Child Language Acquisition

-Able to recognise native language

-Able to recognise mothers voice

-Mehler discovered that babies as young as 4 days old could recognise french from other languages (they sucked their dummies harder)

-Express self by crying

-Different types of cry

-Crying helps the baby to learn how to control their airstream.

-Able to make open mouth vowel sounds e.g coo

-Experiment with different vocal sounds

-Vowels and consonants

-Change pitch to express feelings

-Child starts to make noises resembling adult language.

-Repeat sounds (reduplications)

-Add extra syllbales (additions)

-Variegated Babbling- excersise mouth and tongue

-Phonemic expansion- reduction in phonemes

-Utterences rather than questions

-Ignore what speakers say

-Use language for social interactions

-Holophrases are utterences as a simple naming device

-single word utterences-one word stage

-60% of a childs first words will be concrete nouns

-Katherine Nelson discovered these are usually hand held objects.

-underextension- restricts meaning and application of word

-overextension- using the word Dog to refer to all four legged animals.

-Begin to put words together

-Most utterences consist of two words e.g more juice

-Most sentences are grammatically correct

Utterences are 2-5 words in length

-Described as telegraphic due to the similarity to telegrams

-Contain key content words (nouns and verbs) but omit function words and determiners

-Start to acquire questions

-Function words begin to appear more clearly

-Sentences with more than one clause start to appear and coordinating conjunctions are used

-There is still non-fluency

-Negatives are used e.g can't

-Inflections