Early acquisition
What are virtuous errors?
Errors in language production which show that the process of language acquisition is not dependent on the environmental factors only. (over-application of grammar rules - irregular plural and past forms)
What is the characteristic of the holophrastic stage?
Single word utterances (holophrases) - ‘one word = one sentence’.
What is: 1 back-channeling; 2 tag question?
1 reassuring sounds produced by a listener; yeah, mhm, right; 2 questions which are meant to prompt a response.
What does MKO stand for and what is it?
A 'more knowledgeable other' (MKO) who may be a parent sibling or any person with more understanding than the child in context - who can model language for the child, and who will usually instinctively operate within what he called the 'zone of proximal development' - they instinctively work a little bit ahead of the child, not using language that is completely out of their reach, but instead showing them the 'next step'.
What does the ‘Fɪs phenomenon’ prove?
This is evidence that children’s perceptual abilities are often in advance of their productive abilities.
What are the four categories of early vocabulary according to Catherine Nelson?
Naming (labeling objects and people - ‘mama’, ‘toy’), action (describing action - ‘go’, ‘give’), modifying (used for describing/commenting - ‘no’, ‘nice’, ‘good’), social (social/personal function - ‘bye-bye’, ‘hi’, ‘thank you’)
What are the characteristics of post-telegraphic stage?
Children use more complex sentences in terms of vocabulary and grammar; addition of function words (articles, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns: introduction of affixes (cat -> cats); they begin to distinguish hypernyms (words for categories, e.g. animals) and hyponyms (words within those categories, e.g. cat, dog); virtuous errors
What is: 1 elision; 2 ellipses?
1 omission of sounds/syllables; 2 omission of words; characterized by the use of three dots in writing, and silence in speaking
What is nativism and who are its representatives?
Noam Chomsky theorised that language is a human-specific trait. He suggested that the human brain has an innate ability to learn language – a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) – which allows children to develop language skills.
What does ZPD stand for and what is it?
Zone of Proximal Development: The area between what a child can already do and that which is beyond their reach – it is where the MKO enables the child to progress by offering the necessary support through scaffolding.
What is the difference between expressive and referential children?
Referential - naming words (most children); individual differences (‘park’, ‘bus’; ‘shell’, ‘sea’); expressive - social and modifying words.
What is critical period in CLA and who proposed it?
Begins at the age of 2, ends during puberty; language must be acquired during the critical period if it is to be acquired at all. Eric Lenneberg.
What is modality?
Different opinions/compromises through the use of modal verbs; may, might, could, should.
What is cognitivism and who are its representatives?
The originator and most important cognitive theorist, Jean Piaget (1896–1980), claimed that a child was not a miniature adult in their thinking, but went through stages of increasingly complex mental development alongside their language development. Lev Vygotsky was another cognitive theorist who emphasised the social element of learning.
What are the stages of negation development and who proposed them?
Ursula Bellugi:
1) Uses ‘no’ or ‘not’ at the beginning or end of the sentence; 2) Puts ‘no’ or ‘not’ inside the sentence; 3) Attaches negatives to auxiliary verbs.
Explain the following Halliday's functions of language: 1 representational; 2 interactional; 3 regulatory; 4 heuristic.
1 to provide and request information; 2 to develop relationships; 3 to control others; 4 to discover and explore.
What are the characteristics of the telegraphic stage?
Stringing more than 2 elements together; introduction of content/lexical words (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, main verbs); the word order is usually straightforward with subject and verb though often omitting the auxiliary words.
What do we call pointers for spatial and temporal orientation?
Deixis
What is behaviorism and who are its representatives?
According to the psychologist B. F. Skinner (1957), language is acquired by conditioning. Conditioning is process whereby the child imitates the sounds around them, receives praise and approval (good girl; that’s a clever boy) which encourages them to repeat and develop language.
What are the stages of question development and who proposed them?
Brown: 1) Only prosodic features (rising intonation); 2) Interrogative pronouns (wh- words, such as when, where, what, how) are used at the start of sentences: ‘where baby…?’; 3) Syntactic inversion of the auxiliary verb (can, is, did)
What is three-stage model of learning meaning according to Jean Aitchison?
Labelling: learning to name objects, processes and ideas; packaging: testing the limits of terms (over/underextension); networks: noticing the relationship between categories (fruit > apple > Red Delicious).
What is the Berko wug test and what does it prove?
A child is presented with an imaginary object and is told, ‘This is a wug’. Then a second instance is presented, and the child is asked what the two are called. The correct answer is wugs. Children as young as three or four can internalize complex grammatical codes that no one has necessarily ever tried to teach them.
What are prosodic features?
Patterns of stress and intonation (tone, pitch, volume, speed)
What is social interactionism and who are its representatives?
Conceptualised by Jerome Bruner who came up with the idea of the Language Acquisition Support System (LASS), claiming that the Chomsky's LAD needs a LASS to make it work correctly.
What is conversational recast?
A conversational recast is a way of correcting mistakes in which the adult repeats some or all of the child's words and adds new information while maintaining the basic meaning expressed by the child.