CLA revision

https://revisionworld.com/a2-level-level-revision/english-language/child-language-acquisition/case-study-genie

Stages of development

Pre birth

• Has been scientifically proven that a baby can recognise the mothers voice.
• Before the child is born it can recognise words.
• Music can develop a baby’s brain.

 
Stage 1: BASIC BIOLOGICAL NOISE STAGE (0-8 weeks)

• Child expresses itself through crying.
• They show reflexive responses and not conscious responses.
• Child starts with vowel ‘A’ sounds.
• They learn to control their air stream mechanism.

 
Stage 2: COOING & LAUGHING STAGE (8-20 weeks)

• Make different cooing noises – e.g. ‘coo’, ‘goo’ ‘ga-ga’
• Recognise parents faces and speech.
• Towards the end of the stage they begin to string cooing noises.
• They recognise language has a structure.
• Learn to express themselves through laughing and chuckling.
• Have control over their tongue.

 
Stage 3: VOCAL PLAY (20-30 weeks)

• Begin to use consonant and vowel sounds.
• Able to adjust pitch.
• ‘playing and experimenting’

 
Stage 4: BABBLING STAGE (25-50 weeks)

• 2 types of babbling sounds-
• --> RE-DUPLICATING- repeat sounds (e.g. woof woof)
• --> VARIGATED- use different sound patterns and put them together.
• The words have no meaning to the child as they think they are just making sounds.

 
Stage 5: MELODIC UTTERANCE STAGE (10-13 months)

• A variation in rhythm, melody and tone is shown
• The child begins to see some meaning to what they say.
• Proto words used- when the child doesn’t say words it recognises but realises that words are parts of a sound.

 
AGE 12-18 MONTHS

• Developments occur rapidly.
• Intonations used to show feelings and purpose.
• Children begin to develop at different levels.
• Single word utterances – concrete nouns
• Holophrastic phrases – couple of words put together which have no grammatical concept
• Child learns about 10-20 words each month.
• Over extension – when child uses one word to describe lots of things.
  
  • no concept of differentiating
  • e.g. 4 legged object = dog
• Under extension - have yet to acquire the knowledge that there are many numbers of the same thing in the world ( e.g. lots of cars in world)
  
  • have yet to acquire the concept of concrete nouns.
• Mismatch – get the name of something wrong (e.g. car = doll)
• Begin to use modifiers so add extra words in front of another word (e.g. go sleep)

 
AGE 18-24 MONTHS

• Have a vocabulary of 200 words – shows how quickly they are learning.
• Pronunciation  - some syllables dropped (e.g. tomato = mato)
  
  • Consonant clusters avoided i.e. sky - guy
  • Re-duplicate sounds- e.g. baby = baybay
  • no consistency of speaking

Michael Halliday, 1978 – functions of a child's language.
 
Stage 1: INSTRUMENTAL STAGE

• Language is used to fulfil the child's needs
• First words are mainly concrete nouns
• Concerned with obtaining food, drink, comfort, etc

Stage 2: REGULATORY STAGE

• Language is used to influence the behaviour of others
• Persuading, commanding, requesting other people to do as they want

Stage 3: INTERACTIONAL STAGE

• Language is used to develop social relationships and ease interaction
• Phatic dimension of talk
• E.g. love you, daddy, thank you,

Stage 4: PERSONAL STAGE

• Language is used to express personal preferences/speaker's identity
• Conveys attitudes and expresses feelings
• E.g. me good girl

Stage 5: INFORMATIVE STAGE

• Used to communicate information
• Mainly to relay or request information

Stage 6: HEURISTIC STAGE

• Used to learn and explore the environment
• May be questions and answers or running commentary on child's actions

Stage 7: IMAGINATIVE STAGE

• Used to explore the imagination
• Often accompanies play or other leisure activities

John Dore’s ‘Infant Language Functions’

