Language Theorists

• compared adults and children to see if they could predict football results based on the intonation of the newsreader
• found that adults could successfully predit them, whereas children under 7 were less accurate and struggled with pridicting
• this showed that understanding intonation develops as we age

• Nativist theory, suggesting we have an innate brain mechanism (pre-programmed) with the ability to aquire grammatical structures
  • LAD- Language Aquisition Device
• Although human languages differ, we all share similarities
  • universal grammer
• Support:
  • Children around the world develop at similar rates in similar stages
  • All aquire complex grammatical structures by early age, no matter environment/intelligence which supports innate LAD
    • acutal nature not pinpointed

• 33 pregnant women recited the same speech passage out loud each day during their last three weeks of pregnancy
• 16 of the newborns were tested to determine whether sounds of the recited passage or a novel passage were more reinforcing
• found the previously recited passage was more reinforcing
  • found 3rd trimester fetuses experienced mother's speech sounds and prenatal auditory experiences can influence postnatal auditory prefernece

• Babies who were exposed to muliple languages at a young age, expereinced less phonemic contraction than those who were exposed to fewer languages.  
• they were more able to pick out sounds of different langages as they got older, if they were exposed to different languages for the first 9 months of their life. 

• Found babbling mainly comes from the right hand side of the mouth, which is controlled by the left hand side of the brain.
• They studied videod infancts and noticed this
• the left hand side of the brain is also responsible for speech production 
• findings suggest babbling is a form of preliminary speech

• Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH)
• Children have certain amount of time to aquire language- between the age of 2 and 13
• Genie Wiley: 
  • spent 13 years (entire childhood) locked in room, isolated and abused with no social interations - whenerv she made a noise, her father would beat her, her family rarely spoke to her and on the rare occasions her father spoke, it was to bark or growl.
  • Nationsl Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) sought out to help genie develop
  • her inability to use language meant she scored about the age of a 1 year old in mental abilites
  • made rapid progression in some areas but remained poor in language
  • could communicate non-verbally 
  • with help, she started to develop new vocabulary but never experienced "language explosion" (satge when children rapidly aquire new words)
  • however still unable to apply grammatical structures and use language in meaninful way

3 stages of development:

1. children memorise words on individual basis

2. awarenes to rules of inflections form- observe past tense forms usually end in -ed, therefore overgeneralise the rule 

• e.g. using "runned" instead of "ran"

3. correct inflections are used