THEORISTSS
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Skinner
- Behaviourist
- Imitate their parents
- CDS
- Child learn after correction
Chomsky
- Innateness
- Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in a child's mind
- Children all develop language at the same age/through same stages
- Similar grammatical categories throughout all language (noun, verb etc)
- Over extention/under extention
- Children making up names for things
Piaget
- Cognitive development
- Need a certain intellectual understanding before they can use language correctly
- Words are acquired after the concepts are grasped
- Children talking to themselves
Bruner
- Social interactionalist theory
- Use language to get what they want
- Pragmatics
- Children's whose mothers talk more have larger vocabularies
- Language Acquisition Support System (LASS)
Lennenberg
- Critical Period Theory
- First five years of life is when a child needs to develop language
- Genie
Katherine Nelson
The four categories of a child's first words:
- Names - people and objects
- Personal/social
- Describing/modifying things
- Actions/events
Roger Brown (1976)
Studied two-word sentences from children all over the world. They analysed them and by the types of meaning relations that the children were expressing and found that at the two word stage the vast majority had the same meaning relations:
- Nomination
- Recurrence
- Negation
Clark (1972)
Found that some spatial adjectives tend to me more difficult than others to aquire. That is, they tend to appear later in children's spontaneous speech and when they first appear they are confused with other adjectives.
Ursula Bellugi
Four types of questions:
- Rising intonation
- "wh" questions
- verb first
- inversion of auxiliary and subject first
The three stages of negation
- 2 years - "No sit there"
- 2 years, three months - "I can't catch you"
- 2 years, nine months - "I didn't caught it"
Halliday
Functions of language:
- Instrumental - fulfil a need
- Regulatory - influence the behaviour of others
- Interactional - develop and maintain social relationships
- Personal - convey individual opinions
- Representational - convey facts or information
- Imaginative - imagination and mind-games
- Heuristic - learn about the environment
John Dore
Language functions:
- Labelling - naming a person, object or thing
- Repeating - repeating an adult word or utterance
- Answering - responding to utterance of another person
- Requesting action - asking for something to be done for them
- Calling - getting attention by shouting
- Greeting - greeting someone or something
- Protesting - Objecting to requests from others
- Practising - Using language when no other adult is present
Harris and Coltheart (1986)
Learning to read...
- The Sight Vocabulary or Whole Word Stage - see a word but can't break it down
- The Discrimination Net Service - They guess based on what they know
- Phonological Recoding Stage - sounding out words, breaking it down
- Othographic Stage - distinguish different words