FUNCTION	EXAMPLE
LABELLING	Naming or identifying a person, object or experience
REPEATING	Echoing something spoken by an adult speaker
ANSWERING	Giving a direct response to an utterance from another speaker
REQUESTING ACTION	Demanding food, drink, toy, assistance etc
CALLING	Attracting attention by shouting
GREETING	Pretty self explanatory
PROTESTING	Objecting to requests etc
PRACTISING	Using and repeating language when no adult is present

Lennenberg's critical period


Most babies learn a language by a certain age if they are to learn to speak at all.  A critical period is a fixed time period on which certain experiences can have a long lasting effect on development.  It is a time of readiness for learning, after which, learning is difficult or impossible. Almost all children learn one or more languages during their early years, so it is difficult to determine whether there is a critical period for language development.
In 1967 Lenneberg proposed that language depends on maturation and that there is a critical period between about 18 months and puberty during which time a first language must be acquired. Lenneberg especially thought that the pre-school years were an important time frame as this is where language develops rapidly and with ease.
Although much language learning takes place during pre-school years, it continues into adulthood. Therefore, young children’s proficiency in language does not seem to involve a biologically critical period.


CASE STUDY - Genie
Genie was found at the age of 13 after being severely mistreated by her father, She had little to no communication with anyone so her language development was greatly affected. After she was rescued she spent a number of years in excessive rehabilitation programs including speech and physical therapy. She eventually learned to walk and to use the toilet. She also eventually learned to recognise many words and speak in basic sentences. Eventually she was able to string together two word combinations like ‘big teeth’ then three word ‘small two cup’. She didn’t however, learn to ask questions and didn’t develop a language system that allowed her to understand English grammar.




Jerome Bruner
Jerome Bruner developed interactionist theory - how language is acquired through interaction between the child and caregiver. Care giver must use child directed speech (CDS)


Child directed speech
Phonology

• Separate phrases more distinctly, leaving longer pauses between them.
• Speak more s-l-o-w-l-y.
• Use exaggerated  ‘singsong’ intonation, which helps to emphasise key words.  Also to exaggerate the difference between questions, statements and commands.
• Use a higher and wider pitch range.

Lexis and semantics

• Use of concrete nouns (cat, train) and dynamic verbs (give, put).
• Adopt child’s own words for things (doggie, wickle babbit).
• Frequent use of child’s name and an absence of pronouns.

Grammar

• Simpler constructions
• Frequent use of imperatives
• High degree of repetition
• Use of personal names instead of pronouns (e.g. ‘Mummy’ not ‘I’)
• Fewer verbs, modifiers and adjectives

Large number of one-word utterances

• Deixis used to point child’s attention to objects or people
• Repeated sentence frames eg. “that’s a ……”
• Use more simple sentences and fewer complex and passives.
• Omission of past tenses, inflections (plurals and possessives).
• Use more commands, questions and tag questions.
• Use of EXPANSIONS – where the adult fills out the child’s utterance.
• Use of RE-CASTINGS – where the child’s vocabulary is put into a new utterance.

Pragmatics

• Lots of gesture and warm body language.
• Fewer utterances per turn – stopping frequently for child to respond.
• Supportive language (expansions and re-castings).

Are there are variations due to the gender of the caregiver?
Research has suggested that fathers are more demanding than mothers, using more direct questions and a wider range of vocabulary.
What effects do you think this kind of speech has on children?
Some claim that it retains the attention of the child, others that it makes language more accessible. Some claim that children learn by repetition – can this explain the fact that children can produce sentences which they have never heard before?
Others claim that ‘babytalk’ actually interferes with language development because children learn babyish words and sentences instead of the real language.
Not every culture uses such forms of child-directed speech. In Samoa and Papua New Guinea, adults speak to children as they speak to adults, and children acquire language at the same pace as elsewhere.
Features and purposes of Child Directed Speech
CDS aims to:

• Attract and hold the baby’s attention.
• Help the process of braking down language into understandable chunks.
• Make the conversation more predictable by referring to the here-and-now.

