Child Language Acquisition Brief Notes

Child language revision:

Main stages of language development

Holophrastic – one-word utterances

Two – words: two-word combinations

Telegraphic – three or more words combines

Post – telegraphic – more grammatically complex combined

Cursive handwriting- handwriting is joined in rounded and flowing strokes

·         Convergence- a process of linguistic change in which people adjust their dialect, accent or speech style to others

·         Orthography- the study of the use of letters and the rules of spelling in a language

·         Emergent writing- children’s early scribble

·         Ascender- where a portion of the letter goes above the usual height for letters

·         Descender- where a part of a letter goes below the baseline of a font

·         Diagraph – a graphic unit in which two symbols combine to produce a single sound

·         Homophone- a lexical item that has the same pronunciation as another but a different meaning/ spelling

·         Imperatives- grammatical mood that forms commands or requests

·         Negation- the opposite of something

·         Holophrases – one word to indicate greater meaning ‘drink’ could mean I want drink

·         Pitch: degree of highness or lowness of tone

·         Deletion- dropping unstressed syllables, consonants, clusters

·         Substitution- substituting easier phonemes for more difficult ones

·         Reduplication- different phonemes are pronounced in the same way

·         Filler/ filler pause : ‘mm’

·         Backchannel behaviour: noise the listener makes in the background as response to what speaker is saying ‘yeah’, ‘mm’

·         Marker of sympathetic circularity: function of checking if the person is still with you: ‘don’t you know’

·         Tag questions: ‘didn’t she?’, ‘aren’t you?’

·         Discourse markers: particular verbs and phrases used to mark boundaries in conversation between one topic and the next ‘ANYWAY, let’s wait for Henna to ring up’

·         Interrogative and imperative: interrogatives are usually followed by a question ‘ can you help me with this’, imperatives uses the verb in a simple form, or they add do or don’t , ‘ don’t touch that’

·         Ellipsis: speaker leaves out some parts as they think the person already knows what they mean ‘are you…’

·         Modal expressions: words or phrases that indicate the attitude of the speaker towards the situation they’re describing ‘ I suppose it must be sort of hard or whatever’

·         Semantic field: other words related by meaning , satan, god

·         Jargon: if you’re a doctor, x-ray, medicine

·         Declarative sentences: following structure, often used to make statements about facts , ‘glass drink bottles are prohibited’

·         Transactional:  language used to pass on information, ‘it’s miserable weather in June’ , used as ice breaker instead of information to pass on

·         Phatic talk: referring to the social, rather than the message, aspect of communication

·         First/ second person pronoun: I/Me, you

·         Active voice: ‘you should pay for it’

·         Passive: it should be…