Chapter 6
Child language acquisition
Children’s language comprehension skills generally outpace their producton abilitess so
relying on children’s verbal output alone provides only partal picture of acquisiton process.
In collectng and analysings strife for naturalness and representatveness.
Parental diaries: parent’s detailed descripton of children’s language development.
(Leopold bilingual language acquisitonn. – one observers one child. Only uterances
and behaviour measured around the analysing parent. Errors and omissions in
transcriptss out-of-the ordinary samples. Not representatve but high in naturalness.
Observational studies: audio/video recording and transcribe speech to understand
how they learned to comprehend and produce basic English sentence structures.
Interacton in natural context regularly and over extended period. Language
socializaton practces which uncover how children are socialized into culturally
appropriate language behaviour and how linguistc competence developss with
emphasis on how paterns of interacton and parents’ ideologies about language vary
cross-culturally. Longitudinal (long-termn and cross-sectonal (language behaviour of
partcipants from at least 2 diferent groupsn. – tme intensives small number
partcipants. But the data is natural and representatve.
Experimental studies: tend to have narrowly defned research questons and use
more controlled methods of collectng data (e.g. HASPn. Less data overall from each
partcipant but greater number. Less naturalistc but higher chance of accuracy. High
Amplitude Sucking Paradigm (HASPn = sucking increases seen as evidence that child
has detected new sound and can thus discriminate between sounds. WUG test is
elicit producton. Also used is truth-value judgement task (children’s early language
abilitesn.
Children follow similar development path with same order but age is variable. Speech
perception, during frst years = ability to segment speech streams into meaningful unitss
recognize namess distnguish similar sounding vowels etc. are critcal. They also involve visual
informaton. Early speech percepton skills related to sound structure of language may help
bootstrap (= possibility that skills in one area of language help child to develop competences
in other language areasn into more complex language competencies. Infants born with
capacity to learn any languages but capacity to hear like natve fades early on.
First sound is crying.
- 2-5 Month = cooing (vowel like sounds interpreted as pleasure or playfulnessn
- 4-6 Month = babble (vowel or consonant-vowel soundss ofen palatals and labial. It is
innate and unconscious but also interactve and social. Deaf children do it and if
taught gesture also gesture babblingn.
- 6-10 Month = Babbling begins to conform to sound paterns of adult’s language.
- 5th Month = imitate simple sound sequences. Proto conversations = engaging in give-
and-take exchange.
- 12 Month = Holophrastic stages starts with frst words begin assign specifc meaning
to sounds they produce. One-word sentences. No evidence that learning to
languages causes delay. Ofen content words rather than function words. While
working on vocabularys children ofen engage in semantc overextension and under
extension.
Child language acquisition
Children’s language comprehension skills generally outpace their producton abilitess so
relying on children’s verbal output alone provides only partal picture of acquisiton process.
In collectng and analysings strife for naturalness and representatveness.
Parental diaries: parent’s detailed descripton of children’s language development.
(Leopold bilingual language acquisitonn. – one observers one child. Only uterances
and behaviour measured around the analysing parent. Errors and omissions in
transcriptss out-of-the ordinary samples. Not representatve but high in naturalness.
Observational studies: audio/video recording and transcribe speech to understand
how they learned to comprehend and produce basic English sentence structures.
Interacton in natural context regularly and over extended period. Language
socializaton practces which uncover how children are socialized into culturally
appropriate language behaviour and how linguistc competence developss with
emphasis on how paterns of interacton and parents’ ideologies about language vary
cross-culturally. Longitudinal (long-termn and cross-sectonal (language behaviour of
partcipants from at least 2 diferent groupsn. – tme intensives small number
partcipants. But the data is natural and representatve.
Experimental studies: tend to have narrowly defned research questons and use
more controlled methods of collectng data (e.g. HASPn. Less data overall from each
partcipant but greater number. Less naturalistc but higher chance of accuracy. High
Amplitude Sucking Paradigm (HASPn = sucking increases seen as evidence that child
has detected new sound and can thus discriminate between sounds. WUG test is
elicit producton. Also used is truth-value judgement task (children’s early language
abilitesn.
Children follow similar development path with same order but age is variable. Speech
perception, during frst years = ability to segment speech streams into meaningful unitss
recognize namess distnguish similar sounding vowels etc. are critcal. They also involve visual
informaton. Early speech percepton skills related to sound structure of language may help
bootstrap (= possibility that skills in one area of language help child to develop competences
in other language areasn into more complex language competencies. Infants born with
capacity to learn any languages but capacity to hear like natve fades early on.
First sound is crying.
- 2-5 Month = cooing (vowel like sounds interpreted as pleasure or playfulnessn
- 4-6 Month = babble (vowel or consonant-vowel soundss ofen palatals and labial. It is
innate and unconscious but also interactve and social. Deaf children do it and if
taught gesture also gesture babblingn.
- 6-10 Month = Babbling begins to conform to sound paterns of adult’s language.
- 5th Month = imitate simple sound sequences. Proto conversations = engaging in give-
and-take exchange.
- 12 Month = Holophrastic stages starts with frst words begin assign specifc meaning
to sounds they produce. One-word sentences. No evidence that learning to
languages causes delay. Ofen content words rather than function words. While
working on vocabularys children ofen engage in semantc overextension and under
extension.
