things (i.e., the word 'dog' refers to an animal) not to other aspects/features of the scene or context in which the word is used - initially comes along with the mutual exclusivity assumption that a word refers to one class of objects only (i.e., 'dog' only refers to the animal not to any other objects like sticks for instance - children assume there should be a different word for the other class of objects). 2. Extendability Principle - words refer to a class of objects rather than a unique object (i.e., 'dog' refers to all dogs not just one particular dog). 3. Whole-object Principle - word refers to the whole object, not just parts of it (i.e., the word 'dog' refers to the whole animal not just the tail). Learning words that refer to constituent parts of objects comes later in development. Children are actively engaged in trying to understand adult language by making associations between words and object - they do not passively learn the meanings of words through mere exposure to the words. Another important question is whether children develop a concept about a category first and then learn the appropriate word to describe that category, or instead first learn a word and then which category it should be applied to - there is evidence that both occur so some combination of these two things is probably occurring. Pragmatics Pragmatics refers to the use of language to communicate with others. Children learn the communication skill of turn-taking by around 18 months of age - they can use shifting gaze to indicate the beginnings and ends of utterances (two crucial aspects of turn-taking behavior). Audience design - the use of different types of speech for different audiences - develops later with the exact timeline a bit unclear, but by around 4 years of age children use different speech for adults than they would use for younger children (for younger children they tend to use 'motherese' ). By around 5 years of age most of the skills for communicating with others have been learned.