CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

INTRODUCTION

 The problems facing the child

 The importance of language in our everyday lives
 The sorts of topics we’re going to be looking at
 Stages of child language acquisition
 Comprehension vs. Production

It is really difficult for a child to identify where one word ends and the other begins. Children
work things out using cognition knowledge and the contexts (i.e. making relations) (e.g.
signal of pedestrian crossing) but sometimes it is hard to work out the meaning through
context (e.g. signal of caution warning).

What information has a child to decode?

Firstly, the passer-by has uttered a string of words so the child has to distinguish the speech
from other background or surrounding noise (identify speech signals). Then, he has to split
the discourse up (words, syllables) and be aware about the existence of different languages,
he has to identify the code he has been raised with. After he has marched this ‘noise’ with
the sounds of the English language and broken the string down into words, he retrieves the
meanings for these words and relates this to the immediate circumstances.

Nonetheless it is harder than it seems since it is extremely difficult to segment the words
even in your own language so how does a child manage to do it?

Importance of language

Language is part of our daily life since we get up and until we go to bed and it does not only
consist of speaking but also of reading, writing and listening. However, rarely do we stop
and think about all the processes that are going on when we use language in our daily lives.

The ‘internal’ psychological and neurological mechanisms involved may become more
obvious in cases like ‘tip of the tongue’ and other times it goes wrong.
The social and cultural knowledge you constantly use and reflect upon when using language

Why consider Child Language Acquisition?

It is of interest to many different subject disciplines

It is useful to discover:

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  How amazing children are! To explain the fantastic ability we all share
(psychologists / linguists / sociologists)
 How language is structure (linguistics)
 It can tell us about how knowledge is acquired more generally (psychologists /
philosophers)
 Help us understand language disorders (medicine / SLT)
 To become language teachers, care workers, speech and language therapists

Children don’t seem to wait until they are born to acquire some knowledge about language.
At birth, children prefer their mother’s voice of other female’s voices. They prefer the
languages of their parents over other languages. They are able to recognize than an English
sentence is not the same as a French sentence.

Stages of language development

1. Crying: they can signal that something is wrong to their caregivers, thus
communicating a problem. They learn how to activate their vocal tracts, they
practice using their vocal apparatus as well as breathing control.
2. Cooing: it is a pleasurable activity for the baby, not used to communicate a problem;
instead a relationship is being built. Good practice of forming lips, controlling tongue
and other speech organs.
3. Babbling: the child is trying to make words but he can’t put together syllables so he
keeps repeating just one syllable. It involves more complex patterns of sounds, the
first semblance of a unit of language (consonant + vowel sound). The child starts to
make sounds of the language he is going to speak; therefore, babbling differs
depending on the target language. Deaf children start to develop different at this
stage.
4. First word: learned by echoing, mimicking what they’ve heard. Content words rather
than function words (grammatical words) are used. Words may not exist in adult
English. Up until 18 months, words are learned slowly. Then there is an explosion of
new words learning.
5. Two and three word: not simply repeating or approximating to adults but clearly
understanding the meaning. Beginning to develop syntactic constructions, full
sentences are used and the child understands what he is producing. Mainly content
words, function words come later but they are now understood. Little to no
inflections used.
6. Multiword stage: use increasingly complex grammar. Keeps on learning new words
as well. Errors are made (but many are systematic), but these are crucial in their
language development.

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Comprehension vs. Production

Comprehension develops before production. This can be tested via various comprehension
tests.

Examining language acquisition

We will be looking at theories of nature vs. nurture:

 Do children learn languages in the way they do because of any ‘pre-programming’,
or purely from their experiences/teaching?
 What is the evidence for and against these theories?
 Examples of wild children

Investigating child language

Famous examples from history:

 Charles Darwin (1877): pioneered a diary technique
 Clara and Wilhelm Stern (1907): also pioneered a diary technique to observe in detail
how children acquired a language
 Leopold four volume account of bilingualism (1939)

Observing and recording natural behaviour

Others have trained mothers to keep diaries
Experimental studies

So as well as the ‘what’, and the ‘when’, we’ll also be looking at the ‘how’ and ‘why’
 What is learned – features of language
 When is this learnt – typical stages of language development
 How is it learned – what processing strategies seem to be going on?
 Why is it learnt this way and not others?

Terminology

 Phonology
 Morphology
 Lexicon
 Syntax
 Sociolinguistics
 Pragmatics
 Discourse