Research
Clarke-Stewart (1973)
Found that children whose mothers talk more have larger vocabularies.
Katherine Nelson (1973)
Found that children at the holophrastic stage whose mothers corrected them on word choice and pronunciation actually advanced more slowly than those with mothers who were generally accepting.
(Brown, Cazden and Bellugi 1969)
Found that parents often respond to the TRUTH value of what their baby is saying, rather than its grammatical correctness.  For example, a parent is more likely to respond to “there doggie” with “Yes, it’s a dog!” than “No, it’s there is a dog.”
Berko and Brown (1960)
Brown spoke to a child who referred to a “fis” meaning “fish”.  Brown replied using “fis” and the child corrected him again but saying “fis”.  Finally Brown reverted to “fish” to which the child responded “Yes, fis.”  This shows that babies do not hear themselves in the same way that they hear others and no amount of correction will change this.




Child Directed Speech – some conclusions

• Recent research argues the CDS doesn’t directly help babies learn language, instead it helps parents communicate with children = its purpose is social rather than educational.
• In some cultures (non-western) babies are expected to blend in with adult interaction and no special accommodation is made in speech addressed to them.  These children still go through the same developmental stages at roughly the same time as long as there is EXPOSURE to language.  However Clark & Clark’s research suggests that children who are only exposed to adult speech do not acquire the same standard of language as those whose parents speak to them directly in a modified manner.
• The older argument that baby-talk is ‘harmful’ to a child learning a new language is being replaced.  People now think it’s beneficial to the child.
• A child’s language improves when in contact with an adult who speaks to them directly.

David Crystal (1996)

Cries, Burps and Burbles	In the first two or three months of life an infant makes lots of noises of pain, hunger and discomfort, to which parents learn to respond, but it is difficult to attribute specific meanings to these sounds.
Cooing and going gaga	Most children add a new variety of sounds to their repertoire before they are six months old – the ‘cooing’ which may resemble some of the first sounds of speech.
Babbling on	This evolves into babbling – the first extended repetitions by children of some basic phonemic combinations such as ‘babababa’ etc.
First Words	From out of these streams of sounds eventually emerge a small repertoire of utterances that sound something like a word.  However, these single words may appear to serve a multitude of functions or to have more than one meaning.

Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), Roger Brown (1969)
MLU is used to define stages of Child Language Acquisition.  MLU is calculated by dividing the total number of words (morphemes – smallest meaningful part of a word) spoken by the number of utterances a child makes.  So if a baby used two words in two utterances the MLU would be one.  Brown has related MLU scores to stages of CLA:

MLU Score	Stage
1.1 – 2.0	1
2.0 – 2.5	2
2.5 – 3.0	3
3.0 – 3.5	4
3.5 – 4.0	5

Skinners behaviourist theory
Correct utterances are positively reinforced when the child realizes the communicative value of words and phrases. For example, when the child says ‘milk’ and the mother will smile and give her some as a result, the child will find this outcome rewarding, enhancing the child's language development. Skinner viewed babies as 'empty vessels' in which language had  to be 'put into'. Skinner suggested that children learnt language through the environment and consequences of undesired responses (e.g being ignored) although  Skinner said that language was learnt mostly by positive reinforcement. He also suggested tat babbling would not progress to speech unless the parent gave them praise


Experiment
The rat and the food experiment, the rat learnt that to get a reward (food) he had to push down the leaver, he then learnt to repeat this behaviour (can we extrapolate this to human behaviour?)


Vygotsky's Zone of proximal development
Vygotsky stresses the role of social interaction and that culture has an effect on cognitive development. He created the zone of proximal development which is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help.


Scaffolding (Vygotsky and Bruner)
Scaffolding is the strategies that caregivers provide for learners that they can then use independently


Naom Chomsky
Chomksy believes that children are born with an inherited ability to learn any language. He believes that every child has a 'language acquisition device' or LAD which encodes the major principles of language and its grammatical structures into the child's brain. Children then only have to learn new vocabulary and apply the structures from the lad to form sentences. Chomsky points out that a child could not possibly learn a language through imitation alone because language spoken around them is highly irregular and sometimes ungrammatical.


