Language and literacy development
What is the LAD put forward by Chomsky?
-"Language Acquisition Device" (Chomsky)- use this to distinguish between languages, helps with applying different grammatical rules across languages. The LAD is so constructed that it can "perceive" regularities in the utterances that the child hears. The LAD generates hypotheses about these regularities. These are then tested against new utterances and so come to be rejected or accepted as appropriate. The LAD can acquire any language and faced with the utterances of a particular language, it develops a grammar.
What is early literacy development like at: -6 months -2/3 years -3/4 years
-6 months- listen to stories, hold books -2 and 3 years: able to recite passages on books -3-4: children begin to track the words on the page
When do children learn to take into account their own and others perspectives?
-Ability normally emerges by the age of 4-5 when children describe personal experiences -In re-telling events from a book or a drama, it is not until much later- usually around 9 years- that children begin to move clearly among the perspectives of the author of the storyline, the characters, the events and their own views on the narrative
What happens after babies are able to use 3 word utterances?
-After the 3 and 4 word linking stage, there is a rapid increase in use of grammatical rules. Prepositions and irregular verb endings appear. Now the child can begin to re-order the words of a sentence- eg. to make questions or negative statements.
What are pre-reading and pre-writing skills?
-As well as the usual skills of perception and discrimination, these include the understanding of reading conventions and the concept of story, and the awareness of rhyming and alliteration- can be helped to develop these skills from an early age -When a child begins to read and write he needs to consider visual information as well as the sound and sense of words. During the pre-school years, the child's perceptual skills can be sharpened by encouraging him to observe specific aspects of his environment.
What does Bruner argue about narratives?
-Bruner: argues that not only do children devise narratives as a way of understanding their own experiences but they also use narratives as a medium for communicating to others what these experiences mean. -Parents have a crucial role in the period before the child can read by making stories enjoyable, shared experience through turn-taking and empathizing.
What do Bryant and Bradley argue about pre-reading and pre-writing skills?
-Bryant and Bradley (1985) and Bryant et al. ( 1990) argue that young children's awareness of rhyming and alliteration indicates a skill in analysing the constituent sounds of words, which is essential for learning to read. In the process of becoming familiar with rhymes and alliteration they are also developing an awareness of speech sounds (phonological awareness) that will have an influence in their later ability to read and spell. They hypothesize a direct link between sensitivity to sounds ( as shown in responses to rhyming and alliteration games) and competence in learning to read. Bryant et al. (1990) argues that the awareness of rhyme helps to form spelling categories. -Snowling (1996, 2002) argue that semantic skills are very important
How can we encourage children to learn to take their own and other people's perspective?
-By encouraging children to tell and write stories, parents and teachers can give them the opportunity to encompass both subjective and objective ways of knowing the inner world of experiences as well as external reality -Oppenheim et al. (1997) found that there were clear associations between children's co-constructed narratives with their mothers and two aspects of their development: Their ability to construct emotionally well-organized and regulated narratives independently; and their behavioural and emotional regulation in everyday life.
What is the role of fantasy and make believe in language?
-By the age of 3 or 4 years, children are expert at moving easily between reality and fantasy through appropriate use of gaze, gesture, tone of voice, position and posture. Can also speculate hypothetically. -The narrative form plays a key part in the development of children's capacity to make sense of events in their lives and to evoke meanings -One opportunity, common in the pre-school
What are babies language development at 6-9 months?
-Canonical babbling: eg. "dadda" - becomes more speech-like -Reduplicated babbling- repeat things over and over- practicing vocal apparatus -deaf babies still babble, similar across langauges -Infants begin to develop a whole range of behaviours some of which are directed only at familiar people -Disagreement among researchers about the extent to which babbling and later speech are related to one another. It would seem, however, that babies' vocalizations at this stage have some phonetic characteristics of speech and that there is a process of continuity in the ways in which vocal abilities develop -However, parents tend to believe that their babies' babbling is an attempt to communicate meaningfully and seem to spend a lot of time guessing at the intentions which underlie the baby's actions and sounds. The fact that they often go beyond the actual meaning of the baby's actions plays a crucial part in the parents' integration of the young child into their social system, and provides an early example of scaffolding. -Clear that long before the first words appear the baby shows signs of understanding some of what is said to them. The capacity to share the adult's intentions has been called "a shared memory" -Fogel (1993) identifies complex micro interactions or "co-regulation of intentions" during the communication process between adult and child, which he claims is a form of ongoing elaboration of actions and intentions in response to the other's actions
How do children learn to take into account one's own and other's perspectives?
