English Language Theorists Of Language Acquisition

Front 1

Noam Chomsky

Back 1

Children in all languages make the same mistakes.
This means that all children must have the same innate knowledge of language, before they have even started acquiring any.

Front 2

Jerome Bruner

Back 2

"LASS" Language Acquisition Support System.
A child's social environment and their social interaction with others is extremely important to their process of learning.
1) Draw the baby's attention to the picture
2) Ask the baby to identify said picture
3) Tell the baby what the picture is
4) Respond to any of the babies utterances

Front 3

Jean Piaget

Back 3

Language acquisition is directly proportional to a child's cognitive development. They must understand what they are saying, before they are able to say it. Whereby Piaget believes children learn to talk 'naturally' without the deliberate teaching from adults.
~4 developmental stages~

Front 4

B.F Skinner

Back 4

Children respond to a system of rewards for good things and punishments for bad things. Positive reinforcement encourages children to use language properly, as they will receive a reward afterwards.
~4 general types of speech~

Front 5

Eric Lenneberg

Back 5

Claimed there was a 'critical period' in which language can be acquired (the first 12 years of a person's life). Once this period is ended, children are unable to acquire language properly/at all. The Wild Child (Genie) supported this theory.

Front 6

Lev Vygotsky

Back 6

Children learn through hands on experience. He claimed that a timely intervention, when a child is on the brink of learning of something new (Zone of Proximal Development, ZPD), could benefit them. This technique is otherwise known as scaffolding. He also proposed the theory of the More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) being beneficial to children.

Front 7

Jean Aitchison

Back 7

Proposed 3 stages of language acquisition:
1) Labelling: Child making links between sounds of particular words and the objects they refer to.
2) Packaging: Understanding a word's range of meaning.
3) Network Building: Grasping the connections between words... Some words have opposite meanings (antonyms) / Understanding the relationship between hypernyms and hyponyms.

Front 8

David Crystal

Back 8

Viewed as a social Interationist (believes that input is essential in helping children to acquiring language).
He also claimed that adults change their language when interacting with children.
~Child Directed Speech~

Front 9

Micheal Halliday

Back 9

Seven functions of child's language acquisition.
Language is acquired in a social context, whereby interaction is key. Children first learn to communicate via gestures (pointing/shaking or nodding of the head). Next protolanguage is used, and then conventional words. Gradually, the need to be clear and expressive gives way and children start putting sentences together.

Front 10

Jean Berko

Back 10

Even very young children have internalised systematic aspects of the English language such as plurals, past tense, possessives and other forms of words they've never heard before. First experimental proof that children are capable of learning rules from the language around them.

Front 11

Berko & Brown

Back 11

'Fis phenomenon.' Babies do not hear themselves in the same way that they hear others. This means no amount of correction will change this. Also supports the theories that children can understand language before they are able to coherently speak it.

Front 12

Cruttenden

Back 12

A football results experiment highlighted that children of young ages are unable to grasp the importance of the intonation of a person's voice. //
Three stages of Inflection:
1) Children learn singular words with no regard for general rules or principle.
2) Children begin to learn the general rules and principles. So, they say "runned" instead of "ran" because of -ed suffix and "foots" because of the -s plural.
3) Children use inflections correctly.

Front 13

Bellugi, Cazden and Brown

Back 13

Parents respond to the truth value of what their children say. So, "there doggie" would get positive reinforcement as opposed to "No, say there is a dog!"

Front 14

Kathryn Nelson

Back 14

Children at the holophrastic stage whose mothers corrected them on word choice and punctuation advanced slower than those who were generally accepting. //
Rerential children develop concrete nouns first
Imaginative children are more developed and are capable of using abstract nouns also

Front 15

Bloom

Back 15

As the two-word stage is context-bound and is not always clear children are forced to move onto the next stage of utterance, telegraphic.

Front 16

Brown

Back 16

Inflectional Order:
1) -ing
2) Plural -s
3) Poessisive -s
4) Determiners the, a
5) Past tense -ed
6) Third person singular verb ending -s (eg she sings)
7) Auxiliary verb be