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Theories of Child Language Acquisition - Coggle Diagram
Theories of Child Language Acquisition
Noam Chomsky
Suggested everyone is born with an innate ability to understand rules of language - called the LAD (language acquisition device).
Michael Halliday
Pragmatic Development
Personal
Instrumental
Heuristic
Regulatory
Imaginative
Informative
Jean Aitchison
Labelling - children make the link between sounds of words and the objects that they refer to.
Packaging - children begin to learn that words can have a range of meanings, and overextension and underextension become hurdles to overcome.
Network Building - grasping connections between words, and understanding synonyms and opposites.
Believed that the speed of learning is influenced by both innate abilities and environment.
Developed a Timetable of Language Acquisition: Single words at 12 months. Understanding word endings, using negatives, and forming questions at 24 months. Complex constructions with rare faults at 60 months.
Skinner
Imitation Theory
Children only learn language through listening and copying the language that they hear around them.
Operant Conditioning
Children receive “rewards” for using language in a functional manner.
Four-Term Contingency
Motivating operations, discriminative stimuli, response, and reinforcing stimuli.
Piaget
Children are active learners who use their environment and social interactions to shape their language.
Sensorimotor (up to 2): Experiences physical world through the senses and begins classifying the things in it - when lexical choices appear, they tend to be concrete rather than abstract. Object permanence develops - the concept that objects exist when out of sight.
Pre-operational (2-7): Language and motor skills develop and become more competent. Language is ego-centric - either focused on the child or used by the child when no one else is around.
Concrete Operational (7-11): Children begin thinking logically about concrete events.
Formal Operational (11+): Abstract reasoning skills develop.
Bruner
Input/Interaction Theory
Children require lots of interaction with people, mainly their primary caregivers, to further their acquisiton.
LASS (Language Acquisition Support System)
Children have an innate ability to learn and acquire language, but require the interaction of other users of the same language to excel in their learning.
Lenneburg
Vygotsky
Level of development obtained when children engage in social interactions with others; it is the distance between a child’s potential to learn and the actual learning that takes place.
Grunwell
All children make predictable pronunciation errors, called phonological processes.
2 years - p, d, b, m, d, n, w, t
2.5 years - k, g, h
3 years - f, s, j, l
3.5 years - ch, dg, v, z, sh, r
KEY CLA PROCESSES
Addition
- the repetition of particular sounds and structures e.g. doggie (adding an extra vowel sound to create a CVCV structure)
Reduplication
- repeating the whole syllable e.g. choochoo
Deletion
- deleting the last sound and/or swapping other sounds around e.g. ca instead of cat, pi instead of pig (often occurs on the last consonant)
Consonant Cluster Reduction
- reducing the amount of consonants in a word so it is easier to pronounce e.g. banket instead of blanket
Substitution
- when one sound is swapped for an easier sound e.g. debra or zebra (fricative sound replaced by a stop sound)
Assimilation
- repeating the same consonant sound so it is easier to pronounce e.g. goggie instead of doggie, babbit instead of rabbit (illustrates how some sounds change because of other sounds around them)
Overextension
- it is common for children to overextend a word's meaning. Children link objects with similar qualities and may, for example, apply the word 'dog' to all for naked household pets.
Categorical Overextension
(60%) - the name for one member of a category is extended to all members of the category, e.g. apple used for all round fruits
Analogical Overextension
(15%) - a word for one object is extended to one in a different category, usually on the basis that it has some physical or functional connection, e.g. ball used for a round fruit
Mismatch statements
(25%) - one word sentences that appear quite abstract; child makes a statement about one object in relation to another, e.g. saying 'duck' when looking at an empty pond
Underextension
- less frequently, children underextend a word by giving it a narrower definition then it really has, for example, a child might use 'duck' for a fluffy cartoon dark and not for the brown ones in the local pond.
David Crystal
Children also replace new difficult words with phonologically similar ones as a kind of stand-in whilst they're learning the correct one.
Eve Clark
Common adjectives ('nice' and 'big') are among children's first 50 words, but spatial adjectives ('wide' and 'thick') are acquired later.