Child Language Acquisition

15 Months

-Bye Mummy

-Isee

-Allgone

These utterances suggest to me that the child sees most sentences as all one word. It also suggests that the child does not yet understand personal pronouns. The words suggest that the child cannot comprehend the thought of another human being other than their parents at this young age.

20 Months

-All fall down

-Teddy tired

-Gone, where mummy gone?

-More juice

At 20 months I can start to observe that the child realises that there are pauses in between words. There is also a beginning to understanding prepositions as the child starts to use them. Although the child does not yet understand how to pose questions correctly, as it uses imperatives instead of question words. There is also a start to using concrete nouns such as Teddy and Juice.

28 Months

-Teddy's hat came off

-Harry's got a big, big green truck

At 28 months there is a clear use of simple sentences as the child's primary source of communication. The child also begins to describe things; using adjectives. It also starts to understand that things belong to people and that there are other people other than themselves and their parents.

36 Months

-Little Luke hit me, he did

-I am going to see Harriet another day tomorrow

-I don't like faces, I want to see children's ITV

At 36 months the child begins to understand how and when to use personal pronouns. there is also a beginning to using negation. In addition the child begins to feel that it has certain needs and wants.

40 Months

-Look at my knee. I felled over in the playground

-Once upon a time there was a little girl and she got beautiful hair and then the monster killed her and then she got dead and then and then the beautiful fairy came and made them better again

At 40 months the child starts to use compound sentences. However the child still does not make cohesive grammatically correct sentences or understand what irregular verb endings are and when to use them.

Difficulties a child might encounter in it's acquisition of vocabulary

Some difficulties a child may encounter during its acquisition of vocabulary are as follows:

• The language of English in particular is very irregular and has a lot of rules a child under the age of seven would find very hard to grasp.
• It may also be hard to understand what a concrete or abstract noun is before actually knowing what an example of one is to use in a correct sentence.
• There are also many different sounds that can be made through the phonological alphabet which would be hard to make without a fully developed vocal range.
• They also use over-extension, which is when a child thinks that one type of object can be categorized under one particular name; such as calling all fruits apples or all vehicles cars. Children find it hard to realise that objects do fall into larger categories themselves.
• Katherine Nelsons research showed that a child's first word could be split into 4 groups; naming/ action/ personal and social/ describing and modifying. They find it difficult to use personal and social & describing and modifying words in particular because they have not yet developed an understanding of the world around them. This also proves it is difficult for a child to learn certain vocabulary because none of these words are grammar words which means they have a whole new set of words to learn in their next few years.
• Jean Aitchison identified 3 stages of lexical development; labelling, packaging and network building. This last stage proves difficult for children as they find it hard to make links between words using antonyms(opposites), hyponyms and hypernyms.

Jean Piagets stages of lingustic development

Jean Piaget's stages of linguistic development supports the type and order of words a child uses particularly because of the concept of phonemic expansion. In the sensorimotor stage of Piaget's theory he says baby's experiment with their mouths, saying a lot of unnecessary words/sounds, much like in phonemic expansion, where baby's use unnecessary sounds that do not relate to their own language. When a child grows older it begins to use phonemic reduction which is when they get rid of unnecessary sounds they will not ever need to use, which relates to how the children start to mimic their parents language around them.

In the preoperational stage which lasts between 2-6/7 years old children seem to talk constantly and has not fully developed the idea that others can see what they are doing. This sense of lack of knowledge relates to categorical over-extension, when children categorize something to an extreme sense because they are unaware of the proper name for these objects, such as calling all fruits apples etc.

Language Acquisition Theorists

Noam Chomsky- Theory of nativism

• Noam Chomsky believes that children are born with an inherited ability to learn any human language.
• He claims that certain linguistic structures that children use so accurately must be already imprinted on the child's mind.
• Chomsky believes that every child has a 'language acquisition device' which encodes the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child's brain.
• Children have then only to learn new vocab and apply the syntactic structures from the language acquisition device to form sentences.
• Chomsky points out that a child would not be able to learn a language only through imitation because the language spoken around them is highly irregular.
• Chomsky's theory applies to all languages.

B.F Skinner-Imitation and behaviourist theory

• Skinner is a behaviourist theorist that said children learn language through imitation.
• He conducted research on rats and pigeons which lead him to believe that language was just another form of learned behaviour.
• This brought him to the conclusion that children learn language through nurture rather than language acquisition devices.
• Another part of his theory is reinforcement, children learn from positive and negative reinforcement.

Jerome Bruner- Social interactionist theory

• He believed the child's social environment and particularly social interaction with other people were extremely important in the process of learning.
• Bruner believed that children think through 3 modes; ENACTIVE (actions), ICONIC (pictures) and SYMBOLIC (words and numbers). He believed this because actions, pictures and words are used by people around them in interactions and in performing tasks.
• He considered language as the most important cultural tool in children's cognitive growth and learning.

Jean Piaget- cognitive development theory

• The first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development.
• According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure on which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based.
• Piaget proposed 4 main stages of cognitive development; sensorimotor intelligence, preoperational thinking, concrete operational thinking and formal operational thinking.
• Each stage is correlated with an age period of childhood, but only approximately.
• The 4 stages always happen in the same order, no stage is ever skipped, each stage is a significant transformation of the previous stage and each later stage incorporates the earlier stages into itself.

By Joel Clark