-Children need to learn to make appropriate use of linguistic indicators to show that they are aware of the listener's perspective -Need to distinguish between what they know as speakers and what the listener may not know -Children need to be able to adjust their language to different contexts
What is language development like when a baby is 2-3 months old? -What did Stern (1990) do and find out?
-Coo, smile, laugh: starting to combine sounds that they are able to make, starting to make sounds -Stern (1990) collected detailed observational data on the interactions between caregiver and baby in the early months of the baby's life. These observational data indicate that the interaction is distinctively different from typical adult-adult interaction: when adults interact with infants there is close proximity, an emphasis on exaggerated facial expressions, much repetition and more eye contact. Stern plots "phases of interaction": ensures optimal attention on the part of the infant. The adult tries to make sure that the baby is neither bored nor over-aroused by engaging in a sort of "dance" with the infant in which each trades similar responses back and forth- these exchanges are rhythmic and both partners contribute to the rhythm. Stern's key point is that the exchanges between parent and infant involve a communication of affect. During the pre-linguistic stage, mother and child show a very sensitive attunement to each other's emotional state. The "gaze coupling", in which caregiver and baby appear to take different roles in their "dialogue", may anticipate later turn-taking, or alternative speaker-listener roles, that are at the hear of conversation.
What is language development like when a baby is 1 month old?
-Discriminate virtually all phonemes: initially good, but worsens amongst the early months of life- decreasing continuous trend -Different cries: eg. different cries that they are hungry, tired- caregiver learners to differentiate between them -Able to produce the vowel "ooo", a sound which seems to grow out of pleasurable social interactions, especially out of dialogues that occur spontaneously during normal caregiving activities such as nappy-changing and bathing -Period of "shared rhythms and regulations" where the parent builds on the biological rhythms of the baby to develop a mutual "dialogue" that will form the basis for the communication patterns that characterize the adult world
What are the two different classes of words that Barett distinguished between?
-Distinguished between 2 classes of early words: 1. Context-bound words that are only used in a specific behavioural context 2. Referential words that are used in a variety of different behavioural contexts -Proposed that these two classes of words follow different routes in order to reach adult conventional meaning. Context-bound words are mapped on to holistic event representations while referential words are mapped on to mental representations of either specific objects or actions. -Agrees that maternal input has a critical role in helping the child establish the initial uses for words but argues that children also rely on their own cognitive processing to establish subsequent use of words—while the initial focus is on external stimuli, later children focus more on their inner representations in order to form theories about the linguistic system
What is a genre in language?
-Genre refers to the distinctive language of scripts, whether in the form of accounts of personal experience or in the form of fictitious stories
What is adult-child speech?
-Gives a fourth perspective on the interactionist stance -Adult- child speech is distinctively different from Adult-Adult speech -Mothers typically use the simplest speech with infants of 8-12 months -Adults also adjust their speech to the cognitive ability of the child, whether it is first or later born and whether siblings are present -Babies indicate soon after birth that they prefer A-C speech than A-A speech: before infants are able to speak or even respond to words, they seem to be able to respond to the sound patterns- or "prosodic" characteristics- of speech. This refers to the general pattern of sound, which is not related to individual words.
What did Gleitmen (1990) find out for adult-child speech?
-Gleitman (1990) suggested that infants are predisposed to attend to smaller segments of speech (such as stressed syllables) and that is how they eventually identify words -Emphasis of words, on behalf of the mother, clearly helps infants to identify the order for everyday objects in the child's world
Hoe does Barrett's multi-route model differ from Gleitman's model?
-In contrast to Gleitman's model, Barrett's takes account of the interactions he observed among the timing of acquisition, the child's linguistic experience, and the cognitive representational abilities
What did Ingram (1999) claim about first words?
-Ingram (1999) claims that children's phonological systems develop in ways that are parallel to adult languages. It is easy to miss the first words a baby utters since they are often sounds not to be found in the dictionary. However, they can be considered first words if the child uses them consistently in the presence of a particular object or situation. These first words have the function of naming or labelling the people and objects in the child's environment, and they also condense meaning.
What did Messer (1994) find out about adult-child speech?
