CLA - PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT:

PRELINGUISTIC FEATURES:
In the first year we see:
*Crying
*Cooing
*Babbling, rhythmic and melodic
*Phonemic expansion and contraction
*Repeated consonant-vowel patterns

AVERAGE AGES:
*AGE 2 1/2 - Can pronounce all vowels and 2/3 of consonants
First consonants mastered tend to be: b d m n h
*AGE 4 - Struggles with a few consonants but confident elsewhere 
Difficulty tends to arise with pronunciation of consonants at the end of words rather than the beginning.
*AGE 6/7 - Confident use of all phonemes.

SIPLIFICATION MECHANISMS:
If the child repetitively struggles with pronunciation then they utilise a variety of techniques to overcome these difficulties and still communicate:
*DELETION - Omitting the final consonant of words - ca(t), bow(l)
*CONSONANT CLUSTER REDUCTIONS - Clusters of consonants are difficult to produce so they are reduced to smaller units - nake for snake, pider for spider
*DELETION OF UNSTRESSED SYLLABLES - Omitting the opening syllable of polysyllabic words - (ba)nana 

*SUBSTITUTION - Substituting another phoneme/sound in to replace another - dere for there, pip for ship
*ADDITION - Extra vowel sound added to the end of the word to create a CV pattern as used in babbling - dog to doggie, pig to piggy
*REDUPLICATION - Repetition of the whole syllable in a word - choochoo
*ASSIMILATION - Changing only one consonant or vowel directly for another - gog for dog

INTONATION:
As the child matures and their linguistic abilities strengthen, they use varied intonation to express further meaning. The motor ability to vary intonation is gained at a young age however understanding of the connotations still develops all the way up to teen years.
* 'my car' vs 'MY car' ---> stress on 'MY' has implied meaning of not wanting to share and strong possession.
*CRUTTENDEN 1974 - Investigated the effect of intonation on children and adult predictions of a football score. Found the adults successfully predicted the winners based on the intonation stressed on the team name over the voice-over but the children (aged 7-11) were significantly less successful than the adults.

AITCHISON:
'It is unlikely that a new born baby or child under one year realise that the sounds that come out of people’s mouths ‘stand for’ things and actions’ - 1987
*Aitchison drew links between a child's semantic and lexical growth:
STAGE 1 / LABELLING - Linking words to objects and understanding that things can be given names.
STAGE 2 / PACKAGING - Exploring where these labels are applicable and stretching these names = over/underextension occurs until confident in meaning.
STAGE 3 / NETWORK BUILDING - Understanding similarities and differences in words and identifying opposites.


ARTICULATION:
*PLACE OF ARTICULATION = the place in the mouth the sound originates

BILABIAL - produced with the two lips
INTERDENTAL - tongues between teeth
ALVEOLAR - produced at alveolar ridge
ALVEIO-PALATAL - starts at alveolar ridge then straight to palate
PALATAL - produced at palate
VELAR - produced at velum/soft palate
GLOTTAL - produced at glottis, upper larynx

*MANNER of articulation = the way the sound is produced

PLOSIVE/STOP - total stoppage of airflow in mouth - voiceless: t, k, p voiced: b, d, g
FRICATIVE - partial use of vocal tract producing audible friction - voiced/voiceless: f, th
AFFRICATIVE - stopping airflow then partial release into a fricative - ch, j
NASAL - stopping airflow in the mouth but allowing it to continue in nasal cavity - n, m
LIQUID - give impression of water flowing - r, l
LATERAL - touching tongue to roof of mouth and letting air pass either side - l
APPROXIMANT - consonant produced without turbulence or blockage of airflow - l, y, w

MORE CLA THEORISTS/RESEARCH:

BERKO AND BROWN: FIS PHONOMENON - 
*Perception of phonemes comes before production
*1960 - Berko & Brown: child referred to toy fish as 'fis', when asked if the toy was his 'fis' he responded no but when asked if it was his 'fish', he'd respond yes.
*Shows that although he lacked the motor ability to create the phoneme 'sh', he was able to hear it and comprehend that 'sh' was the appropriate phoneme for fish. 
*Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tmlhQAlP5c
Eve describes her toy fish as a 'jep' but when the mother responds 'your jep?' she protests and begins to get frustrated as she is trying hard to pronounce 'fish' even though it is out of her capabilities at the moment. But when asked if it's her 'fish' she responds: 'yes, jep!' and sounds relieved that the mother got it right. 

