DEP
4005 - Developmental Psychology Christine
Ruva
"BABY
TALK" (NOVA
Presentation)
Language Acquisition
I. Imitation ,
Biological, & Interactionist Theories of Language Acquisition :
A. B.
F. Skinner - Imitation Theory children learn language through imitating adults.
1. "On Verbal Behavior" - environmental perspective
B. Noam
Chomsky (linguist) - challenged the imitation view of language acquisition.
1. Evidence against strict imitation theory explanation:
a. young children able to follow proper
grammar rules
b. generative and productive quality of
language - children can say a sentence they never said or heard before.
c. young can use proper word order
2. Language Acquisition Device (LAD) : children are born
with the unique capacity to learn language and grasp the rules of grammar.
a. LAD - is located in the brain according
to Chomsky and = bio component of lang.
C. Interactionist
Theory: the issue is not whether envr. or bio has an influence in language acquisition
but rather how the 2 interact (Dan Slobin).
II. Developmental Psycholinguistics:
Major Ques: When does language
development begin?
A. Intonation
Patterns (David Crystal): intonation carries meaning use intonation to denote questions, statements, and commands.
B. Cry
Analysis (Barry Lester) - crying is the fist effective form of
communication.
1. Different cries have different physiological patterns
2. How caretaker responds to different cries has impact on early
lang. development.
3. Cries
have prosodic qualities - changes in intonation, pitch and melody.
4. Peter Wolfe: cries as experimental manipulation produce new sounds and watch their effects on adults - this is the
beginning of lang.
C. Turn-Taking
During Nursing (Harry McGurk): precursor for turn-taking in communication.
Major Ques: How do children come to
recognize that the speech they hear is actually made up of separate units
(words and the sounds that make them up)?
A. Categorical
Perception (Peter Eimas; Janet Werker): How do infants segment and process speech
and determine what categories are important?
1. Strong
bio component - categorical perception at 4 days old demonstrates that they
know what sounds are going to be important (Universal Language Perceivers) and
by 1 year they have narrowed the categories of
speech into those of their native tongue.
III. Rules of Language - Grammar:
A. Syntax:
word order in a sentence (e.g., What makes a statement different from a
question).
B. Semantics:
word meaning
C. Pragmatics:
how to use words in socially appropriate ways (e.g., please, thank you, bye
bye).
Holistic Approach
(Jerome Bruner): children learn all 3 of the above together.
IV. Social Interactionist:
look at
parent-child relationship and its impact on language learning.
A. Parents
reaction to child's intentionality (Jean Berko-Gleason): social use of language
comes before words.
B. First Words
= those useful for social interaction (e.g., Hi, bye bye)
C. We pull
intentionality out of the precommunicative child (Catherine Snow):
1. By
asking baby question and commenting on her sounds we demonstrate the rules of conversational
communication.
D. Mother-Child
Book Reading: allows analysis of sentences over & over again & may
allow to learn rules of grammar.
E. Scaffolding
(Jerome Bruner): by creating a structure envr. we create a scaffold on which
the child can acquire language through social interaction.
V. Which Comes First Language or Cognition?
A. Andrew Meltzoff studies the ability of 15 mos olds to
perform Jean Piaget's search and find task which requires object permanence.
1. Meltzoff concludes that in young children lang and cog develop
simultaneously.
B. Catherine
Nelson: in older children cognition is crucial for lang learning
(understanding).
C. Construction
of Compound Nouns (Eve Clarke): must know how & when to apply rules
e.g., pumpkin-house,
tree-house
VI. Cross-Cultural Linguistics (Dan Slobin)
A. Language
Universals and Universal Grammar (UG): universal language rules that govern
language behavior of all children at certain stages of development.
1. overgeneralizations: know the grammatical rule but not
the exceptions these happen in every language.
a. past tense of irregular verbs e.g., teach, run, go teached, runned, goed
(1) thus,
learning rule not mere imitation
b. at earlier ages before the language rule
is learned they use the correct form
e.g., taught, ran, went
2. Segmentation and classification - patterns of applying
the underlying rules of language
GOAL OF CHILD IS TO LEARN
HOW TO COMMUNICATE, NOT TO LEARN GRAMMAR, SYNTAX, AND SEMANTICS. THEY LEARN THESE IN THE SERVICE OF BECOMING
AN EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION.