Language Acquisition

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Copyright © 2009 www.englishteaching.co.uk + www.english-teaching.co.uk
English Language
Unit 1, Section B:
Language Acquisition.
1

SOURCES
 Whisper it quietly, but the power of language may all be in the
genes
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/oct/07/research.highereducation
--------------------------------------------------------------
 A baby’s babble leads to language
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3077446/
--------------------------------------------------------------
 Parenting: Baby talk — that’s saying something
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article717007.ece
--------------------------------------------------------------
 Genie - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWzO8DtRd-
s&feature=related
2

English Language
Pre-verbal: 0-12 months
LO: To understand the pre-verbal stages of child language acquisition.
To research some of the key theorists from the child language acquisition unit.
3

CONVERSATION WITHOUT
WORDS
Babies’ hand movements, facial expressions,
voice tone and lip movements are different when their
mothers are talking to them.
Mothers then respond to babies gestures as
if they are real conversational partners. This is called
turn-taking, as the baby and mother are taking turns in
conversation. If a baby points, it’s like saying ‘Look at
that!’; therefore, it’s important that the parent responds.
Turn-taking then transfers into language
between the child and parent (child-directed speech is
used).
4

pre-verbal: refers to anything that the baby does or says before
meaningful words are used.
non-vocal: refers to behaviour that does not involve voice.
vocalisations: refer to sounds made using the voice but which cannot be
described as words.
1.turn-taking
2.pointing
3.daily routines
Main Points:
- Gaze, pointing, turn-taking and routines are all important in the developing
language in the pre-verbal stages.
- Crying allows babies to recognise the importance of language and
communication.
- biological noises  cooing and laughing  vocal play  babbling proto-word
5

] Task:
1. In pairs, brainstorm routines that parents
and baby might share during a day.
2. For each one suggest baby activities that
might count as responses for the parent
(i.e. crying during nappy-changing might
be seen as the baby objecting).
6

Task
 Read the article ‘A baby’s babble leads to language’ and complete the questions
below:
1. What was the hypothesis for the experiment?
2. What did the researchers conclude?
3. Which theory is this article supporting?
4. Check yourself in the mirror. Do you notice any lopsidedness?
Easy
Difficult
stopped sounds: where air is
momentarily stopped from being
released (‘p’) (aspiration)
reduplication: where the same vowel-
consonant combination is repeated (da
da)
variegated babbling: as above except
that the vowel sound changes (da de)
consonant cluster: where a number of
consonants are combined, as in /fr/
friction sounds: where there is vibration
whilst air is released (the ‘s’ in
pleasure)
Babbling
7

Key theorists
Research the following
Theorists (briefly, as I
will
go over them):
Chall Kroll
Piaget Skinner
Bruner
What do they argue?
8

English Language
Thursday 5th November 2015
A Child’s Introduction to English Language
9

OBJECTIVES
1. To look at how children develop their understanding and use of
spoken English up to the age of about five.
2. To explore some of the main theories that try to explain how this
happens.
3. To analyse real examples of child language data.
10

TRUE OR FALSE?
 At around 18 months, a child learns about 10 words a day.
 Deaf children exposed to sign language show the same stages of language acquisition, as do hearing children
exposed to spoken languages.
 If a person develops his/her language after puberty, he/she will never be able to fully acquire language.
 Sixty percent of a child’s first 50 words are adjectives.
 Children at the age of 18 months will have a productive vocabulary of around 50 words.
 A child’s first recognisable word usually appears at the age of 5 months.
 A child understands more words than he/she can speak.
 A child’s language development is only affected by his/her social environment.
 During Stage 1 (18-30 months) of a child’s language development, he or she can use the subject + verb + object
sentence structure.
 The average 17 year old person knows about 20,000 words.
 If you expose a baby to two languages at the same time, he/she will learn both.
11