-Messer (1994) shows that A-C speech has a higher pitch, a greater range of pitch and is simpler in meaning. The mean length of utterance is shorter; A-C speech is also much simpler, for example, through number of verbs or conjunctions per utterance. It is also more likely to be in the present tense. It is easier to process; it is slower; it has more repititions and an exaggerated form, uses proper names rather than pronouns.
What are babies language development like at 9-12 months?
-Modulated babbling: becomes increasingly like a conversation in terms of its constination and tone pattern -Infant begins taking active role (Reddy, 1999) -Dyadic (involving 2 individuals)→ triadic interaction (can use more than one thing in their interactions) -Meaningful gesture -Pointing from 8 months -Comprehension of simple instructions
How has SLT more recently contributed to the nature-nuture debate?
-More recently, SLT has contributed to the debate. Moerke (1991) proposes a skill learning model based on an integration of learning theory (operant conditioning), SLT and aspects of Piaget's cognitive developmental theory. He uses the idea that language depends on continuous feedback cycles within which the "trainer"-usually the parent-invites a response from the child and then provides feedback.
What did Nelson (1977) do and find out?
-Nelson (1977) wanted to see if the effects of recasting were specific: eg. would children whose utterances were recast into sentences tat contained complex verbs show greater use of verbs. Collected a sample of girls and boys who all lacked 2 categories of syntactic structures in their spontaneous speech: complex questions and complex verbs. Half were assigned to an intervention schedule focused on using complex questions, and the other half received an intervention designed to facilitate the use of complex verbs In the last 2 sessions, responses were recorded, and their transcript was scored for presence or absence of sentences containing complex questions or complex verbs. Complex questions which had been lacking before the intervention were used by the question intervention group and vice versa with verb forms. Nelson concluded that this experiment increases our understanding of how children get information from adults about syntax. Suggested that the experimental recasting probably drew the child's attentiveness to the new forms. -More recently, SLT has contributed to the debate. Moerke (1991) proposes a skill learning model based on an integration of learning theory (operant conditioning), SLT and aspects of Piaget's cognitive developmental theory. He uses the idea that language depends on continuous feedback cycles within which the "trainer"-usually the parent-invites a response from the child and then provides feedback.
What did Nelson et al. (1973) do and find out? (support for behaviourist perspective)
-Nelson et al. (1973), investigating the impact of different kinds of adult feed-back on children's grammatical constructions, compared the effects of expanding children's incomplete sentences (that is, putting them in their complete form) and recasting them (that is, keeping the topic the same but giving the child a new way of talking about it). Children whose sentences were recast performed better in a sentence imitation task than children whose sentences were only expanded, they also used more complex grammatical forms in their spontaneous speech. An even more specific effect was found when an experimenter recast children's utterances into questions or complex verb constructions: each treatment group showed growth in the use of negative "wh-" questions or complex verb constructions depending on the type of adult intervention.
What is extended discourse?
-Pan and Snow (1999) argue that the ability to engage in extended discourse- a pragmatic skill, when the child needs to combine his own perspective with those of others and with outside events into a coherent account- emerges over time out of regular participation. In conversation with adults and peers. This is not easy for children.
What did Papousek et al. (1987) find out about adult-child speech?
-Papousek et al. (1987) found that A-C speech has the following kinds of melodic units: level, rising, falling, U-shaped, bell-shaped or complex sinusoidal- suggests that melodic units may be universal patterns of pre-linguistic communication, and they are attuned to the perceptual preferences and abilities of infants -It would appear that the prosodic contours enable infants to understand the intent of speech before they can identify the meaning of individual words. They also need to identify individual words in the speech that they hear before they can produce words themselves
What are the explanations of dyslexia?
-Phonological deficit suggests particular difficulty with the sounds of words, so when they try and link the phoneme (sound "sss") to the grapheme (letter squiggle "s") they make mistakes -Identified in pre-school when they have problems rhyming and alliteration -Nicolson and Fawcett suggest that the key to the dyslexic deficit seems to be early problems in articulation, which has been found to be significantly slower and more error prone in dyslexia -Reading and spelling are the most severely impaired skills -The result is that at each stage dyslexics are investing too many resources in just coping with the basics, which leaves them less spare capacity for acquiring new information
What are the 4 basic components of language?
