1. Piaget's Three Mountains Experiment

2. Variations on Three Mountain Experiments

3. Semantic Relations in Two-Word Utterances
Relationship
Example
Agents + action
Action + object
Agent + object
Action + locative (location)
Object + locative
Possessor + possessed
Attribute + object
Demonstrative + object
Baby cry
Eat cookie
Bobby cookie
Jump stair
Teddy bed
Mommy sandwich
Big dog
There Daddy

4. 2 to 5 Year Language Explosion
Prelinguistic: crying signals, gooing, cooing, babbling, squeals, yells, inflection by 9 months
Holophrastic: One word means many things. Starts about 1 year. 40 to 50 words by 18 months, 300 words by 2 years.
Telegraphic: Two or three word phrases (“Where go?” “More milk.” “No bath!” “Big boat.” “Mommy’s dress.”). From about 18 to 24 months.
Stage II Grammar: Includes plurals, overgeneralizations. From about 2 to 3 years.
Adult-like Speech: Starts at about 5 to 6 years.

5. Broca's
area
Primary
auditory
Wernicke's
Motor cortex

6. Theories of Language Acquisition
Social Learning Theories: Language acquisition through imitation or modeling
Reinforcement: The child is conditioned to perform verbal behavior. (B.F. Skinner, 1957)
Innateness: We are “pre-wired” or “preprogrammed” to learn language through a language acquisition device (L.A.D.) in the brain. (Chomsky)
Combined View: Includes predisposition and input from the environment, but the child plays an active, creative role in learning language. Perception, cognition, motor, social and emotional factors are all involved.

7. Summary of Early Childhood Cognitive Development
Preoperational thinking, not yet logical, unable to see another’s viewpoint.
Child has gone through “language explosion,” emerging with vocabulary of over 14,000 words, and syntactically correct usage.