ChildAcquisition, Apuntes de Pedagogía

¡Descarga ChildAcquisition y más Apuntes en PDF de Pedagogía solo en Docsity!

223 Child language acquisition The data: milestones in child language development All normally developing children, acquiring any of the world's spoken or signed languages, follow a similar path of language development and reach the major milestones in the same order. However, there is significant variability in the age at which these milestones are reached. The first sounds The techniques described above have yielded much of what we know about infant lan- guage ability in the early months, and in particular what we know about the development of speech perception during the fest year af life, Speech perception — which includes, for instance, 1he ability to segment the speech stream into meaningful units, to recognize one's own name in Une speech stream, or to distinguish between similar sounding vowels (e.y. /ee/ and /00/) — is a critical skill that infants develop early in life. These early language skills also involve visual information; for instance, infants as young as two months have been shown to be able to match vowel sounds they hear with the appropriate lip, mouth, and face movements. These carly speech perception skills related to the sound structure of language may help infanls to bootstrap into more complex language competencies; bootstrapping refers to the possibility that skills in one area of language might help the child to develop competencios in other language arcas. For instance, infants” ability to recognize their own names in the speech stream (which appears around the fifth month) may provide them with a means to tecognize novel, adjacent words. (See Box 6.3.) Early research in speech perception dernonstrated that during their first few months of life, infants are able to discriminate between similar sounds (for example, between /b/ and /pA) both in their native language(s) as well as in other languages. Over time, however, infants become more attuned to their native language(s) and less able lo make sound distinctions Kendall A. King ¿¿BOX-6.3H0W.FAMILIAR NAMES HELP BABIES BEGIN : TO SEGMENT SPEECH How do infants learn to segment the speech stream and to recognize individual words? Bortfeld et al. ¿ (2005) provided evidence that infants can exploit familiar words, such as their own names, to segment i- adjacent untamiliar words from a fluent stream of speech. In other words, infants' names appear to serve as an “anchor” in the speech stream, helping them to disambiguate the words which come just ¿ after their name. Using the “headturn preference procedure,” the experimenters first familiarized 24 six-month-old infants with two six-sentence passages. In one passage, each of the sentences contained the baby's own name followed by 4 novel word (e.g. “Emma?s fcct”), Merc, feetis the familiar-name target. In the other passage, each of the six sentences contained a different name (i.e. not the baby's own) followed i by another novel word (e.g. “AutumYs cup”). Here, cis the altemate-name target, Infants were paired so that the alternate-name passage for one infant was the familiar-mame passage for another, ¿ and vice versa. The researchers then sought to determine whether infants had formed a preference for : the familiar-name target relative to the alternate-name target (and nonfamiliarized control words) by testing them on each in isolation. Stimuli were presented through laudspeakers located en each side of - a Lesting booth; the dependent variable was how long infants oriented to the side on which the word 3 was being played. Bortfeld and her colieagues found that the infants listened significantly longer to the familiar-name target than to the alternate-name target, while there was no difference in how lang the infants attended to the alternate-name targets and the nonfamiliarized controls. A second experiment produced similar results, indicating that six-month-old intants fikewise displayed a preference for wards linked with another familiar name, this time the moniker for their mather (Mommy or Mama), over words linked with an unfariliar name (Lolty or Lola). Based on these 3 resulls, Le researchers concluded (hal lamiliar names provide a useful means for infants to break into a 3 fluent stream of speech and segment out previousty unfamiliar words that follow those names. in other languages. Janet Werker and her colleagues, for instance, working with Hindi- and English-speaking adults and English-learning infants, illustrated that while English- learning infants (six to eight months old) and Hindi-spcaking adults could distingulsh between the Hindi sounds of /da/ and /Da/, English-speaking adults could not. Her work demonstrated that English-leaming infants seem to lose this skill quite quickly, with the sharpest decline in perceptual ability occurring around the end of the first ycar of life. This line al research underscores lhe fact Uat infanis