This document contains class notes on language learning in early childhood. It discusses several topics: 1. How children acquire their first words and begin combining them into sentences from ages 1-2, and the theories around language acquisition including behaviorism, interactionism, and innatism. 2. Potential language impairments like aphasia and dyslexia. 3. Theories of language development stages in early childhood including imitation, interaction with caregivers, and innate language acquisition devices. 4. Milestones in language comprehension and production from babbling to first words to combining words and basic grammar by age 4. 5. The continued expansion of language and development of reading/writing skills through primary

1. Class Notes by Camila Roldán
Practice II – Class 21st
August, 2014
How languages are learnt
Chapter 1: Language learning in early childhood
• What enables a child to learn words and then put them together in meaningful
sentences?
• What pushes them to develop complex grammar structures?
• How do bilingual children acquire more than one language?
In the brain until the age of ten, people learn languages together; when you reach
puberty you learn languages like in compartments. (Lateralization) Certain tasks are
performed with the left hemisphere and others with the right one.
Aphasia is an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of
speech and the ability to read or write. Aphasia is always due to injury to the brain-most
commonly from a stroke, particularly in older individuals.
Dyslexia is the name for specific learning disabilities in reading which are
neurological and often genetic. It is often characterized by difficulties with accurate word
recognition, decoding and spelling. Dyslexia may cause problems with reading
comprehension and slow down vocabulary growth. Dyslexia may result in poor reading
fluency and reading out loud.
• Does child language develop similarly around the world? Yes.
• Imitation → behaviourism ( Skinner)
• Interaction with their mothers → Interaction ( Bruner)
• Language acquisition device → Innatism (Chomsky)
Critical Age period – Hypothesis (CAPH)
Input triggers → language acquisition device
Developmental sequences for language acquisition
• First months: vocalization.
• First year: They understand frequently repeated words: bye bye, juice and
cookies, they clap when they hear something they like.
• 12 months: they produce one word utterances
• 1st
-2nd
year: produce around 50 words. They star combining them: mummy
juice, baby fall down.
• Telegraphic speech: only content words, there are no function words or
grammatical morphemes.

2. Class Notes by Camila Roldán
Comprehension precedes production
Vygotsky → thinking develops thanks to language.
3- year old children
• Do not use temporal adverbs such as tomorrow last week.
• Language acquisition= children's cognitive development
• First they understan plurals then they produce them
• Mastering irregular....
Grammatical morphemes
Brown, Roger (1973), LONGITUDINAL STUDIES
Order of acquisition of morphemes:
• Present progressive -ing (Mommy running).
• Plurals: -s (two books)
• Irregular past forms (Baby went)
• Possessive's (Daddy's cat)
• Copula (Annie is happy)
• Articles the a
• Regular past -ed
• Third person singular simple present (She runs)
• Auxiliary BE (He is coming).
Interlanguage (Selinker, 1982)
L1 L2 (target)
interim grammars → Errors
Cross-sectional studies
• The morphemes can be acquires at different ages, but the order is the same.
RATE/ROUTE
• Experiments to prove the acquisition of plurals and regular simple past in English.
Bigthink
Negation
Stage 1: No. No cookie. No comb hair
.
Stage 2:
Daddy no comb hair.
Don't touch that!
Stage 3:

3. Class Notes by Camila Roldán
I can't do it. He don't want it.
Stage 4:
You didn't have supper. She doesn't want it.
I don't have no more candies.
Questions
Predicable order of wh words appearance: (Bloom 1991)
1. What
2. Who
3. When & Where
4. Why
Stages in Questions
Stage 1: Cokkie?
Stage 2: you like this?
Stage 3: can I go?
Is the tired is tired?
Stage 4: Are you going to play with me? Do you like ice-cream?
The pre-school years:
What can children do by age 4?
• Give commands
• Report real events
• Create stories out f their imagination
• Use correct word order and grammatical markers most of the time.
• 3 and 4 year olds continue learning vocabulary at a rate of several words a day.
• They acquire less frequent and ore complex linguistic forms such as passives and
relative clauses (late structures).
• They use language in a wider social environment / greater variety of situations/ start
interacting with unfamiliar adults.
What else can they do?
• Start using language to defend themselves/ their toys.
• Talk on the telephone to invisible grandparents.
• Pretend to use different voices like in a play.
• Start developing METALINGUISTIC AWARENESS (they notice language that does
not make sense)
The school years:
• The ability to express themselves expands and grows.
• Seeing words represented as SYMBOLS and LETTERS expands their

4. Class Notes by Camila Roldán
understanding of LANGUAGE.
• They develop READING and WRITING.
• They discover the ambiguity of language. Language can have multiple meanings.
• Astonishing VOCABULARY growth.
• Reading a variety of text types helps that acquisition of LEXIS (Dee Gardner, 2004)
Acquisition is unconscious (whether you like it or not), whereas learning is a conscious
process (and systematic- rules).
And more:
• Acquisition of different language registers. From the ethnic or regional variety they
speak at home to the standard variety required by school.
• Some children are bilingual and come to school with a different language.
INPUT → roughly tuned (authentic use of language)
→ finely tuned (artificial, easier, children do not learn much)
ERRORS → motherese
Videos:
1. The four stages in acquiring language
a) “Babbling” one-syllable sounds (4 months old)
b) Single word
c) Two-word combination
d) Sentences
2. Baby arguing with Father (15 months old)
3. Small group oral language sample for early childhood education
- Discovery learning
4. Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada on How languages are learned (1 of 3)
Homework/practice= Language Learning in early childhood: page 13
1) Lightbrown and Spada. Answer the questions page 13. (Mid-term)
2) How children learn languages- Chapter 2 (page 31) – Brewster (Mid-term)
3) Oral presentations → September 2nd
Group 1: Chapter 1 Cameron. Up to 1.3 Vigotsky. Add a video
Group 2: Chapter 1 Cameron. 1.4 Bruner, plus video. Until the end of that chapter.
Group 3: Jayne Moon, Chapter 1. Children learning English
Group 4: Chapter 3. Are they the same?
Group 5: Piaget's stages of development
Second Parcial:

5. Class Notes by Camila Roldán
Module 5: Planning, Syllabus and textbooks.
Module 4: Classroom Management.
Module 2: topics until Tuesday.

6. Class Notes by Camila Roldán
Module 5: Planning, Syllabus and textbooks.
Module 4: Classroom Management.
Module 2: topics until Tuesday.