-Phonology -Orthography -Semantics -Pragmatics
What did Scarleett and Wolf find? (1979)
-Scarleett and Wolf (1979) and Wolf et al. (1994) showed that, whereas children under the age of 3 demonstrate play that is mainly carried out by actions, by the time that the children are ready to enter school at 5, the meaning of their stories is much more likely to be expressed in linguistic ways. Concluded that the emergence of the different types of story language and the resolution of problems within the story itself are major advances which preschool children make as they gradually free themselves from concrete props and actions and rely more on language itself. In addition, the children are becoming aware of the pragmatics of language- the rules which govern the most effective ways of communicating with others.
How do children's scripts change as they get older?
-Scripts can be analysed in terms of content, organization and linguistic features -In the early years, children need a great deal of help from adults in forming scripts or accounts of events that have happened to them. As they grow older, they become more accomplished and learn to use linguistic features that are specific to the genre- eg. the appropriate use of tense. -By 3, children can usually produce fairly coherent personal stories in conversation with a beginning, some form of contextualisation, a high point and an ending. Children at this time are also developing in their skills as narrators of fictitious stories, using beginnings and endings. These stories are based on real life experiences, or heard in the media or books.
What is the surface structure and deep structure of language, according to Chomsky?
-Suggests that we need to distinguish between the surface structure of the language and its deep structure, that is, between the arrangement of words in the utterance and the logical, grammatical relationships among the elements in that utterance. The connection between the two is specified by the transformational procedures or rules of grammar. Different languages use different transformational rules but the universal features are to be found in the deep structure. -The surface structure- that is the ordering of words in a sentence- can vary but still reflect the same deep structure, that is the underlying meaning. -The relationship between deep and surface structures is achieved through the rules of transformation
What are logical errors?
-There are many sentences which are in a strict sense "ungrammatical" but which reveal that the child is in fact using grammatical rules of syntax: logical errors • Logical errors → knowledge of grammar -eg. Over-regularisation, e.g., "deers
What is Gleitman's syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis? (model of word acquisition)
-called children's ability to infer the meanings of words from cues syntactic bootstrapping- means that young children use grammatical information from the structure of sentences to infer meanings of unfamiliar target words -Argue that from an early age children are sensitive to syntactic and semantic correspondences that exist in language -Young children bring the verb's meaning to alignment with the syntax and not the other way around
What did Tomasello et al. (1997) do and find out relating to nouns and verbs?
-tested children's capacity to make word combinations with new nouns and verbs: children aged between 18 and 23 months. Found that the children combined novel nouns with already known words, 10 times more often than they did with the novel verbs. Concluded that at this age children have some form of category of noun and noun phrase; they called it a pivot grammar on which the children can "hang" new nouns as they are learnt. However they could not do the same on the basis of the category of the verb- Tomasello concluded that children between 18 and 24 months do not have a general schema for subject-verb-object. •After 24 months this pattern changes- uses the term "verb island hypothesis" - language develops in a "verb specific way". After this happens they use these islands in increasingly differentiated ways •Proposes that syntax develops out of the child's experience of learning specific verbs and nouns before they are able to partition events in a general way.
How do behaviourists view the acquisition of language?
Behaviourists, e.g., Skinner (1957) • Different languages, dialects (different words in different geographical areas), accents- evidence for the fact that language can't be innate • Imitation and reinforcement- children's language often involves imitating what they have learnt. In terms of quality of language, it has been found that children whose mothers talk a lot to them have larger vocabularies than those mothers who do not. Children will be rewarded and reinforced for saying things correctly, or will be prompted when they say things wrong- shapes language learning.
Who were the stage models of literacy development put forward by?
Frith (1985); Ehri (1995)
What do nativists argue about language acquisition?
Nativists, e.g., Chomsky (1957); Pinker (1994) • Language is only spoken by humans, virtually all humans • Cross-cultural similarities; Universal grammar- all languages follow grammical rules and constructions • Innate capacity; Explicit teaching unnecessary • "Language Acquisition Device" (Chomsky)- use this to distinguish between languages, helps with applying different grammatical rules across languages.
What are pragmatics?
Non-linguistic- lots about the social conventions of language • Considers communicative function- what is the purpose of language? •Adjusting language for context: knowledge about how language is used in different contexts -Speech, writing: text messages vs. academic essays •Social conventions -e.g. turn-taking, using gestures, elaboration when asked •Perspective taking of the listener/reader- start communication with context to explain what you are talking about
What is orthography?
ORTHOGRAPHY: Letters- standardised way that we write a language
What is phonology?
