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Child language acquisition lecture notes

English Language & Literature - A1 (Sixth Form (UK))

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Chandrika CLA Notes

Lecture One: Beginnings Of

Language Development
Background
 Babies accompany noises with pre verbal behaviours, such as; smiles and eye contact
(paralinguistic features) as it knows it will get attention.
 Vocal play – forcing out sound, to experiment and make noises before the larynx has
even dropped yet.
Pre-birth
 Children do not develop at the same rate – and this is normal.
 However children all around the world do pass through the same set of stages. There is a
universal pattern of development, regardless of the language being acquired.
 Majority of children are bilingual
 Most researchers would agree that this suggests there must be something natural about
learning language regardless of your parents or schooling. Must be a part that is innate.
 Even before birth baby can become acclimatized to native sounds that they are going to
speak.
Mehler 1988
 Conducted research on French babies as young as 4 days old. They were given dummies
that were rigged up to sense their suck rate, the more the child payed attention the
faster they suck.
 Played a number of different languages, without exception the French babies played
closer attention to the French person speaking.
 To ensure a fair test the person speaking was not their mother
 Concluded that the babies were reacting to French phonemes and could distinguish
French from other languages.
 Where you produce sound (diaphragm) is close to where the baby was placed in the
womb.
Crying
 Babies don’t know with how much force to send out their sound.
 During the first few weeks children express itself vocally through crying.
 This signals hunger distress or pleasure
 It is an instinctive noise so it is not language.
 Some parents claim to be able to recognise the difference between the types of cries.
They say it is something to do with the pitch or breathiness
Cooing
 Cooing is also known as gurgling or mewing
 This develops at 6-8 weeks old

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Chandrika CLA Notes

 ‘coo’ ‘ga-ga’ and ‘goo’

 Children develop an increased control over their vocal chords
 This is a wholly universal and natural sound
Babbling
 Babbling is widely recognised as the most important stage in the first year of a child’s life
 This develops at 6-9 months old, first recognition of language
 Coincides with the larynx dropping 3cm
 The sounds begin to resemble adult sounds more closely
 They may start to do it when they wake up or go to sleep, they do it as they are
experimenting with their articulators
 Consonant vowel combinations: ‘ba’ ‘ma’ and ‘da’
 Bilabial sounds are the most common - plosive is closure of the articulators (two lips
coming together)
 The first sounds that children makes is the reason the maternal figure’s name begins
with ‘m’
 When these sounds are repeated = reduplicated monosyllable
e.g. ‘mama’ ‘baba’
 These sounds have no meaning
 Babies will make far more noise than before where they appear to be having a
conversation
 Exercises and experiments with its articulators: tongue, teeth (dental), lips (plosive),
alveoli ridge
Phonemic expansion
 Phoneme – is the smallest element of sound in a language that can display contrast e.g.
initial sounds in ‘ban’ and ‘Dan’
 During babbling number of different phonemes produced increases (expands)
 This is when they realise it makes a different sound
Phonemic Contraction
 9-10 months
 Number of phonemes produced reduces (contracts) – they start to sound like a language
 Restricted to those of the native language
 Baby discards sounds not required
 Evidence: noises made by children of different nationalities starts to sound different.
 Experiments: native adults have successfully identified babies from their own country.
 Phonological development is the first step to learning language.
Intonation
 The rise and fall of the voice in speaking.
 Intonation patterns begin to resemble speech

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Chandrika CLA Notes

 Common one is the rising intonation at end of utterance, as they are used to the
caregiver asking them questions. Even for children who can’t understand or appreciate
them
 Other variations in rhythm/emphasis may suggest greeting or calling
Gesture
 Although they do not yet have the power of speech, desire to communicate indicated
through gesture
 Example: point to object and use facial expression ‘What’s that?’
 Beginnings of pragmatic development – regulating the behaviour of others and getting
what you really want.
Understanding
 Although the child may not begin to speak, they may understand meanings of certain
words.
 Understanding precedes production - Piaget
 Word recognition: is usually evident by the end of the first year.
 Commonly understood: names, ‘no’ and ‘bye-bye’
The First Word
 They say it at approximately 1 years old
 They then learn 10 new words each day
 First recognisable word – has to be used consistently and phonologically recognisable
New Vocabulary
 Acclimatised
 Instinctive
 Cooing
 Babbling
 Bilabial
 Reduplicated monosyllable
 Phonemic expansion
 Phonemic contraction

