Baby Talk

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Baby Talk

• How Infants Become Children

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Questions about Language Acquisition

• Is language innate?
• If it is, what skills allow children to learn
  language?
• What part does caretaker speech play in
  language acquisition?
• What is the schedule for acquisition?
• How do children learn the subsystems?
• How do we describe a childs language?

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Innateness of Language

• Children seemed primed from birth to learn
  language.
• Watch faces of people carefully
• Newborns distinguish their parents speech from
  that of others.
• Newborns distinguish their native language from
  foreign languages.

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Preconditions for Acquisition

• Language is dependent on live human interaction.
• Language is culturally and contextually
  determined.
• Children must be intellectually and physically
  capable of acquiring language.

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Theories of Language Acquisition

• Imitation Theory Children learn by listening and
  reproducing what they hear
• Does not account for regular speech errors
• Does not account for a child grammar
• Reinforcement Theory Children earn praise and
  reward
• Correction usually factual
• Correction rarely works

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Child as Grammar Builder

• Active Construction Children build the rules of
  their own grammar
• Children analyze utterances around them for sound
  and grammatical content
• Hypothesize rules to account for patterns
• Test their patterns through speech
• Children eventually prune away inaccurate rules

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Baby Talk

• Caretaker language may help children acquire
  language.
• Simplified speech with exaggerated sounds,
  frequent questions, simplified words, reference
  to childs environment.
• Conversational even when child is preverbal.
• Changes as childs stage of acquisition changes.

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Pre-linguistic Stages

• Birth thru mid-teens (ha-ha) crying
• 3-6 months Cooing. Production of velar
  consonants k g vowels
• 6-10 months Babbling. Production of a variety of
  sounds along with recog-nizable patterns of
  intonation. Usually CV sounds.Alien language.
• 10 months-beginning speech Sound-play.

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Holophrastic Stage

• 12-18 months.
• Single unit utterances.
• Single words for real-world references mama,
  dada, milk, cookie, kitty, cup.
• Simplified phrases whasa? For Whats that?
• Associative.

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Two-word Stage 18-20 months

• Childs vocabulary exceeds fifty words.
• By 24 months, complex patterns implying
  sentential relationships.
• Cat bad, baby chair, baby sleep.
• The Cat is bad. This is babys chair. The baby
  needs to sleep.
• Child capable of understanding up to 2000 and
  producing 200-400 words.

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Telegraphic Stage 2-3 years

• Quantity of multiple word utterances.
• At first, only lexical morphemes.
• Baby want ball.
• Baby sleep.
• Later, you find simple inflectional endings and
  function words.
• Baby want a ball.
• Baby is asleep.
• Baby sleeping.

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Process of Acquisition

• Children acquire--they are not taught.
• First must decode the speech stream, breaking
  utterances into their component parts.
• Derive rules from speech.
• Word-play.

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Morphology

• By the age of three, children begin to acquire
  inflectional morphology -ing, -s (plural).
• Overgeneralize the rules foots, mans, boyses,
  footses, feetses.
• Children learn through interaction with language
  reading, parents, other children.
• Children dont learn to speak from TV.

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Sequence of Morpheme Acquisition

• -ing
• plural s
• possessive s
• the and a
• regular past tense ed
• third person singular s
• auxiliary be

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Syntax

• Stage I (18-26 months).
• Questions Addition of wh- word Where kitty?
  Where horse go?
• Negatives Addition of no No fall.
• Stage II (22-30 months).
• Questions Rising intonation.
• Negatives Addition of dont and cant.
• Stage III (24-40 months).
• Questions Inversion of verb Can I have a piece?
• Negatives Additional auxiliaries didnt, isnt

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Semantics

• Overextension of meaning.
• Use of middle-level term animal-dog-poodle.
• Overextension of meaning in particular
  dimensions.
• Motor vehicles trucks (movement, purpose,
  setting).
• Stuffed animals bears (shape, texture, context).
• Fly insects (size, context).