Child Language Acquisition

Deletion- Children will often simplify pronouniciation by deleting certain sounds such as final consonants, unstressed syllables and consonant clusters are soemtimes reduced. 

Substitution- Another form of simplification involves substituting harder sounds with easier ones, r becomes w, th becomes d, n or f, t becomes d and p becomes b.

Reduplication- Different sounds in a word are pronounced the same way such as 'dog' becoming 'gog'.

Child referred to a plastic fish as his 'fis'. When an adult asked is that your fis? he replied 'No, my fis'. When he was asked if that was his fish, he replied 'yes, my fis'. 

One word stage / Holophrastic stage: Roughly between 12 and 18 months children begin to speak in single word utterances such as 'milk', 'mummy'. These words are called Holophrases. 

Two word stage: Two word sentences usually appear from 18 months onwards. Usually two words in a grammatical sequence such as subject+verb, verb+object, subject+complement.

Telegraphic stage: From about two children produce three and four word utternaces. Some will be grammatically incorrect still.

Post- telegraphic stage: When the child can produce logical sentences which are grammatically correct. 

A child's first 50 words can be classed as Naming Things, Actions / Events, Personal / Social and Modifiers. 60% of those first words involve naming things.

Presented a child with a strange looking animal called a wug. Child has never seen this before or heard the name. The researcher called it a wug and then showed the child a picture of two wugs and said 'Two..?'. If the child had learned plurals with -s ending, then the child would say two wugs. This proves children don't just learn plurals off by heart, there is a rule they internalise and use. 

Chomsky's view is that the human faculty of language is innate and that humans are born with a set of language learning tools referred to as the LAD. Chomsky proposed that for a child to acquire a language, sufficient innate language-specific knowledge is needed. This was later termed as universal grammar. It is suggested all humans have a set of limited rules for grammar that are universal to all natural human languages. 

Skinner viewed babies as 'empty vessels' which language had to be 'put in to'. Operant conditioning - child goes through trial-and-error in other words they try and fail to use correct language until successful; with reinforcement and shaping provided by the parents gestures which are pleasant to the child.

Piaget claimed it is cognition rather than language which develops in stages. Without this cognition, language cannot develop and a child cannot linguistically articulate concepts they do not understand. There is evidence which challenges this as a child's mental development may be delayed but they are still able to speak fluently.

Theorists believe in the value of interaction, especially between caregiver and child. Parents often speak extra slowly and carefully to their children, they build on what their child says, introduce new words and often relate them to the environment. Some children whose caregivers don't adapt their speech still develop at the same rate. 

Language is a social concept that is developed through social interactions. Language acquisition involves not only a childs exposure to words but also an interdependent process of growth between thought and language. By interacting with his environment, a child develops the ability to develop speech. 

He rejects the idea of an innate universal grammar and instead proposes a functional theory of language development in which children learn linguistic structures through intention-reading and pattern-finding in their discourse interactions with others. 

- adjacency pairs

- Concrete/Abstract nouns

- Stage they're at

- Declaratives/Interrogatives

- Virtuous error such as consonant cluster or reduction 

- Subject verb order