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Chandrika CLA Notes

Lecture Two – Phonological

Development
How children develop the ability to use and understand the sounds of language
 Order in which vowels and consonants are acquired varies from child to child
 Sometimes children appear to have mastered a sound in one word but not in another.
General Trends
 Age 2 ½: all vowels and 2/3 of consonants are mastered
 Age 4: difficulty with only a few consonants
 Age 6-7 – confident use
 Consonants are first used correctly at the beginnings of words. As it is easier word initial
as you are going from rest.
 Consonants at the end of words present more difficulty, because you are going from
elsewhere.
 Example: ‘push’ versus ‘rip’
 Frequency: generally, sounds which occur frequently in a large number of words will be
acquired before sounds that occur less frequently.
Phonemic Simplification
 Deletion
 Final consonants may be dropped.
 Unstressed syllables are often deleted.
 Consonant clusters are reduced.
 Substitution
 Easier sounds are substituted for harder ones:
 ‘r’ becomes ‘w’ – rhotic to liquid
 ‘th’ becomes ‘d’, ‘n’ or ‘f’ – fricative to plosive
 ‘t’ becomes ‘d’ – voice to voiceless
 ‘p’ becomes ‘b’ – Bilabial
Understanding
 Remember: we learned that comprehension is often ahead of speech (e.g. first words).
 The same can be true in phonological development.
Berko And Brown (1960)
 Child: fis
 Adult: This if your fis?
 Child: No-my fis.
 Adult: Oh, this is your fish.
 Child: Yes, my fis.

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Chandrika CLA Notes

 Child with indistinguishable pronunciation of:

 mouse/mouth
 cart/card
 jug/duck
 Could point to corresponding pictures in a comprehension task.
Intonation
 As a child grows older, a wider range of meanings is expressed through intonation.
 Example: two-word stage:
 ‘my car’ versus ‘MY car’ – can communicate possession
 Although intonation patterns can be reproduced from an early stage, understanding of
their meaning is still developing into the teenage years.
Cruttenden (1974)
 Football results.
 Intonation used in first team’s score enabled adults to accurately predict home win,
away win or draw.
 Children (aged 7-11): youngest were largely unsuccessful and oldest were significantly
less successful than adults.
New Vocabulary
 Phonemic simplification
 Deletion
 Substitution

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Chandrika CLA Notes

Lecture 3- Lexical And

Semantical Development
Semantics – denotation (dictionary meaning) and connotation (associated meaning if you’re
part of the specific discourse community)
 Lexical development = a child’s acquisition of words.
 Semantic development = a child’s acquisition of the meanings associated with those
words.
 Symbiotic relationship as they go hand in hand
 Vocabulary acquisition does not end at a certain age. We continue hearing and
learning new words and their meanings throughout our lives. As words are being
invented all the time and language evolves.
Rate Of Acquisition:
 End of first year: child begins to speak.
 18 months: vocabulary of about 50 words.
 2 years: vocabulary of about 200 words.
 5 years: vocabulary of 2000 words (productive vocabulary that they themselves can
produce)
 Rate slows down because formal teaching is introduced – maths, literacy, spelling
and writing. As before they were motivated to learn how to talk.
 7 years: vocabulary of 4000 words.
Understanding:
 The previous figures refer to word use.
 At each stage, the number of words understood by the child is expected to be
higher.
 Children can understand quite complex utterances but just can’t say it yet.
 18 months: 250 words understood.
 Piaget – understanding precedes production
Meanings:
 When a child adds a new word to their vocabulary, they are not immediately aware
of its full range of meanings.
 E.g. duck in the bath is yellow and plastic but wouldn’t recognise the brown ducks in
the pond.
 More time is required to acquire this additional knowledge.
First Words:
 Research has shown that there are predictable patterns in the words and word
classes first acquired by children.
 Might be driven by their physical development
 Entities – something with a physical property: pet, favourite toy, real life thing
 Properties – characteristic
 Actions