are born with (he capacity lo learn any language In the warld, but the capacity Lo hear like a nalive fades very early on. The first sound made by all infants is crying. All infants can do this immediately from birth; although crying may signal distress, discomfort, poredom, or other emotions in the first month of life, itis not an intentional attempt to communicate. From abont the second to fifth month, infants engage in cooing. Coos are generally vowel-like sounds that are often interpreted as signs of pleasure and playfulness. All infants begin to babble anywhere between four and six months and generally continue to do so until they reach around one year of age, Babbling is characterized by vowel or consorantovowel sounds such as ouve-omy otma-ma. At this age, infants' tongues tend to be relatively large compared to the size of (heir mouths, and as a result, these 226 Kendall A. KIng ' BOX 6.4 BILINGUALISM AND THE LANGUAGE DELAY MYTH It is widely believed that leaming more than one language causes a delay in language acquisition í overall. In order to test this assumptian, Pearson et al, (1997) compared two groups of children ranging from elghl months to two and a half years. One group consisted of children acquiring English onky, while the other were acquiring English and Spanish simultanenusly, Parents were asked to complete ¿ questionnalres regarding the words their children could produce. The lindings revealed tral bilingual children acquired the two languages at the same rate and timetable as the monolingual children In addition, when the bilingual children's Spanish and English words were added together in one list, the size of their vocabulary list was similar to the size of the monolingual children's vocabulary. : This division of the total vocabulary list between two languages would appear to be a “delay” in the 3 acquístion of the vocabulary of one language by bilingual children. However, by the time chileiren reach the age of four or five, the time it takes all children to become fully fluent in even one language, * the bilingual children have vocabularies equal to that of their monolingual peers for twice that of their monolingual peers ¡fone adds the vocabularies ol bolt languages). While working to master the vocabulary around them, children often engage in bolh semantic overextension and underextension. For instance, a child may overextend the meaning of the word water to include not just drinking water, but also juice, milk, and soda. Underextension, which seems to be less common, refers to the reverse phenomenon: a child, for example, might use baby only to refer to an infant síbling and not to the other babies he/she enconnters, Around age two, children enter (he two-word stage, characterized by use of phrases which are nal more than two words. For English-learning infants, his typically means combinjng a subjecl and verb (e.g. baby cry, mara sleep) or a verb and modifter (e.g. cat row, go out). The ordering of these two-word phrases is not fixed, however, and there tends to be limited systematic use of grammatical morphology (for example, the possessive is formed as Lucia bed rather than Lucía's bed). As in many other stages of their linguistic development, children's capacity for com- prehending words outpaces their production ability. Tor instance, around lhe age of one, children can typically imderstand about seventy difterent words, but only product- ively use about six. There is about a four- to six-month delay between when children can comprehend a given number of words aná when they can produce thal many words themselves. Sometime around he end of (he second year, children's produclive vocabu- lary begins to develop rapidly; this is sometimes known as the vocabulary spurt. During this period, children begin to add about two hundred words a month to their vocabularies! At approximately two and half years of age, children begin to produce phrases af three or more words, entering the multi-word stage (e.p. Graham go out, Daddy cuuk dirmer, Esperanza food all gone). Children's language at this stage has been described as telegraphic speech because, like the ecunomical language used in telegraphs, tt is seemingly direct and makes only limited use of morphological and syntactic markers. 