CHILD LANGUAGE Research and further reading

Semantic Roles Roger Brown (1973) Looks at the 2 word stage ( months) and categorises utterances into their semantic relationships.

Semantic roles Agent + action daddy kick Action + objectkick ball Agent + objectdaddy car Action + locativedrive there Entity + locativeball there Possessor + possessionmummy car Entity + attributecar blue Demonstrative + entitythat car Adapted from Open University course book Unit 12 How is Language Learned by Pam Czerniewska

Semantic Roles – conclusions? Could support both Chomsky and Piaget, as children tend to use the same patterns, perhaps suggesting shared innate ‘equipment’ or shared representations of the world linked to cognition.

Acquisition of morphology Roger Brown (1973) Looked at the stages children go through in acquiring grammatical inflections (“-ing” & “- ed”) and grammatical morphemes such as prepositions (“in”, “on”) & determiners (“the”, “a”)

Inflection/ grammatical morphemes stages 1: -ing 2: plural -s 3: possessive -’s 4: “the” “a” 5: past tense -ed 6: 3rd person sing -s 7: auxiliary “be”

Morphology - conclusions Again, using a longitudinal study of 3 children, Brown found recurring patterns which might lead us to think that Chomsky’s nativist and Piaget’s cognitive theories are broadly accurate: language is linked to cognition (Piaget) and language acquisition is innate (Chomsky, Pinker etc.). The “wugs” test seems to back this up too…

Jean Berko and wugs Another famous study of children’s use of morphology was the “wugs” test. Using a made-up animal, she tested the children’s application of the “-s” plural rule and found that nearly all of them applied it to a noun they’d never heard before.

Negatives and Questions These are important elements of a child’s early language development and again the patterns behind them can throw light on the nature of CLA. Adapted from:

Questions Question formation is in 3 stages: Intonation alone: “Mummy gone?” Wh- words: “Where Mummy gone?” Auxiliary verbs and word order: “Where has Mummy gone?” or “Is Mummy here?”

Negation Negative formation is also in 3 stages: Use of “no” or “not” as negative markers at beginnings of utterances: “no juice”, “no like that” Use of auxiliary verbs: “don’t like that” and “can’t eat no more” Other forms, e.g. “didn’t”, “isn’t”; full accuracy

Semantic development Jean Aitchison (1987) proposed a 3 stage process to children’s lexical and semantic development (acquisition of meanings of words): Labelling Packaging Network building

Critical Period Hypothesis Along with the other theories, comes a view from Eric Lenneberg that language acquisition can only take place within a “critical learning period” after which the LAD is deactivated. He originally proposed the CLP as between 2 and 13 But research by Jacques Mehler shows that children as young as a few days old respond to their native language (i.e. the language being spoken around them) in different ways to other languages. One example of the CLP is the widely-cited case of Genie, whose full story can be read in your resource packs.

A functional approach to CLA Michael Halliday proposed a slightly different approach to language acquisition. Language is acquired in a social context – that is by interacting with other people. Children first learn how to communicate by using gestures such as arm-raising, head-shaking and pointing or by making noises; these are used to achieve functions such as controlling the behaviour of others (e.g. head-shaking could mean “Don’t do that”) or satisfying a physical need (e.g. pointing could mean “I want that.”) Later the child begins to use what Halliday calls protolanguage (the child’s own words) and, finally, conventional words are used. Gradually the constraints of speaking (e.g. the need to be clear and to be expressive) force the child to make longer utterances and mould the structure of the child’s language. (from

Halliday’s functions Instrumental – to satisfy needs and wants: “Juice!” Regulatory – to control others: “Lift me up, daddy” Interactional – to create interactions with others: “Bye bye” Personal – to express personal thoughts and opinions: “I no like custard” Imaginative – to create imaginary worlds: “I’m a dragon – roarrr” Heuristic – to seek information: “What’s that, mummy?” Informative – to communicate information: “We had fish for lunch.” adapted from

Case studies and further research Other reading that can help: Jean Berko: “wugs” experiment (1958) Katherine Nelson: children’s first words (1973) Michael Halliday: functions of early speech – not so much what children say as what they mean. Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct Jean Aitchison: The Language Web

Useful links Try some of these sites for further explanations and data: Kidspeak: How Children Acquire Language Kidspeak: How Children Acquire Language Steven Pinker on CLA Andrew Moore’s CLA pages