TRUE OR FALSE?
 At around 18 months, a child learns about 10 words a day.
 Deaf children exposed to sign language show the same stages of language acquisition, as do hearing children
exposed to spoken languages.
 If a person develops his/her language after puberty, he/she will never be able to fully acquire language.
 Sixty percent of a child’s first 50 words are adjectives. nouns
 Children at the age of 18 months will have a productive vocabulary of around 50 words.
 A child’s first recognisable word usually appears at the age of 5 months. 12 months
 A child understands more words than he/she can speak.
 A child’s language development is only affected by his/her social environment. genetics are also a factor
 During Stage 1 (18-30 months) of a child’s language development, he or she can use the subject + verb + object
sentence structure.
 The average 17 year old person knows about 20,000 words. 60,000
 If you expose a baby to two languages at the same time, he/she will learn both.
12

THEORISTS
Behaviourists believe… language is developed through
imitating others’ language and
gaining positive and negative
feedback from adults.
Social Interactionists believe… children’s early language can be
influenced and improved by adult
carers adjusting their own speech
patterns.
Nativist Theorists believe… language is innate; we are ‘pre-
programmed’ to acquire it.
Cognitive Theorists believe… language will grow when children’s
ideas about the world develop.
13
 Write a 1-2 sentence definition for each of the key terms (language
development theorists) below. Also, state which linguist or psychologist is
primarily associated with each theory.
1. Behaviourists
2. Social Interactionists
3. Nativist theorists

NATIVISM
All children have an inbuilt language acquisition device
(LAD) that enables them to extract the rules of the
particular language from the words and structures they
hear.
universal grammar: a theory that all languages share a
similar grammatical structure under the surface.
critical period: children’s LADs must be activated with
sufficient input before the age of 12, or the child’s language
acquisition will be impaired.
14

BEHAVIOURISM
15

B.F.
SKINNER
 Skinner coined the ‘Skinner
Box’ where he tested
positive and negative
reinforcement with rats and
pigeons; therefore, some
people are sceptical of his
findings, as he did not focus
on humans.
 He believed that language
is learnt through positive
and negative
reinforcement.
16
http://blsolutionsaba.org/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images
/skinner_Smiling.35130931.jpg

Parents do not say, “I breaked glass” or “I fighted my toy
soldiers”; the behaviourist’s theory cannot account for children’s
invention of language.
Children find meaning and truth more important than grammatical
correctness, whereas parents focus on correct use of grammar.
Child: I putted the plates on the table.
Mother: You mean, I put the plates on the table.
Child: No, I putted them on all by myself.
Some Problems with
Behaviourism
17

SOCIALINTERACTION
THEORY
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION SUPPORT SYSTEM
(LASS):
a system that states that interaction helps support a
child’s language acquisition (“scaffolding”).
Father: Have you done a wee wee?
Daughter: (smiles and maintains eye contact)
Father: Shall we have a look in your nappy?
Daughter: (vocalises and smiles)
Father: Let’s get the baby wipes then, shall we?
Daughter: (vocalises and looks after dad as he goes
to get the wipes)

COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT
 Theorists Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget
 Language comes with understanding; a child cannot linguistically
articulate concepts he/she does not understand
 A child needs to understand the idea of the past in order to use past
tense
19
THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT
The Examination Board wants you to know this term
 Who? Vygotsky
 What? The difference between what a child can do with help and
what he can do without guidance

20
 Object permanence the ability to
understand that an object still exists even
though it is no longer in sight
 Vygotsky believed that collaborative play is
essential to children’s learning. He
believed that, “What a child can do in co-
operation today, he can do alone tomorrow”
 Virtuous error: a logical mistake made by
children based on the rules they already
know (i.e. mouses or forgeted)

TASK
 Read the article ‘Whisper it quietly, but the power of language may
all be in the genes’ and answer the questions below:
✎ Which theory is this article supporting?
✎ What happens if the gene is mutated?
✎ What is another theory on why the KE family suffer the linguistic
disorder?
✎ What ethical issue arises from the topic?
✎ Use the Internet to research ‘feral children’ or ‘The Case of
Genie’. How are they affected?
21
The article you will be using was in The Observer on October 7th, 2001, and was written
by Robin McKie. The title is 'Whisper it quietly, but the power of language may all be in
the genes'. It is an article about the nativist theory of language (Chomsky) and a family
(KE is their scientific codename). It supports the fact that a single misplaced gene can
affect your ability to control language and pronounce words; therefore, it is highly
supportive of Chomsky's theory.