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Chandrika CLA Notes

 Personal-social – ta, hiya, love you

 Routine – Bruner – LAD, scaffolds- associated action
 Predictably, a large proportion of a child’s first words refer to familiar people,
objects and aspects of social interaction.
Word Classes:
 Nouns
 Verbs
 Adjectives
 These are lexical content words
 Concrete nouns – easier for children to understand
 Some abstract nouns can be understood before from stories, e.g. ‘adventure’
 5-7 years – abstract nouns begin to be used
 Grammatical function words: noticeably absent in the early stages of lexical
acquisition.
 Could be learned as a holophrase – learnt as single unit
Underextension:
 Common semantic error made by children
 A word is given a narrower (under extended) meaning
 ‘Cat’ is the family pet, but not other cats
 Egocentric stage
Overextension:
 Another common semantic error – opposite of Underextension
 A word is given a broader (more general, over-extended) meaning
 ‘daddy’ – for all men, rather than just the child’s father
 ‘dog’ – for other four legged animals
 More common than Underextension as they have a lot of lexical gaps to fill, so they
find it easier to use one word for everything
 50 word vocab (1/3 are likely to be overextended)
Getting It Right:
 Age 2 ½ : marked decrease in number of overextensions.
 Explanation: child’s vocabulary is increasing rapidly, thus filling the gaps previously
filled by overextended words.
Understanding:
 Children’s understanding of word meanings is ahead of their ability to produce the
corresponding words.
Aitchison (1987):
 Three stages/processes occur during acquisition of vocabulary
 Labelling – Naming things/objects
 Packaging – Package the full range of meaning in the word, two people/things can
have the same label. Children who are still over and under extending have not yet
mastered packaging.

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Chandrika CLA Notes

 Network Building – Learning the connection between that word and other words,
e.g. saying one item is little but the other one is even smaller, using words
comparatively. Synonyms and antonyms, echoing someone else by giving another
example.
New Vocabulary:
 GRAMMATICAL FUNCTION WORDS
 UNDEREXTENSION
 OVEREXTENSION
 LABELLING
 PACKAGING
 NETWORK BUILDING

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Chandrika CLA Notes

Lecture 4: Grammatical
Development 1
Syntactic development: development of a child’s ability to create grammatical constructions
by arranging words in an appropriate order.
One word (holophrastic) stage:
 12-18 months: child speaks in single word utterances.
 ‘milk’
 ‘mummy’
 Groups of words may be used as a single unit.
 ‘allgone’
 In many situations, the words simply serve a naming function. – Labelling, Aitichison
 Holophrases: single words which convey more complex messages than just a labelling
function.
 Depends on delivery and the context
 ‘juice’
 ‘I want some juice’
 ‘I’ve spilt some juice’
 Context, gesture (paralinguistic features) and intonation (prosodic) : enable
parent/carer to understand what child means.
Understanding:
 Although the child’s utterances are limited, their understanding of syntax is (predictably)
more advanced.
 Evidence: children at the one-word stage can respond to two-word instructions: ‘kiss
mummy’.
Two-word stage:
 18 months: two-word utterances begin to appear.
 Usually: grammatically correct sequence. – This could have prompted Skinner’s
imitation theory. Learnt behaviour.
 Common constructions:
 S+V ‘Daddy sleep’
 V+O ‘Draw birdie’
 S+O ‘Suzy juice’
 S+C ‘Daddy busy’
 Cognitive development
 When repeating an adult, children at this stage commonly omit elements, but retain the
correct order:
 Look, Ben’s playing in the garden.
 Play garden.

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 Preserved: main verb in infinitive form

 Utterances focus on key lexical content words.
 Grammatical function words: commonly omitted (as they carry less information). Such
as determiners, prepositions…
 Working memory holds on to the last words they therefore they preserve words later in
the syntax
Meanings of two word utterances
 Range of complex meanings can be expressed.
 Possession: ‘Mummy car’
 Action: ‘Paul eat’
 Location: ‘Teddy bed’
Bloom (1973)
 Studied a child across the day and found the child used the phrase:
 ‘Mummy sock’
 There were numerous different ways the child uses the two word utterances to convey a
range of different meanings in context
 Proves how versatile a child’s meanings could be at the two word stage
 Prosodics and paralinguistic features relevant