227 Child language acquisition First sentences: morphological and syntactic development Many diary, observational, and experimental studies have documented and explored how children become competenl users of their language's system of morphology and syntax. From this research, we know that for all languages, bolh signed and spoken, this prucess seems to involve the formation of internal “rules”; in olher words, children's increusingly regular use of gramatical forms (even non-adultlike or “incorrect” usages such as brokcd or foots) may reflect children's developing gramatical rule systems, We also know that children seem to begin to acquire this grammatical competence at a very young age and, asin vocabulary development, comprehension skills outpace produc- lion. For instance, children who are only seventeen months of age, and typically sti producing only one- or two=word ufteranices, tend to look longer at video clips that correclly correspond to the grarnnar of the oral commentary, For instance, children who hear “The bear sat on the bird” and are shown two pictures (one of a bear silting on a bird and another of a bird sitting on a bear) will look longer al ne picture where (he bear is sitting on the bird, his rescarch demonstrates that even at very young ages children are tuned inlo he semantic significance of thcir language's grammatical structures. Research has also demonstrated that morpholagical and syntactic development is pre- dictable. Ln other words, all children follow similar patterns and pass [hrough the same developmental sequences as their competence develops. Although there is some variation depending on Ihe language being acquired, many patterns and processes are constant across different language and cultural groups. Below we focus on these patterns for chil- dien acquiring English; in Lhe following section, we'll highlight some of the crosslinguistic and crosscultural differences that have been documented. The development of inflectional and derivational morphology in children's productivo language hecomes apparent once the child enters the multipie-word stage and continues through age five. The development of inflectional morphology was the focus of early and intensive investigation. Brown's investigalion of Adam, Sarah, and Eve, discussed above, made important advances in this are: ee Box 6.5.) is of Adam, Sarah, and Eve's spontaneous speech, Brown mapped out when Through anal different grammalical morphemes consistently appeared in their speech and how Uhis corres- ponded to other aspects of thcir language, in particular to mean length of ntterance (MILU). MLU is a widely used measurement of the complexity of children's language and is calculated from the average number of morphemes (not words) per utterance. Brown illustraled that: (1) the order of acquisition was similar across the three unacquainted children (with present progressive, plural, and pasl irregular verb formas appearing first); (2) the age at which children acquired competence in using these forms varied widely (compare, for instance, Eve and Adam al age two years and three montas in Box 6.5); and (3) the MLU stage served as a 3o0d index of the level of development for grammatical morphology (and indeed was much mote predictive of granmatical development than ago). More recent research has stressed the importance of vocabulary as a predictor of grammatical development. Another early study which sheds light on when children acquire inflectional morph- ology was Jean Berko's famous “wug” study. Ralher than recording and analyzing Child language acquisition Figure 6.2 The Wug test Los This is a wug. E Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two —. children's spontaneous speech as Brown did, Berko asked young children of different ages to form the plural of unknown, nonsense creatures, such as “wugs.” (See Figure 6.2.) The experimenter pointed to an item and said, “This is a wug.” She then showed a picture with the sane two animals and said, “Now here is another one. There are two of them. There are two___?” Berko found that even preschool children were able to torm the plural correctly, demonstrating that they had learned the rule for forming plurals and could apply this rule correctly in novel contexts, and were not just repeating (orms which they had previously heard, In developing these rules, children pass through predictable stages. For instance, chil- dren overgeneralize in the early phases of acquisition, meaning that they apply lhe regular rules of grammar to irregular nouns and verbs. Overgeneralization leads to forms thai we sometimes hear in the speech of young children such as goed, euled, foots, and ing of three phases: fishes. This process ís often described as consi e Phase 1: The child uses the correct past tense of go, tor instance, but does not relate this past-tense went to present-tense go. Rather, wen? is treated as a separate lexical item. e Phase 2: The child construets a rule lor forming the past tersse and begins to overgeneralize this rule to irregular forms such as go (resulting in forms such as g0ed). 