Evidence to support

• Overgeneralisation - mistakes such as 'I drawed' show they are not learning form imitation alone
• Children learning to speak rarely get their subjects, verbs and objects in the wrong order

Investigation plan

Quantified data

1. Words associated with the lexical field of make-up

- words to do with make-up when considered within their context e.g. 'shade' wouldn't count if the topic was about colours rather than colours of eye shadow
- excluding repetitions of words (looking at variety)
excluding proper nouns e.g. brand names and make-up artists as is it hard to distinguish between whether they are strictly make-up related

     2. Words with positive connotations


- that promote confidence
- that provide advice
- including multiple word phrases that do not make sense alone




      3. Empty adjectives


- as identified by Robin Lackoff (claims they represent deficiency)
- hard to define (possible issue)
- 'generally positive and appealing but vague in meaning'






Other things to include

• Gender interpellation (Louis Althusser in Marxist theory) http://www.longwood.edu/staff/mcgeecw/notesoninterpellation.htm
• Include relevant info on changes over time of how we perceive gender
• Any other theories , Dominance?, Difference?
• Opposing theories, Janet Hyde?

Methodolgy

Deborah Cameron proposed the idea that language is the primary influence upon creating gender stereotypes, highlighting the importance of social causes rather than biological predispositions. I will be looking at children’s magazines that are fundamentally aimed at young girls (8-12 years of age) In relation to Cameron’s opposing theories around the heavily debated topic “The Myth of Mars and Venus”. Within these magazines I will look predominantly at how the use of language creates representations of young girls amongst several magazines and compare the differences between them. 

I have picked my data very carefully to reduce extraneous variables that may influence my results in relation to reliability and comparability factors. I have chosen 3 well-known magazines that are readily available in popular shops that are all aimed at the same target audience. I felt that 3 was enough to allow me to gather a good amount of information to look at and sort through and find what will be applicable to my investigation. It will also allow me to identify similarities and differences between them and thus increasing reliability and comparability factors.

 I have also ensured that these magazines are all recent (dated Oct – Nov) to improve the temporal validity of my data. I feel that this was a very important factor to consider when choosing my particular data as we know that attitudes about women have evolved over time. For example looking at magazines from the 1940’s would not be comparable to now due to previous social concepts and norms that would no longer be acceptable to produce. Despite this I will not be ignoring these arguable advances from my investigation as I feel it is an important topic and I still expect to see some similarities. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have also considered the slightly more obvious issue of differences amongst cultures and eliminated these by ensuring that all my magazines are English, because representations of women vary over time but also from culture to culture. As I am looking at published magazines there are no issues with privacy meaning I did not need any permission when collecting my data.

Zach transcript comparison essay

We would expect fluency of speech to improve and develop as the child grows older, although in the second transcript there are instances when Zach's language seems less fluent than the previous year. We could suggest various reasons as to why this is the case in relation to contextual factors such as the fact that in this transcript Zach is playing and being imaginative and therefore a lot of what he is saying is being made up on the spot. We can see an example of this where he says 'an I'm sitting here (.) to (.) for waiting (.) to get (0.5) better (.) for it (0.5)’ where examples of pauses and a false start can be seen. Alternatively it could be due to the fact we know that Zach is ‘home ill’ and it is likely this will affect his language. Despite this, the mean length of utterance (MLU) is noticeably greater in the second transcript, compared to more simple utterances in the first transcript, as we would expect, With an MLU of  0.7 in the first transcript and 1.2 in the second. In addition to suggesting Zach’s language has advanced we can draw attention to the fact that there are slightly more open questions in the second transcript and as these are likely to produce longer, more complex replies and therefore a longer MLU. However, in order to make conclusions about Zach’s language development we would need far more utterances to allow the MLU data to be both comparable and reliable.

 

We can see Zach’s development from telegraphic ‘look (.)/blown away’ to post telegraphic ‘please can you pick it up?’ showing improved ability to sustain a conversation. His language is very developed at both ages although there are occasions where he uses what Naom Chomsky calls ‘overgeneralisation’. For example Zach says ‘bolognay’ rather than ‘bolognaise’ which could be an example of him over applying the rule for making nouns plural, which in this case is an example of non-standard English. Chomsky also believes that children are born with an innate ability to learn any language, although this theory is widely criticised  for ignoring the importance of interaction, for example, Zach would not have known the correct term ‘bolognese’ without communication between him and his mother.