PHONOLOGY: Sounds •Phonology: perception & production of sounds used in language
What are semantics?
SEMANTICS: Meaning of the words that we are speaking/writing down
What did Bryant and Bradley do in their 1985 study?
Wanted to test the hypothesis that the child's experiences of categorising sounds, as in rhyming and alliteration, has an considerable effect on later success in learning to read and spell -Used two methods: correlational and experimental study -Correlational study conducted on 4-5 year old who couldn't read yet. The children were testing on their ability to categorise sounds, by detecting the odd one out, in a series of words. Each child was also given a test of verbal intelligence and a memory test. Four years kater (children now 8/9 years), were given a standardised test for reading and spelling, also measured their IQ. There were high correlations between the initial sound categorization scores and children's reading and spelling 4 years later. -Carried out a training experiment on children who were at least 2 standard deviations below the mean. Two experimental groups received training in sound categorization over 2 years. In group 1 they were only concerned with increasing children's awareness of rhyming and alliteration. However, group two were shown plastic letters and taught how to identify the sounds which the names of the pictures had in common with particular letters. -Two control groups were also used: one was called to categorize the same pictures in a conceptual way (group 3), the other received no training at all (group 4) -Group 1 was ahead of group 3, by 3-4 months in reading and spelling levels -Group 2 performed best of all in reading and spelling -Conclude that not only does training in sound categorization have an influence on reading and spelling, but if combined with alphabetic teaching it will be even more effective -Argue that the effect is specific to reading and spelling
Grammar: when do infants start to use 2 word utterances?
• 2 word utterances: 1½ -2½ years (Bloom, 1998) -eg. "mummy go"- convey sufficient meaning but lack link words, just simple words combined together to communicate a message
Grammar: when do children use 3 word utterances?
• 3 word utterances: 2-3 years
How is language when a child is aged 4-5 years?
• 4-5 years: most grammatical constructions. The 3 year olds speech is largely understandable to adults, vocab is now about 1,000 words and complexity of utterances has increased. Able to carry out reasonable conversations, although these tend to be routed in the present. Begin using complex sentences containing relative clauses. By the age of 5 a child can understand and express complex sentences and her use of language is very similar to that of an adult.
What is language development like at 4-6 months?
• 4-6 months -Babbling- merge constanents and vowels in combination- practice control of vocal cords, language, echolalia- frequent repetition of sounds that they have heard: eg. "dadadadadadad" or "mumumumum" -Cross-culturally similar sounds and ages: universal feature of language development -Pragmatics -joint attention: infant can follow another person's gaze, attention: important for later conversations -turn taking (adult burden)- adults take most of the responsibility. Adults don't talk over infants babbling
What is the second stage of literacy development?
• Alphabetic stage (approx. 5+ years) • Use phoneme-grapheme correspondences: learn to spell out first name letter by letter • e.g., /k/ /a/ /t/ • Convert to known spoken words- match words into text • Dependent on knowledge of phonology- need to learn how to say a word to be able to read it • Must eventually acquire additional strategies
When and how do first words develop?
• Comprehension precedes production •Phonologically consistent forms- eg. "moo" to say a cow •First conventional word at around 1 year (between 10 and 18 months) -Predictable semantic categories (Dromi, 1999; Nelson, 1981), or familiar action or phrases- eg. "stop", "more", or objects such as "car". Often use a word for a variety of meanings- up to adult to interpret single word utterances -Single words can be used as holophrases, since one word (eg. "milk") can be interpreted as expressing a whole idea. -New words are mainly object names, but also include action names, state names, and some "function" words referring to types of events -At around 18 months the child starts to combine single words into two-word sentences. The child's first sentences are often described as telegraphic speech: speech in which the highly condensed meaning is transmitted from the child to another person -When the child produces a holophrase the adult will expand it to clarify meaning
What is grammar and syntax? (semantics)
• Grammar and syntax- governs how we put words together -Grammar= refers to the study of the rules that determine sequences of morphemes and words in any language -Syntax= specific rules that govern the word order. Refers to the form in which words are combined to make grammatical sentences.
Grammar: what are holophrases?
• Holophrases: 12-18 months (Tomasello, 1995)- where a child will join up one word with a gesture or look in order to convey additional meaning
Are stage models of literacy development still accepted?
• However, STRICT stage models of literacy largely discredited: still a general understanding that children do you through various stages, however now more flexible that initially suggested
What is vocabulary development like?