230 : BOX 6.6 DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH NEGATIVES AND QUESTIONS (ADAPTED FROM AKMAJIAN ET AL. 1995), Kendall A. King Phase 3: The child learns that there are (many) exceptions to this rule and acquires the ability Lo apply this rule selectively. Note (hat from the observer's or parents' perspectives, Utis development is “U-shaped” — that is, children can appear to be decreasing rather than increasing in their accuracy of past-tense use as they enler phase 2, However, this apparent “back-sliding” is an important sign of linguistic development. We see similar patterns, known as “developmental sequences,” in other areas of gram- mar, such as he formation of English negalives and interrogatives. As outlined in Kox 6. children move through identifiable stages, although these stages are more continuous and overlapping than discrete. Note that from the parents' perspective, children's devel opment is also not always straightforward, For instance, a child is likely lo produce inverted yes/no questions (Did William eat cake?), while still using normal declarative word order for wh-questions (How Miranda go out?). (See Chapter 13 for related developmental patterns in second language acquisition.) Stage Negatives Yes/no questions wh-qquestions One-word Use of single word Use of single word with rising Use of single word stage No intonation with rising intonation Allgone Sleeping? Cookie? Early multi Single negative word occurs at No se of auxilia Limited use of where word stage start of senlence only inversion of word order; rising and what at start ol intonatian sentence only No sleeping Drink water? Where doggie? Na go outside Go outside? What box? Allgone Cheerios Where mommy sleeping? Mid multi- Negative word appears between Auviliaries in negative Greater use of other word stage subject and predicate; use of sentences; rising intonation; — wh=words; still no Late multi- word stage (unanalyzed) cant and don't Baby no sleep Mommy cant go out. She don't eat that. Greater range of auxillaries used; auxdliaries in positive and negative sentences 1 didn't eat í. She doesn't watch TV. Mommy can't go out. no inversion of word order She can't eat? See baby? Dudely cook dinner? Auxiliaries used in positive sentences; inversion of auxiliary appears. Did you eat coke? Can't she play now? Will mommy eat cake? inversion of word order Why baby sleeping? bvho talking? Additional wh-words used; still no inversion of word order How she go out? What he eats? Where he can go? 232 Kendall A. King speech, researchers examining Korean recently have argued that this is not universally the case. Gopnik and Choi (1995) presented data demonstrating that verbs are among the frst items acquired by Korean children, a fact probably related to their salient sentence-final position in Korean. They further suggest that this difference hokds implications for cogni- tive development; for example, Korean children tend to perfora better on tasks which are related to verbs (tooL-usage tests), while English-spcaking children perform better on notn- related tasks (object categorization lesls). Other crosslinguistic research has focused on the development of grammatical compe- tence, Across the world, young children seem to use their developing grammatical compe- tence to altempt to convey similarintents, including, for instance, possession, location, and volition. Nevertheless, there are important differences in the linguistic forms that young children use to convey these meanings. These differences reflect the nature of the language beiny acquired by (he young child, For instance, Turkish children appear to have mastered the entire system of case morphology at age Lwo, reflecting the high degree ofregularity and phonological saliency of the Turkish inflectional system. Similarly, young Italian children “use relative clauses to a much greater degree than young English-speaking children, possibly retlecting the frequency of this form tor common pragmalic functions in Italian. "These structural differences across languages influence the nature of the developmental sequence for each language. For instance, recall the devclopmental sequence for the formalion of English wh-questions discussed ín Box 6.6. Because English wh-questions require inversion of word order and use of an auxiliary verb, even children in the multi- word stage still produce utlerances such as Where she sleep? Children who are leaming languages which do not require auxiliaries for question formation, such as Italian or Spanish, sound much more “adultlike” in the use of their questions from a young age. Spanish-speakiny children, for instance, correctly form the same question — ¿Dónde dormió? (literally “where sleep?”) - from a younger age. Cultural differences In addition to these important crosslinguislic differences, there are also significant cross- cultural differences. Children are born into distinct communicalive systems around the world. These systems potentially stress different aspects of child-rearing and hold different ideologies concerning language use and what ¡t means to be a “good” child, often resulting in different interactional patterns with and around the infant. Flínor Ochs, for instance, describes how Samoan caregíving patterns differ dramatically from those of most US hauseholds. Most notably, youmg Samoan children are not believed to have individual personalities or control over their behavior; thus, in sharp contrast to common parenting