Ambiguity
 The scope for ambiguity at this stage arises because of the omission of inflectional
affixes.
 Commonly possessive and plural ‘s’ and past tense ‘ed’ are absent.
Telegraphic Stage
 Age 2: 3 and 4-word utterances begin to be produced.
 Some will be grammatically complete:
 S+V+O
 ‘Lucy likes tea’
 S+V+C
 ‘Teddy is tired’
 S+V+A
 ‘Mummy sleeps upstairs’
 Predictable S V pattern/ standard syntax
 Other utterances will have grammatical elements missing:
 ‘Daddy home now’ – main verb ‘is’ missing
 ‘Where Josh going?’ – Auxiliary verb ‘is’ missing, if they do put the auxiliary is present it
involves syntactic inversion (where josh is going?)
 Interrogative formation
 Hence the name ‘telegraphic’.
 Like a telegram, they include key words, but omit elements such as:
 Determiners
 Auxiliary verbs

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 Prepositions
 Wider range of structures will be used:
 Questions (interrogatives)
 Commands (imperatives)
 Simple statements
Rapid Progress:
 3 years: items such as determiners begin to be used regularly.
 More than one clause appears
 Coordinating conjunctions
 Inflectional affixes (see next lecture)
 5 years: many of most basic grammatical rules have been learned, though some (e.g. the
passive) have yet to be mastered.
Vocabulary
 HOLOPHRASE
 TELEGRAPHIC
 COORDINATING CONJUNCTIONS
 INFLECTIONAL AFFIXES
 PASSIVE

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Chandrika CLA Notes

Lecture 5: Grammatical
Development 2
Acquisition of inflections:
 Predictable patterns – revealed by research in the acquisition of inflections
 Grammatical function words – also seem to be acquired in a predictable order
Brown (1973):
 Study: 20 – 36 month olds exhibited the sequence shown below:
 -ing
 plural –s
 possessive –s
 articles - ‘the’, ‘a’
 past tense –ed
 third person singular verb ending –s
 auxiliary ‘be’
Cruttenden (1979)
1. Memorise words individually. No regard for rules
2. Awareness of general principles, governing inflections
3. Overgeneralisation
4. Correct inflections are used, including irregular forms
Understanding of grammatical rules
 Researchers: how do children produce grammatically accurate constructions so early in
their development?
 Rules or Imitation
Berko (1958)
Supports Chomsky
 Showed a picture of a made up creature – wug
 ‘Wug’
 ‘This is a Wug’
 ‘Now there is another one; there are two of them’
 Complete the sentence: ‘There are two …’
 3-4 years old: ‘wugs’
 Grammatical rule for plural ‘s’ was clearly being applied.
 With brand new words they use rules they already know independently
Overgeneralisation
 2 ½ - 5 years: grammatical errors show an awareness of rules. (Chomsky)

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 They ‘overgeneralise/over regularise’, trying to make the language more consistent than
it is:
 ‘sheeps’
 ‘wented’
 ‘mouses’
 Although children apply grammatical rules in this way, they are not conscious that they
have acquired them and would not be able to explain them = NO METALINGUISTIC
AWARENESS
Interrogatives
 Asking questions involves complex constructions.
 Research: suggests they are three stages involved in acquiring this skill
 Two-word stage: questions rely on rising intonation only.
 Second year: question words acquired: first ‘what’ and ‘where’, then ‘why’, ‘who’ and
‘how’= ‘Where daddy gone?’
 Third year: begin to use auxiliary verbs and inversion
 Therefore: ‘Joe is here’ becomes ‘Is Joe here?’
 However: questions involving –wh words are not always correctly inverted: ‘Why Joe
isn’t here?’
Negation
 It also appears that the accurate expression of negative (stereotypically characterised by
the ‘terrible twos’) occurs in three stages …
 Single dependence on the words ‘no’ and ‘not’ used independently or in front of
expressions: ‘no want’ and ‘no go bed’.
 Third year: ‘don’t’ and ‘can’t’ appear. Begin to appear after the subject and before the
verb of the sentence:
 ‘I don’t want it’ and ‘Sammy can’t play’
 More negative forms are acquired: ‘didn’t’ and ‘isn’t’. Negative constructions are not
generally more accurate.
Vocabulary:
 OVERGENERALISATION
 IRREGULAR FORMS
 METALINGUISTIC AWARENESS