• Initially very slow: 1-3 words per month • 18-24 months: 10-20 words per week (Fenson et al., 1994) • 6 years vocabulary = 15,000 words! -Vocab typically grows from around 20 words at 18 months to around 200 words at 21 months
What is intonation and prosody? (pragmatics)
• Intonation (using variations in pitch in spoken language) and prosody (tone of voice, rhythm, stress, repeating points)- can impact the meaning that is being conveyed- eg. "it's fine"
What are the conclusions that we have reached about language?
• Language is complex •Spoken language develops rapidly from young age • Innate desire to communicate • Rich linguistic environment required • Literacy develops more slowly and is more difficult to acquire • Requires explicit education •Bi-directional relationship between written and spoken language
How does Holdaway view literacy development?
• Learning to read is natural developmental phase linked to children's natural development of oral language skills. • Proposed four key components: 1. Observation 2. Collaboration 3. Practice 4. Performance
How do letters relate to phonemes?
• Letter(s) correspond to phonemes • But, not 1-to-1 correspondence - /s/ corresponds to <s~c~ss~sc~x~st~ps~z~sw~sch> (Hanna et al., 1966) • Rules for combination -Corresponding to phonology • Specifically orthographic rules -e.g., adding "-e" Mat---mate Bath—bathe Rational--rationale
What is the first stage of literacy development?
• Logographic stage (pre-school) • Salient visual cues- eg. recognise macdonald's signs • e.g., SMALLER misread as yellow "because it's the one with two sticks in it" Seymour and Elder (1986) • Expect large objects to have long spellings • Inefficient- learn that this is inefficient
What are morphemes?
• Morphemes = smallest meaningful unit -These may be whole words (eg. "dog"), or grammatical markers, such as "ed" at the end of a verb to make the past tense.
What is language development like when a baby is newborn?
• Newborn -Reflexive vocalisations: infants first sounds- crying, grunts, hiccups
How is literacy development viewed by Piaget?
• Sensorimotor stage: birth - 2 years • No / limited language skills • Sensory exploration of world- eg. books with sounds in, different textues • Preoperational stage: 2 - 7/8 years • Rapid language development • Children begin to categorise with words • Concrete Operational: 7/8 - 11/12 years • Use concrete objects to think about abstract concepts: eg. using graphs and diagrams to understand abstract concepts • Formal Operational: 11/12 years - adult • Use language in abstract way: use inferences, better and summarising and synthesising things in spoken and written forms
How does social interaction contribute to language acquistion?
•A third interactionist approach places a general emphasis on the child's early experiences of communicating and interacting socially with the people in their surroundings; the baby masters a social world on to which she later "maps" language •One powerful factor according to this theory is the adult's tendency to give meaning to the sounds and utterances of infants. •Another important development is the development of joint attention, and mutual understandings of gestures. As early as 6 months, infants will follow the mother's gaze to see what she is looking at; and by 9 or 10 months, they will start pointing at objects in a communicative way, reaching for objects also changes and becomes more social. The crucial development at this age, shortly after first words appear is joint attention- together with the experience of turn-taking or "conversational" formats of interaction, are crucial precursors of early language development. •This sociocognitive perspective traces the child's competence in language back to her experience as a communicator in the pre-verbal stage- a time when the responsiveness of adults is a key factor.
What is the relationship between spoken and written language?
•Bi-directional relationship: need spoken language for reading abilities, but also have a greater spoken language if we read more •Exposure to different language forms • Metalinguistic development: language if an object of thought, using language to talk and think about it -language as an object of thought
Is the notion of an inborn LAD still accepted?
•Children's language does seem to be governed by rules and does seem to develop in a systematic way. Children do seem to progress through similar stages in the acquisition of language. However, many contemporary psychologists question the notion of an inborn LAD.
What is Tomasello's construction grammar approach?
•Complement to the constructivist views of Piagetians •Argues that children acquire language gradually, beginning with concrete linguistic structures based on words and morphemes, and building up to more abstract structures based on linguistic schemes and constructions •Model is grounded in children's cognitive understanding of the various "scenes" that make up their lives. In his view, children move through specific steps in their language development: holophrases, word combinations, verb island combinations and adult-like constructions •At each step the child produces creative new utterances, suggesting, that they have constructed some kind of schema or category based on the specific utterances that they have heard from adult speakers
What is Piaget's perspective of language acquistion?
