There are seven Halliday’s functions.

These functions are categories which states the reason why a

child uses language in his/her daily life, as the name suggests it shows what are the functions of
the language in the conversation.

The first is instrumental, this is seen mostly in the early ages such as the before birth,
Holophrastic stage and two-word stage where it serves to satisfy the need of the child. It could
be called a mechanism of survival where the child asks for basic needs such as food or if the child
is feeling uncomfortable or if in danger. It usually asks for an action from the caretaker’s side for
example “child: nana, mother: Are you hungry(.) here you go(.) here is banana”

The second one is Interactional. It is commonly seen when the child becomes aware of their
surroundings and learn that there are different people around them. It can be seen as they try to
converse with others and to build on relationships with another individual. The conversation here
are not transactional but rather interactional and it’s not have the purpose to convey information
or gain a certain outcome by the partner. This is common usually at telegraphic stage and above.
For example: “I love you.” “Daddy home”

Then there is regulatory function where the child asks for the person to do something. It usually
has imperatives such as “Give”, “Cook”, “Play” to gain and achieve what the child wants. As they
older the regulatory functions are achieved through vague, expressions such as “If its okay” and
by modality such as “May”, “could”,” can”. However, in the early age it isn’t common as modality
are usually absent in their utterances.

Further, there is personal function. As the name suggests this is used to convey personal opinion,
emotion, thoughts. As the child learns more language, they learn not only to speak for basic
needs but their opinion on a topic or an idea. Humans are social animals who express beyond. As
a research carried out on Nim chimpsky a subject of animal language acquisition where a
chimpanzee was taught to make different responses to different sequences of signs and to emit
different sequences in order to communicate different meaning but the results showed that Nim
only used these signs only as a way to obtain an outcome which is unlike human child where
they use language to express meanings, thoughts and ideas. Few examples are “I love butterfly” ,”
Beautiful cat” , “Hate mommy”

Also, there is Heuristic function where the child asks and bombards with question. Its where they
are more aware of the surroundings and give more attention to something outside of their circle
and they show fewer egocentric behaviors. They use many why questions such as “Why are
apples red”. Its when they start to gain critical thinking skills and wants to find out why hence
their reasoning skills develop as they utilize these functions.

There is representational function. The child tried to convey information which they noticed in
their sounding world. Such as “did you know that cats bite?” “Daddy ate blueberries today.”

Lastly there is Imaginative function. This is when the cognitive boundaries go beyond their
surrounding and into their own world, an abstract world where they start to imagine. They use
this language which shows something out of normal day life such as “I am a train(.) CHOO (.)
CHOO.” Where they pretend to be something/someone or transform the world into what is in
their mind.

There are main four branches of theories of child language acquisition.

First is the behaviorist theory by BF skinner. This theory was proposed saying that interaction is
the key to the child language development which is seen when a child imitates the mother’s
words and lexis. He also states that the learning of the language depends on the reinforcement,
where the caretaker corrects the child’s incorrect utterances, and on the reaction of the caretaker
to the child. This is where he proposed the Operant conditioning which consists of positive feed
back and a negative feedback. The positive feed back would be a reward to the child on the
correct use of language which would further on encourage the child to speak and develop while
the negative feed back would be the punishment where the child is again propelled to speak
correctly.

He also carried out a research on a rat where a rat was put into a maize and later rat found a
button. When it was pressed the rat would receive food which was its reward. Therefore,
whenever the rat was put into the same maize the rat would go and press the button. However,
later the food (reward) was not given in another experiment despite the button was pressed, the
mice then stopped pressing the button. This was a punishment. This experiment supports the
operant conditioning as the mice responded accordingly to the punishment and the reward and
mice and human brain are similar.

Despite the experiment there are few limitations in this theory as not all children imitate the
grammatical mistakes of the parents. As it is seen in David Crystal’s stages of language
acquisition, children, no matter their nationality, go through a similar stages of language
development when their interaction is all different. Further there are variety of sentence structure
and not all of them are spoken by the caretaker. Also, the children do overextensions and show
virtuous error stating that there are certain rules they follow. This is shown by an experiment of
Jean Berko where Berko showed a imaginary picture of a “wug” to the children and then showed
two of them and the children said “Wugs”.

Then there is a nativist theory of Noam Chomsky. It can be seen as the opposite of Skinner’s
theory as he sates that every child is born with an innate ability to speak language and he
proposed the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) which are something a children are born with.
As opposite to behaviorist theory, the opposing points support the nativist theory where children
show development of their own grammar and do virtuous errors.

However, Nativist theory also have limitations. It is seen in a case study of Jim; he is a normal
child of a two deaf parents and he had no interaction between his parents. Even though they
showed him TV programs he still could not speak the language appropriate for his age. Later he
conversed one to one with an adult and he immediately showed an improvement. His younger
brother Glen did not have any problem as he later had his brother as an interaction partner.

This suggest that environmental factors do play a significant role in child language acquisition.

Then there is a Constructive theory by Jerome Bruner which can be seen as the middle ground for
the two theories above. He states that the children have LAD, but they also need a social factor to
develop their language. Here he proposed the Language acquisition support system (LASS) which
are the elements and interactions which aid the child to develop language which is also called
scaffolding. In scaffolding there are roles of the caretaker such as using infant directed speech,
parenthesis, singing songs, reinforcement. Etc.

There is a Russian psychologist Vygotsky who also discussed about the constructive theory stating
that there is three particular areas in child language acquisition. One is an area where the child
can learn without any aid while there is an area where child can not learn by his/her self and in
the middle of these two areas there is a zone of proximal development where it the other end is
achieved by scaffolding and support by the caretaker.

He also proposes a mode of representations. First is an active representation where the child first
learns through action which is from age from 0-1years. Then there is iconic mode of
representation and the child learns from images, diagrams which is from 1-6 years. Then there is
mode of symbolic representation from 7 to 8 learning from languages.

Lastly there is cognitive development theory by jean Paige stating that cognitive development
comes first which is then followed by development of language. He states four stages of cognitive
development and development of languages according to them. First there is sensory motor
stage from 0-18 month where the child learns about the world through senses and learns things
in the child’s immediate environment. Then there is preoperational stage from 18 month to 6
years where the child learns the basic symbol of things and overextensions and under extensions
are common. Further they are egocentric at this age.

Later there is concrete operational stage from age 7-11 years where the children relate
themselves to the real world and start to reason.

Lastly there is Formal operational stage where the child understand abstract ideas which they can
not physically see.