22
* Which theories were mentioned in the film?
* When was the critical period of language development? Who proposed that if
a child did not learn language before puberty, s/he would not be able to fully
acquire language?
* What linguistic conclusions did you make from the film?
* Do you believe the psychologists were ethical in the treatment and care of
Genie? If not, how could they have been better?
* Genie did not fully acquire language in the end. Which theory does this
evidence support?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmdycJQi4QA
TASK: Genie
Questions
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3400/3265088651_6287fa2365.jpg

English Language
Child-directed speech
LO: To develop understanding of CDS.
To identify contextual factors that may affect a child’s language
acquisition.
23

THE FEATURES OF
CHILD-DIRECTED SPEECH
More pronounced intonation that draws attention to key morphemes or
lexemes.
Simplified vocabulary that helps establish keywords (‘dog’ rather than
‘German shepherd’).
Repeated grammatical ‘frames’ that help draw attention to new elements
within those frames (e.g. ‘What animal lives in a kennel? What animal lives
in a sty?).
Simplified grammar – shorter utterances.
Actions that accompany speech: pointing, smiling, shrugging shoulders).
More obvious lip and mouth movement.
24

Meaning Example
EXAGGERATING
PROSODIC CUES
using more exaggerated intonation patterns
and slightly higher frequencies, greater pitch
variations.
Uh oh!
RECASTING phrasing sentences in different ways, such as
making it a question.
“dada byebye daddy… Is
daddy going byebye?
ECHOING repeating what the child said.
EXPANSION restating what the child said in a more
linguistically sophisticated form.
“ball all gone” = “Yes, we
lost the ball.”
EXPATIATION expounding further on the word by giving
more information.
(baba hot) > Yes, the bottle
is hot. We’ll wait until later.
LABELING providing the name of objects, using
simplified vocabulary
OVERARTICULATING using more precise sounds contained in the
words, stretching out sounds, sounding out
‘super-vowels’
yees
fahr
good
25

DIRECTED SPEECH: WHAT
DO YOU THINK?
 High-socioeconomic status (SES) mothers use longer
utterances and more different words when they talk to their
children than low-SES mothers and, in turn, their children have
larger vocabularies.
 Low-SES mothers are found to talk less and use less varied
vocabulary during interaction with their children than high-SES
mothers.
 It is estimated that children from the high-SES families they
observed heard approximately 11,000 utterances in a day,
compared to 700 utterances for the children from low-SES
families.
 Low-SES mothers more often use speech to direct their
children’s behaviour and high-SES mothers more often use
speech to elicit conversation from their children.
26

CULTURE CAN ALSO HAVE AN
EFFECT
Linguists have studied striking differences in the way middle-class mothers in the
US communicate with their children compared to Gusii mothers of Kenya, with the
Gusii mothers rarely making eye contact with their children and only responding to
child vocalizations if the children are in distress (Richman, Miller & LeVine, 1992).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
The communicative actions (or non-actions) of the Gusii mothers follow from their
beliefs that babies cannot understand speech and thus it is senseless to talk to
them before they are older and can understand what is being said (LeVine, 2004).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
Similar conclusions have been drawn based on research with the Kaluli of Papua
New Guinea (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984), who believe their children to be helpless
and have no understanding, and thus do not engage them in dyadic
communicative interactions.
27
TASK
* Use the characteristics of child-directed speech to create 3 scripts between a
child and a parent when out shopping/watching television/eating dinner.
* In each script, include at least two characteristics.
* You can also puts actions into parentheses.