practices in the US, very young children are not expected to initiate talk and Uncir carly vocalizations are not interpreted as meaningful attempts to communicate. Such differences in language socialization practices are apparent at a young age: for instance, in Central American homes, infants' interactions are mostly with multiple social partners, whereas in European-American homes, infants' interactions are mostly with one adult person at a time. In the United States, European-American mothers tend (o aclively participate in verbal exchanges with their children and place greater altention on 233 Child language acquisition >BOX6.7 ANALYZING CROSSCULTURAL DIFFERENCES AN CHILDREN'S NARRATIVES - s in addition to investigating crosslinguistic differences ín the acquisition of grammar, researchers have 3 also examined crosscultural differences in other aspects of language, such as narratives. As might be expected, the organization, presentation, and content of typical stories vary from one culture to the next. Chilgren learn these culture-specific conventians far narratives through interaction with their parents, In one study to compare Spanish-speaking mothers from Central Arnerica and English-speaking mothers of European-American descent, Gigliana Melzi (2000) sought to determine if there were 3 differences in how the two groups of mothers supported or scaffolded their children's narrative skills. ¿To this end, the researcher visited the mothers and their preschool children in their homes and asked ¿the children to talk about four past events the children had experienced. The exchanges between the Í mothers and their children were compared an a range of measures, Melzi concluded lhal Lhere were significant differences belween the Lwe groups ol molhers and lhe ways in which they supported their children's contributions to conversations about past experiences. Thus, while Central American mothers served as active listeners, giving their children more cantral over 3. the slorylelling process and showing less concern for the overall organization of the story, Europcan- Í American mothers took a more active role in helping the children organize the narrative and include 3 relevant information. As for the reasan for this difference, Melzi speculates that it may be due to the 3 socialization goals of the two groups. As she explains, Latino parents typically “place greater emphasis en interpersonal relations and appropriate social demeanor, whereas European-American parents place greater emphasis on autonomy and the development of cognitive skills” (2000: 173). task-specific goals (like organizing a narrative chronolagically) than on sacial conversa- tional goals (like including all those present in the conversation). (See Box 6.7.) In contrast, in the highly social environments of Latino homes, mothers' roles might be to support children's conversations with others. For example, researchers have reported that Mexican- American family members explicitly instracted preverbal infants to participate in social conversations through the use of dile (tell him/her”). Through these carly interactions, children learn to parti ¡pate in multiparty conversations from a very poung age. This line of research suggests that communication patterns such as these influence children's language and literacy interactions in the classroom as well as their school performance more generally, Shirley Brice Heath, for example, demonstrated how cultural patterns of communication in different communitics in the US South prepared children difíerenuy for language and literacy tasks at school. Bilingualism The final difference in language acquisition to be discussed in this section concerns not which languages are being learned, bul ralher (he nuenber ol languages acquired by a child. In the United States, monalingualism and manolingual child-rearing remains he norm. In many other parts of the world, however, bilingual and multilingual chilé-rearing are standard. Indeed, it is estimated that roughly half of the world grows up speaking more than one language, a fact which provides the kernel of truth for the joke ín Box 6.8. 235 Child language acquisition BOX 6:9 CODE-MIXING OR CODE-SWITCHING? z Lanza (1992) studied two children from Norwegian-American families living in Oslo, Norway, Lo 3 observe their bilingual language use and code-mixing. Each had an American mother and a Norwegian father with whom the child was to exclusively speak English and Norwegian, respectively, following what is sometimes known as the one-language-one-parent rule. Lanza found that children knew when to use Norwegian and when to use English, and also mixed (or switched between) the two languages in 3 the appropriate situation — that is, (he chile used English with the mother, Norwegian with the father, and mixed the two when the family was together such as at meal times. This showed that the children 3 were aware of saclo-contextual cues for language