*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
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