English Language: Lexical and
semantic development
LO: To develop an understanding surrounding the lexical and
semantic development of children’s acquisition
28

Baby talk contributes to mental development, as it helps teach
the child the basic function and structure of language.
Studies have found that responding to an infant's babble with
meaningless babble aids the infant's development.
While the babble has no logical meaning, the verbal interaction
demonstrates to the child the bidirectional nature of speech, and
the importance of verbal feedback.
RESEARCHERS
BELIEVE …
29

CHILD’S WORD DEFINITION
baba blanket or bottle
beddy-bye go to bed, sleeping,
bedtime
blankie blanket
boo-boo wound or bruise
dada father
din-din dinner
num nums food/dinner
ickle little
icky disgusting
nana grandmother
oopsie-daisy small accident
owie wound or bruise
num nums dummy
pee-pee urinate or penis
poo-poo defecation
potty toilet
sleepy-byes go to bed, bedtime
stinky defecation
tummy stomach
widdle urine
wuv love
yucky disgusting
yum-yum tasty, meal time
uppie wanting to be picked up
A
CHILD’S
LEXIS
30

‘THE MORE KNOWLEDGEABLE OTHER’
THEORY
Who?
➜Holt and Willard
When?
➜2000
What was the theory?
➜Social constructive theory that states children need a
knowledgeable other in order to acquire acute language
skills.
➜A child needs to see him / herself in people who they
determine to be more knowledgeable.
➜Therefore, this relationship is advantageous in acquiring
language.
31
The Exam board is looking for a reference to this
theory.

DATA EXTRACT 17 
1 Can you notice any patterns of ‘virtuous error’?
2 What are the characteristics of their speech?
3 What can they do?
4 Link what the children are saying to the different theoretical
models we have explored.
32
Liam: The goodies are going on their ship cos they’ve
catched a baddie.
Stan: Yeah, they’ve caught him and throwed him in the
dungeons.
Liam: The cavemans are laughing. This one’s much more
braver than the baddies though…I’m going to build a whole
army of goodies.
Stan: Yeah, cos the baddies are coming.
Together: Charge!
A conversation between twin boys aged 3 years 6
months

KEY TERMS
Utterance a stretch or continuous unit of speech.
Morphology the study of word structure, especially in
terms of morphemes.
Pre-verbal the stages before actual words are uttered.
Referent: the object or person in the real world to
which a sound consistently relates.
Plural the marking of a noun to indicate how
many are being talked about.
Possession the marking of a word to indicate that it
possesses or owns something.
Cooing open-mouth vowel sounds made by babies
of about 3 to 6 months old.
Babbling repeated consonant-vowel sounds and a
combination of these made by babies of
about 6 to 12 months old.
Proto-words sounds that resemble actual words but that
are not consistently applied to their
referents.
Productive vocabulary the words a child can actually speak.
Holophrase a one-word utterance that is used to
communicate more than the one word on
its own.
Overextend to stretch the meaning of a word (i.e.
labeling rats and rabbits as ‘mouse’).
Underextend to contract the meaning if a word.
Overextension a feature of a child’s language where the
word used to label something is stretched
to include things that aren’t normally part
of that word’s meaning.
Hyponym a word within a hypernym’s category (i.e.
apple or broccoli)
Hypernym a category into which other words fit (i.e.
fruit or vegetable)
Telegraphic the stage during which children use three
or more words, usually omitting
grammatical words (i.e. determiners,
auxiliary verbs and prepositions) but
keeping lexical words (i.e. nouns, verbs
and adjectives)
Post-telegraphic the stage after telegraphic during which
many of the omitted words from the stage
before start to appear (i.e. auxiliary verbs,
prepositions, etc.)
33

1. What could be some influences on language acquisition?
2. What words might a child brought up in the country say?
3. In the city?
Child’s words Context to utterance
“Tiger” Used when looking at pictures of tigers, lions and leopards in a picture book.
“Socks” Used when referring to gloves.
“Duck” Used when talking about feeding ducks, pigeons and other birds in a park.
“Cat” Used when pointing at door where cat normally waits.
“Shoes” Used when referring to own pair of shoes but not when talking about any other type of
shoe.
34