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Chandrika CLA Notes

Lecture 6 Pragmatic
Development
Pragmatics = the part played by language in social situations and relationships.
 Del Hymes: ‘communicative competence’
 When to speak
 How to respond to others
 Appropriate registers
Language Functions:
 Bottom line: children are motivated to acquire language because it serves certain
purposes/functions for them.
Halliday’ Taxonomy (1975): seven functions (It Really Is Pants Here In Rotheram)
1. INSTRUMENTAL – where the child is trying to fulfil a need (e.g. asking for food or
drink) ‘Need juice now’
2. REGULATORY – Used to control the behaviour of someone (e.g. telling a caregiver
where to sit) ‘Don’t do that’
3. INTERACTIONAL – Used to develop relationships with others (e.g. telling a sibling
you love them, saying hello (salutation) or goodbye (valediction), or you miss them)
‘Love you Ruthie’
4. PERSONAL – Used to express views and preferences (e.g. me no like it) ‘Me like
sausages Mummy’
5. HEURISTIC – Inquisitive function. Used to explore the world around them (e.g. what
are you doing mummy?) ‘What Daddy doing there?’
6. IMAGINATIVE – Used to explore something creatively or during play, role playing or
making their toys talk ‘Then teddy said he wants to go shopping’
7. REPRESENTATIONAL – Used to exchange information – to give or receive
information. They recognise that they know information that other people don’t
know. Announcing stage ‘Got new shoes Granny’
As with other elements of language acquisition, remember that pragmatic development
begins before a child starts to speak.
Early Years
 Children are introduced to important role of language in everyday life.
 Adults speak to them a great deal.
 Routine events are accompanied by regularly repeated utterances.
Conversation Preparation

 Child-parent/carer interactions prepare the child for later participation in conversation

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 Bancroft (1996) - ‘Peek-a-boo’ parallels:

 Turn-taking
 Response
 Common purpose and understand the sequence
 Pleasure
 Other interactions - Despite the fact that the child has not yet begun to speak, adults
will:
 Ask questions
 Express agreement
 Give approving/disapproving responses
First Conversations:
 First utterances: statements (rather than questions) and not always directed at anyone!
 Child will often seem to ignore other speaker.
 Typical conversation:
 Initiated by adult
 Dependent on continued adult input to progress

Later Development:

 Age 2-4: significant development in conversational skills:

 Turn taking
 Response to questions
 Greetings
 Politeness forms
Speech Convergence And Accommodation Theory
 Yousef (1991)
 Group of children in Trinidad
 Children responded to different social situations by using different varieties of
English
 Janet (3, 9): Past tense verb forms:
 Conversation with mother: 100% SE
 Family helper (a Trinidadian English speaker): decreasing amounts
 Brother/same age children: decreasing amounts
After starting school:
 Children develop increased sensitivity to the needs of their listener
 Greater understanding of language more appropriate to formal situations (register).

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Chandrika CLA Notes

Lecture 7 Child Directed

Speech
The academic term for the language used by adults/caregivers when addressing children.

Phonology
 Separate phrases more distinctly (longer pauses).
 Speak more s-l-o-w-l-y.
 Exaggerated ‘singsong’ intonation.
 Exaggerated difference between questions, statements and commands.
 Higher and wider range of pitch.
Lexis and semantics:
 Use of concrete nouns (e.g. train, cat) and dynamic verbs (e.g. give, put).
 Adopt child’s own words for things (e.g. wickle babbit).
 Frequent use of child’s name and absence of pronouns
Grammar:
 Repeated sentence frames: ‘That’s a …’
 More simple sentences.
 Fewer complex sentence and passives.
 Omission of past tense and inflections.
 More command, questions and tag questions.
 Use of EXPANSIONS: where the adult ‘fills out’ the child’s utterance.
 Use of RECASTINGS: where the child’s vocabulary is put into a new utterance.
Pragmatics:
 Lots of gesture and body language.
 Stopping frequently for child to respond.
 Supportive language.
Clarke-Stewart (1973) - Children whose mothers talk to them more have larger
vocabularies.
Nelson (1973) - Holophrastic stage. Children whose mothers corrected them on word choice
and pronunciation actually advanced more slowly than those with mothers who were
generally accepting.
Kuhl (1992) - Studied exaggerated vowel sounds used by parents when speaking to 6-month
olds (in English, Swedish and Russian). Babies turn towards adults who speak in sing-song

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Chandrika CLA Notes

voice, ignoring regular conversation. Mothers in all three countries exaggerated the
important vowels.
NOT ALL CULTURES USE CHILD-DIRECTED SPEECH.
 In some (non-western) cultures babies are expected to ‘blend in’ with adult
interaction and no special accommodation is made. Papua New Guinea
 These children still go through same developmental stages at roughly the same time,
as long as there is EXPOSURE to language.

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