Baby Talk

1. Baby Talk How Infants Become Children

2. 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 child’s language?

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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

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

8. 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.

9. Holophrastic Stage • 12-18 months. • Single unit utterances. • Single words for real-world references: mama, dada, milk, cookie, kitty, cup. • Simplified phrases: whasa? For “What’s that?” • Associative.

10. Two-word Stage: 18-20 months • Child’s vocabulary exceeds fifty words. • By 24 months, complex patterns implying sentential relationships. • Cat bad, baby chair, baby sleep. • The Cat is bad. This is baby’s chair. The baby needs to sleep. • Child capable of understanding up to 2000 and producing 200-400 words.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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 don’t learn to speak from TV.

14. 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 don’t and can’t. • Stage III (24-40 months). • Questions: Inversion of verb: Can I have a piece? • Negatives: Additional auxiliaries: didn’t, isn’t

15. 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).