 What sort of characteristics do the objects
named in List A have which might account
for them being among the first to be labelled
by children? Why wouldn’t words from List B
be used as frequently?
A: clock, key, blanket, shoe, sock. horse,
car, ball
35
TASK
B: sofa, floor, lamp, nappy, pants, house,
tree, park

FACTS:
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A CHILD’S VOCABULARY
36
A child’s first recognisable word usually appears at
about 12 months of age, but this varies depending on
the child.
Once children reach 18 months, they will have a
productive vocabulary of around 50 words.
At 24 months, most children will have reached at 200-
word productive vocabulary, and by 36 months, it
be around 2,000 words.
On average, children will learn 10 words a day.
The early words of children fall into four categories:
naming, action, social and modifying.

GRAMMATICAL
DEVELOPMENT
Thursday 26th November 2015 - Syntax
37

OBJECTIVES
1 Learn how children’s early language develops through different
identifiable stages.
2 See how children build up longer and more complicated
utterances as they get older.
3 Study the patterns in children’s early grammatical development.
38

39
What do
we mean
by
syntax?
Syntax is another name for word order
A child’s development of syntax refers to
how a child puts words into patterns and
he/she develops an understanding of how
words control meaning
THE TWO
WORD
STAGE
With a partner, attempt to hold a conversation using only two
words for about a minute. Choose the conversation topics
below:
* where you’re going on holiday
* what you’re doing for the weekend
* what happened at the football match.
Record your two word utterances in a transcript format after you
have the conversations
 At around 18 months of age, babies
begin to combine words to form
two word utterances.
Task

40
WORD
S
 endings on words such as ‘dropped’
and sleeping’
 articles (a, the)
 prepositions (in, on, with, at)
 the verb ‘to be’ (I AM happy, you ARE
silly)
 auxiliary verbs (DOES run, CAN run, IS
running)
AT THE TWO
WORD STAGE:
DERIVATIONAL
MORPHOLOGY: MAKING
NEW WORDS
Conversion -> Using word as a different word class
e.g. ‘I jammed the toast’
Affixation -> Applying endings to words to create new ones
‘It’s crowdy in here’ or ‘He’s shooting his shooter.’
Compounding -> Joining existing words together into new combinations
e.g. ‘horsey-man’ and ‘tractor-man.’

41
PHONOLOGICAL
DEVELOPMENT

OBJECTIVES
 Study the sounds children make from birth up to the one-word stage.
 Explore how children develop through different stages until they
create recognisable words.
 Observe the patterns in children’s early phonological development.
 Explore how children’s production and comprehension of sounds are
related.
42

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj
z82FBYiug
 Watch the clip and use your phonics tables to
identify the sounds being learnt.
43

Studies on infants have shown that newborns have a natural
preference to attend to the human voice above all
environmental sounds. When listening to the human voice
they show a distinct preference for listening to speech over
non-speech sounds like laughing and coughing. Linguists
have demonstrated that 3-day old babies can distinguish
between utterances in their mothers’ language and those in
another language.
Children are born universal; they are capable of producing any
sound in the human language (i.e. rolling their ‘r’s in Spanish
or saying the ‘ch’ sounds of Scots). At the age of 12 months,
they contract their range to the language in their native
country; they concentrate on the phonemes used in the native
language.
44
THE HUMAN VOICE

SOME FACTS ABOUT PHONOLOGICAL
DEVELOPMENT
Vowels are acquired before consonants.
By the age of 2½, the average child has
acquired all of the vowels and two thirds of the
consonants.
By the age of 4, only a few consonants are
causing a problem.
By 6 or 7 years of age, the child is confident in
the use of both vowels and consonants.
Initial consonants in a word are much easier to
master than final ones.
45

INTONATION AND
MEANING
 Intonation is particularly important at the one and two
word stages. Why?
 A child who says ‘my car’ may use different strengths of
intonation to produce a different meaning for each
utterance. How could a child say it differently?
 Pitch is an important component of intonation.
 Mandarin Chinese can have as many as four different
meanings for one sound depending on the intonation that
is being used.
 Cruttenden (1974) demonstrated that understanding of
patterns of intonation is still developing in the teens.
46
1 Want cookie
2 Dat doggie
3 His baba
4 Daddy bye bye