JEAN BERKO: WUG TEST - 
* 1958 - Testing knowledge of grammar when applied to gibberish words - if children memorise all that they hear, without analysing the morphemes, how will they react when encountering words they've never heard before? It can't be on their grammar lists if they haven't heard it before.
*EG: 

This is a Wug <'-'>
Now there's another one <'-'> <'-'>
There's 2 of them. There are 2 ........ (Child finishes sentence) WugS.
*Indicates that we remember more than just words and word combinations.
*Children must have a more complex understanding of grammar than initially thought - supports Chomsky's Universal Grammar rather than imitation as words had never been heard before.
*Wug test also used in other countries and has application to many languages.

NELSON: FIRST WORDS -
* http://the-language-cru.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/katherine-nelson.html
*Against Piaget as she views CLA as a 'bridge between a child's social and cultural growth with their growing knowledge of the world'.
*1973 - Study of the first words of 18 children and classified the first 50 words a child learns:
NAMING THINGS - Ball, Dog, Car, Baby, Mummy, Daddy, Shoe
ACTIONS - Give, Put, Down, Stop, Sit
SOCIAL - Hi, No, Bye-Bye, Yes
MODIFIERS - Nice, More, This, Dirty
*The largest group of words (60%ish) were nouns for people, animals and objects, followed by demands/actions and then modifiers and social words.
*Local topics tend to make up the first set of words and Nelson found that objects that are small and handled by kids are the first spoken, unlike large objects like houses etc. 

PATRICIA KUHL: STATISTICS - 
*Why can't we preserve a language by speaking to adults? Agrees with the critical period that our ability to learn language is at a pinnacle up until age 7 where it gradually slopes off until puberty. 
*Kuhl focuses on the 'first critical period in development' - where babies try to master the sounds used in their own language.
*Head turning task used: Baby on mother's lap and sounds played of different phonemes. Timing of head turning is measured to distinguish the sounds they recognise and acknowledge. Found that babies can distinguish between all sounds of all languages but adults are culture-bound listeners - this changes before they turn 1.

*During this period babies are taking statistics on how their parents, and the adults speaking their intended language around them, speak.
*EG: Statistics of English and Japanese are very different: 
*These statistics change the brains of babies and thus shape them into culture-bound listening adults.

*Kuhl exposed American babies during this critical period to Mandarin (12 sessions in 1 month) and found that they had taken on board the statistics just as well as the native babies in Taiwan who had been listening for 10 months.
*They ran further tests in which babies were exposed to Mandarin through TV, just audio and through human interaction and found that only social interaction taught them the statistics. (Support for importance of socialisation in CLA).

DEB ROY: BIRTH OF A WORD -
*Cameras and microphones in every room set on continuous capture
*3 years recorded, 90,000 hours of video, 1240,000 hours of audio, 200 terabytes, over 7 million words transcribed - all to understand the social influence on language acquisition
*1 - 1.5 years old, son learned the pronunciation of water from gagagaga to gaga to guga to wada to wader to water ... however this wasn't linear as he between making progress would return back to gaga between steps.
*Why are certain words born first? Parent speech decreases in complexity just before a word is learnt and then slowly ascends back - caregivers are systematically and subconsciously restructuring their language to assist learning (scaffolding).
*Context: the word water is predominantly heard in the kitchen and thus that's where it is mainly spoken and 'bye' is mainly used at the door (highlights importance of context and environment).

BELLUGI: NEGATION -
*1966 - Proposed a stage theory in the formation of negatives.
*Believes that children find it hard to immediately form negatives correctly so they learn in stages:
STAGE 1 - 'No' put at start or end of utterance - 'no wear coat'
STAGE 2 - 'No' placed in the middle and next to a verb - 'I no like it'
STAGE 3 - Use 'don't' or 'can't' - 'I don't want to...'
STAGE 4 - Use do not or can not correctly and precisely - 'I do not think...'

