VARIATION IN CHILD FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

1. VARIATION IN CHILD FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

2. The issue of variation in FLA and SLA/SLL Variables influence IN SLL/SLA rate final attainment IN FLA rate

3. Variables in FLA • Effect of situation • Inherited attributes • Gender • Intelligence • Personality and learning style • Social background • Experience of linguistic data • Amount and type of conversation • Qualitative differences in adult-child interaction

4. Effect of situation • Amount and type of motherese • But not all communities use motherese! • Activities, scenes of language use – functionalism!! • Interaction with adults vs.children • Roles of caretakers (carer, playmate, controller, etc.)

5. Gósy (1999): detrimental noise

6. Inherited attributes:Gender • Girls: advantage in rate (Gósy: at early childhood and at 6-7 years) • Reason: different expectations of and communication with them • Strengthens by adulthood: cooperation initiation

7. Intelligence • Studies relating to - size of vocabulary - rate of acquisition of syntactic structures - acquiring spatial/temporal sequences • No significant result - difficult to define intelligence - many types: IQ vs. EQ!

8. Personality and learning style • Extroversion/introversion: initiation speed and ease • Sociability: „join and communicate” • „Referential” and „noun lover” kids learn vocab. faster than „expressive” ones • Two-element combinations of SVO

9. Social background • Points of disagreement: • Nature and size of variation • Resources or use of resources? • Parameters to distinguish social grouping • Mechanism responsible for the relationship betw. group membership and linguistic variation

10. Early studies • Berstein: clear advantage of middle-class children in • rate of learning, • linguistic proficiency, • style (exploratory, explicit language use). • Labov: legitimising dialects

11. Bristol study: • Full range of family backgrounds • Naturally occurring speech samples • No researcher present when recording • Legitimising local dialects No significant difference in - the amount of speech - types of contexts - range of pragmatic functions - rate: controversial

12. Tough (1977) on parental status • Aspects: • Self-maintaining • Directives • Interpretatives • Projectives High FB children did better

13. Experience of linguistic interaction:Amount and type of conversation • Significant relation betw. amount of speech and rate of progress • Rate of development and joint enterprise • As opposed to mothering and independent • Family status • First-borns and kids with no siblings close in age progress faster • Significance of parental attention

14. Qualitative differences in adult and child interaction • Motherese – modification in • Length • Complexity • Intonation • Range of sentence meaning relations • Vocabulary • Interpersonal functions • Discourse functions

15. Rate of development correlates with • More finely-tuned talk (sensitive and responsive to kids’ reaction) • Matching – referential - accepting parental behaviour • Contingent speech • Concern to facilitate conversation • Vs.concern to control behaviour (= expressive, unidirectional!)

16. Conclusion • Variables mainly influence rate • Controversial influence: • Gender • Personality • Social class • Strongest influence: • Quality and amount of caretaker talk • Interactive community is essential for FLA • Rehabilitation potential limited in time