EARLY MISTAKES IN SOUNDING WORDS:
47

48
 Translate the
following words into
the correct spelling
words:
1. kwit
2. zu
3. kof
4. fiziks
5. yot
6. kwikli
7. sel
8. bunyo
n
 Rewrite the
following words to
reflect their sounds
of the words:
1 knot
2 duck
3 yams
4 hats
5 laugh
6 dumb
7 can
8 central
9 onion
10 who
11 when
12 quest

49
PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT

SUBSTITUTION AND ADDITION
50
This vowel sound, ә,
sounds like the ‘a’ at the
end of vanilla
Correct
Spelling
Adult Child
egg eg egә
pig pig pigә
blue blu bәlu
apple apl apo
button butn butu

WHY DO THE MISTAKES
HAPPEN?
FRICATIVE  a sound that is created by the slow and
controlled release of air through the mouth,
creating friction.
STOPS  sounds where the air flow is completely
stopped. They are created in the throat (e.g. glottal
stop), at the back of the mouth (e.g. ck), at the
alveolar ridge (e.g. t) or by the lips (e.g. p)
51

Which mistakes are being made?
1 ‘Dat’s a circle.’
2 ‘Me want nother bissie.’
3 A baby says ‘bootoo’ for ‘button’.
4 ‘Glue’ becomes ‘goo’.
5 ‘Chocolate biscuit’ becomes ‘cocker bisik’.
6 A baby called Francis attempts to say his own
name. It comes out as ‘Sassy’.
7 ‘Wing a wing a woses!’
52

THE FIS PHENOMENON
53

What do you think?
 At what age do we understand?
 How might this be immeasurable?
54

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY
PRAGMATICS?
Pragmatics is an area of language study linked to the
things people mean rather than what they actually say.
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Pragmatics refers to:
implicature  expressing meaning indirectly
inference  what someone thinks you are
saying
humour
politeness

HOW CAN PRAGMATICS BE DIFFICULT?
Why would these statements be difficult for a child?
A woman asks where the post office is and is told
in reply, “It’s a Sunday.”
A student says to her friend: “Mmmm, nice jacket.
Are there lots of charity shops in Peckham?”
A father says to his daughter, who has just
dropped his mobile phone in the paddling pool,
“Thanks very much, that makes life a lot easier.”
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THE FUNCTIONS OF CHILDREN’S
EARLY LANGUAGE
The linguist Michael Halliday broke down children’s early language
functions into what he termed a ‘taxonomy language’
 Instrumental  expresses needs (e.g. ‘Want juice’)
 Regulatory  used to tell others what to do (e.g. ‘Go away’)
 Interactional  used to make contact with others and form
relationships (e.g. ‘Love you, mummy’)
 Personal  used to express feelings, opinions and individual identity
(e.g. ‘Me good girl’)
 Heuristic  Language used to gain knowledge about the environment
(i.e. ‘What the tractor doing?’)
 Imaginative  Here language is used to tell stories and jokes, and to
create an imaginary environment.
 Representational  Use of language to convey facts and information
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Which of Halliday’s functions might
be at work in each utterance?
1 ‘Put me down!’ whilst talking to father who has lifted
her up.
2 ‘Biscuit!’ whilst pointing at a biscuit tin.
3 ‘Why, daddy?’ whilst asking why the biscuits have
gone.
4 ‘I walking’; giving commentary, and therefore showing
she doesn’t need help.
5 ‘Look at me, I’m a fairy.’ whilst dressing up in
clothes and drawing attention to the game she is
playing.
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EXAM REVIEW 
] You will need to comment about five linguistic
features in a text. The more you expand on the
features, the more points you will earn.
] You will need to write about language
development theories and how they affect a child’s
development. Give examples and also be open-
minded.
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Language Acquisition

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