 

Looking at the transcripts we can see that Zach shows general understanding of the structure of a conversation. Despite occasionally needing prompts to expand on his simple utterances he does not interrupt speaker H. He shows comprehension of turn taking and adjacency pairs, for instance when speaker H uses the interrogative ‘what have you eaten today?’ and Zach replies ‘bananas’.  

 

In the second transcript Zach seems as if he is the dominant speaker, supporting most theories concerning language and gender, such as Zimmerman and West’s dominance theory. He is seen to set the agenda in both conversations and even uses back-channelling ‘We don’t need breakfast (.) it’s gonna take a little time now…’ to divert the conversation back to robots. Alternatively it could be argued that this specific example actually contradicts Zach’s dominance within this conversation with his use of a cloaked imperative. Tannen says that is in fact women who use cloaked imperatives and this suggests deficiency in speech. Although with lack of context this is clearly a command and is likely to influence speaker H’s behavior, I would say it is an example of representational speech rather than regulatory speech purely because of the use of a cloaked imperative.

 

It is evident from both transcripts that there are various efforts made by speaker H to aid the child’s language development. On various occasions speaker H, the mother, models the standard form of the word after the child has used the incorrect form. For example, again Z says ‘bolognay’ and the mother repeats back ‘bolognaise’ and the pronunciation of  ‘through’ as ‘frough’ is corrected in order to help the child’s learning. We can relate this to Deb Roy’s well renowned theory that parents adapt their language to be more simplistic around children, allowing them to understand and learn. Speaker H uses very straightforward utterances with few words, and is often seen echoing words that Z has previously used to reinforce them.  Numerous prompts are used throughout both essays to encourage the child to talk and elaborate on what he is saying for example ‘’Z: What are you drawing (.) Zach?” The use of the direct address ‘Zach’ also identifies that the utterance is directed at him and therefore making him more likely to answer.

Methodology plan

Methodology

Theory

• Deborah Cameron, spoke about how our language is influenced by and influences gender stereotypes in her book ‘The Myth of Mars and Venus’. She challenges "the idea that sex-differences might have biological rather than social causes.
• How the language of the media creates these stereotypes form a very young but these differences are not pre-determined.
• Nature vs nurture debate

Reliability

• 3 girls magazines from the different companies 
• All recent (Oct/Nov) temporal validity
• Recent, English – to avoid differences in culture and cultural changes across time e.g. ideas about gender have considerably changed in recent years – still some issues.
• Reliable gender theories – well accounted/well known

Comparability

• All recent (Oct/Nov)
• Directed at a similar audience (Age)
• Same price (£3.99)
• Similar availability

Ethicality

• Published – no issues with privacy

Possible coursework ideas

1. The language of the media

• attitudes-how do people feel about this language?
• power of media text
• criticism of language use
• hidden meanings?
• portrayal of different social groups, gender, races, religions? etc.
• semantics
• stereotypes
• Encoding and decoding
• denotation and connotation

Gender and the media theory

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_and_gender
• John Berger "Men look, women appear" - women are solely for the objectification of men within all aspects of the media
• http://www.theoryhead.com/gender/extract.htm
•  http://coleshillmediasite.weebly.com/uploads/4/6/0/1/4601434/media_gender_and_identity.pdf
• Tim O Sullivan et al.(1998) "ideas about gender are produced and reflected in language"

Zach drawing a banana transcript analysis

• Virtuous mistake 'I cutting round the edge'
• Non fluency features before more challenging words '(.) banana'
• Requesting action 'where's my little pad gone?
• 'what can the banana have' - imaginative
• 'don't want to eat skins' showing contextual knowledge
• fillers 'erm'
• correcting/modelling adult form Z: frough H: through
• Repetion and labelling Z: Daddy's dinner
• Heuristic - learning of environment 'what's this lasagne'