•During first 2 years child's intellectual skills are rooted in the sensori-motor experiences- symbolic actions do not occur until the end of this period. •The rules that children develop, don't grow out of an innate LAD, but a much wider cognitive system. Children talk alike because they share many similar experiences and their language is facilitated by the sensori-motor schemas of early infancy. This hypothesis is called the "cognition hypothesis". Cromer (1974) states that: we understand and use particular linguistic structures only when our cognitive abilities enable us to do so; even once our cognitive abilities allow us to grasp an idea, we may say it in a less complex way because we have not yet acquired the grammatical rule for expressing it freely. •What Piagetians suggested was that children form schemas to explain events in their lives and only talk about them. Language development reflects the stages of cognitive development through which the child is progressing: this is a reciprocal relationship, in which the child plays an active part. However, the child is not applying an innate LAD to talk about what they hear- their understanding arises out of their existing knowledge of the world. •Child need object permanence before they can begin to understand that words can represent things. Observations of first words show that children usually focus on familiar actions of objects. •This cognitive view was very influential in the 1970s, but then considered narrow, as it ignored things such as the child's social skills and the effect of the social environment on a child's capacity to learn.
What are graphemes?
•Graphemes = smallest unit of text: letters of the alphabet, punctuation
According to Chomsky, what is "generative grammar"?
•His theory of transformational, generative grammar provided the impetus for a great deal of research into child language. His own work investigated grammars in which deep structure or "meaning" had transformational rules applied to it in order to change it to a surface or spoken utterance- called this "generative grammar".
What is literacy?
•Literacy: ability to read and write
What is the third stage of literacy development?
•Orthographic stage (approx. 8+ years): how things are written down, knowledge of written forms of language • Orthographic knowledge • Morphological knowledge: can change tenses by adding "ed", "s". Learn about word families: eh. "family" "families" • e.g., dogs, cats, horses → + <s> • Vocabulary development directly from text
What are phonemes?
•Phonemes = smallest unit of sound -e.g., /b/, /p/, /a/ •Speech is a continuous stream of phonemes •Vocal apparatus can produce 100s of phonemes- need to distinguish between the speech sounds in a language. Eg. Japanese babies are born to distinguish between "l" and "r", but the Japanese language doesn't distinguish between the, so they learn bot to distinguish between them. • Rules govern combination (Chomsky & Halle, 1968) • CAN'T produce- some we can't produce • AREN'T produced (language specific - e.g. rz / dz)- used in Polish but not English
What evidence does Pinker (1994) provide for the innate basis of language?
•Pinker (1994) provides evidence for the innate basis of language. Argues that complex language is universal because children actually reinvent it, generation after generation- because they are generally smart and can't help it. Indicates how pidgin languages have been transformed- by children learning and changing them- into full languages. Also shown with how sign language developed.
How do children play with language, and how does this develop speech?
•Playing with language - e.g., rhyming. -Imaginative play reflects developing language: conversations acted out in play or commentaries that accompany actions contribute greatly to the expression of ideas and experience -Pre-sleep monologues may also be important for the processing of interpersonal experiences and their subsequent organization of memory
According to Chomsky, how is a child's language by the age of 5 years?
•Suggests that by 5 years most children- despite their background or culture- have a good grasp of the basic rules of their language: suggested that this is due to innate knowledge.
What is language?
•Symbolic communication--Code by which specific symbols stand for something else • Rule-governed • Conventional, - the symbolic code is agreed upon by the users •Arbitrary-no logic between the sound of the words and the meaning •Social- about sharing experiences, meaning and information with others • Intellectual- Involved in learning: spoken or written • Doesn't have to be spoken - Written language - Sign language
What are the universal characteristics of language, according to Chomsky?
•Universal characteristics of language: First they refer to phonological aspects of language- also apply syntax. All languages have sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases and a grammatical structure underlying them
How does written language develop?
•Written language -Develops after spoken- starts around 3-4, around 6-7: require key practical skills that allow us to read and write -Not all humans acquire (easily) -eg. dyslexia: most common of developmental disorders: 5% in the Western world affected. Identified in school when they fail to learn to read, and have subtle impairments in their speech. The most consistently reported reported phonological difficulties for dyslexic children are limitations of verbal short-term memory and problems with phonological awareness. They have difficulties with long-term verbal learning and find it hard to retrieve phonological information from long-term memory. -Requires explicit education -Development = matching written to spoken