PRONOUNS - 
*Same sort of idea with pronoun development:
STAGE 1 - Uses own name (Third person) - 'Poppy play'
STAGE 2 - Acknowledges 'I' and 'Me' (First person) - 'Me eat food'
STAGE 3 - Correct form 

OPINION ARTICLE - CATCH IT, BIN IT, KILL IT: PRESCRIPTIVISM VS DESCRIPTIVISM

(Not the best so just some ideas thrown together)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2016/apr/20/grammar-snobs-are-patronising-pretentious-and-just-plain-wrong-video#comment-72877318


Do you suffer from chronic irritation at the sight of a misused apostrophe? Do you tense up when someone begins a sentence with 'and' or 'but'? Are you unable to stop your entire body twitching when someone writes defiantly instead of definitely, or pacifically instead of specifically? Then it sounds like you have a textbook case of prescriptivism - a linguistic syndrome, almost an epidemic. Prescriptivism is the name given to the belief that language shouldn't change and should only be used as originally intended. Prescriptivists hold the view that any non-standard uses of the English language are simply incorrect and quite frankly disgusting. If this all sounds familiar to you then don't be offended! You'll find fellow sufferers in the comment section of Guardian articles and deep in the abyss of Reddit. But where did the outbreak start? Language change and standardisation have been hot topics for linguists for centuries and evolution in technology, war and fashion have fuelled the discussion but the debate is far from settled.

Time for a brief run through history to gather a sense of the argument and where we stand: 1476, Caxton's printing press is released and the ignition to the language change argument is set ablaze. Previous spellings for words are simply cast out due to there either being a technical issue with printing certain spellings (hence the use of the long S in many shakespearian texts) or publishers take responsibility into their own hands and choose spellings which they rank as being most popular. This is followed by an onslaught of dictionaries and language guides from almost half the English speaking population as they each felt their dialect was superior and most efficient. And thus the prescriptivist attitude was born. People began to order Englishes into a hierarchy of most to least desirable to rid of certain traits and although today our language is fairly standard there are some areas of grammar causing dispute.

Prescriptivist attitudes are no mystery to linguists either. Jean Aitchison, a Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford, developed a few theories to attempt to explain the views of prescriptivism and why we aren't all just accepting of language change and its inevitability. 
1) Damp Spoon Syndrome - 'wrong or bad English' is a result of laziness and, like those who leave a damp spoon to soak in the sugar bowl, it sticks and people cannot be bothered to correct themselves. 
2) Infectious Disease - linguistic diseases are spread between people with no control or preventative medicine. People catch 'poor language' and spread it amongst their peers with no say in the matter.
3) Crumbling Castle - our language was once a beautiful archaic castle sat upon a hill and should be frozen this way in time forever and preserved but language has never been at a pinnacle - so when would we save it?
But Aitchison however is a representative of the opposing team - the descriptivists.

Descriptivism is the antithesis of prescriptivism as the argument supports language change and accepts that it is necessary and useful. Descriptivists never judge language as 'incorrect' or 'mistake-ridden' but instead they comment on how 'non-standard' it is. The descriptivists are the optimists in the argument as they look back in history to appreciate how far we have come linguistically and theorise about the potential English has to expand even further. Well-known linguist David Crystal is quotes as saying ''the only languages that do not change are the dead ones'' and in my eyes this summarises the debate perfectly. If language was a person we would expect them to learn through experience and grow so why stop this process?

So the next time you catch your nose running at the sight of the latest internet coined slang term, consider the creativity that goes into language and don't take someone's voice away. 

MEANING AND REPRESENTATIONS: ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH ADVERT

TEXT A

Text A, an advert for male nurses, creates meaning and representations through text-image cohesion. The title of the advert reads in a bold black font: 'ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH... TO BE A NURSE?'. The use of the bold text in a dark colour mean it stands out against the white background, making it the centre of attention. The title, through the use of the direct address personal pronoun 'you', is an example of synthetic personalisation as it appears to be posing the question to the individual reading the text. Graphologically, the imagine in the middle of the advert features 9 males stood directly facing the camera and making eye-contact with the reader. By using language and imagery to link together, the message that they want 'you' as a male nurse is strengthened and readers are more likely to do more research into the topic or feel compelled to join. 

Stereotypical masculinity is depicted in this advert through the dark and bold house colours of the advert which directly juxtapose one another and through the powerful body language of the men. By using dark colours against a white background it connotes harshness, bluntness and is straight to the point. This imitates the message the advert is posing as it is also straight to the point and simple  - they need more male nurses. The body language of the men also contributes to this idea as their postures are powerful and strong, featuring crossed arms and a firm stance. This signifies their solidarity and dedication to the male nurse profession.

At the bottom of the text the job description is summarised through the use of the advective rule of 3 and a multitude of buzz words. The text uses the word 'career' to describe the vocation as it connotes dedication and a lifetime choice rather than a 'job' which connotes a laborious task. The use of the adjectives 'intelligence', 'courage' and 'skill' in a group of 3 are utilised to sell the career as well as make it memorable for the reader.