hello and welcome to another English language a level video with me Paul this one is an important one if you're studying about children's language development what I'm going to talk through are 18 really important theories for doing well in the exam so let's go 18 theories for CLD speech Theory number one is behaviorism this is the work of the app Skinner an American psychologist who claimed that the learning of language is like the learning of everything else a very straightforward process that's all about imitation and copying he called it appearance conditioning he did lots of experiments on rats and pigeons but he believed that children develop language through the same process of responding to both positive and negative reinforcement positive reinforcement the child says something and the adults seem to understand it or they answer the question or they respond to an instruction so positive reinforcement and on the other hand negative reinforcement where the child says something and the caregiver around them doesn't respond or doesn't understand and therefore the child will be discouraged from using that language form again so offer and conditioning is all about positive and negative reinforcement and Skinner claimed that all children are born with a tabular Raza to give it its fancy Latin to a blank slate they know nothing about the world they know nothing about language and they learn simply through imitation now in the exam you have to evaluate at that kind of claim and you'll get a transcript and it may well be that there's lots of features in the transcript that support the behaviorist approach look at the Lexus being used both by the adults and the children maybe you'll find a child who is repeating something that the child says and being rewarded by the parent that's behaviorism maybe you'll find in the syntactical structures being used by the child and by the adults some kind of copying going on that's behaviorism maybe you'll see some aspects of phonology where the child is repeating the phonemes of a particular piece of Lexus that is behaviorism so no doubt you will find for yourself in some data some good evidence to support Skinner's notion of behaviorism but of course you have to evaluate which means you have to critique some of these claims and in that criticism you should draw attention to some of the limitations of behaviorism and here are four of them limitation one if you've ever spent five minutes with a child you'll know that children actually rarely simply repeat what adults say even though the adults are trying to get them to repeat things often children don't do it secondly children often make creative generalized over generalizations so-called virtuous errors things like I eated my tea mummy or I saw sheeps in the field so sheeps and eated are perfectly logical but non-standard utterances and what they suggest is that the child is not just copying language that they hear around them but they are creatively working out grammatical rules another possible limitation with behaviorism is the idea that actually children no matter what language they're speaking and no matter where they are in the world they tend to go through the same predictable stages of development whatever the input so this sort of throws into question the importance of positive and negative reinforcements from adults and then finally few children actually receive explicit grammatical collection and it was Catherine Nelson back in the 1970s who drew attention to the fact that when parents are talking with children parents rightly are more interested in two things politeness and Truth value rather than being interested so much in the grammatical accuracy of their talk okay so behaviorism has some quite considerable limitations to it CLD Theory number two nativism aka innateness the brainchild of one Noam Chomsky um and a current day proponent and nativism would be Stephen Pinker they argued that the human brain has this naturally programmed ability to learn language uh the title of Stephen pinker's book is the language Instinct this language Instinct enables children to work out the language system in terms of grammar and syntax so they come up with the acronym of lad the language acquisition device and this goes against the traditionally held view that the human brain is a tabular rather it's a blank slate because what they're arguing is that the mind is sort of preconditioned for language so the term Universal grammar is used to describe this Global capacity to learn languages and children learn languages at similar rates in similar ways all over the world no matter what language it is whether it's Mandarin Chinese Romanian or English and so as we said on the previous slide virtuous errors can be used to support the language acquisition device so child making an error in inversive commas in inflection grammar or syntax while attempting to apply these rules okay so nativism now as I said before you need to be able to evaluate what's going on here and in the exam quite often they pick transcripts that have examples of this creative over generalizations virtuous errors that show ever some supporting evidence for nativism um here are some limitations however of nativism another linguist called Isaac slavin argued that actually a child is is not born with a set of specific linguistic categories but rather they have a sort of process mechanism higher generalized set of procedures and inference rules that not only enable them to work out language but also other elements as well so he argued that there isn't such a thing as a separate language acquisition device another possible limitation that you could say with chomsky's idea is that it was entirely theoretical and it has wasn't actually based on linguistic data some people have argued about nativism that actually it seems to downplay the part played by interaction between children and carers there's not enough Focus put on social interaction other people who criticize nativism because it doesn't seem to recognize the functions the motivations and the purposes behind children's language it's a good idea if you're picking apart nativism to reference these case study the 1977 case study of the American Boy Jim and this was uh alluded to invard and Sax's research so Jim was a hearing child of deaf parents who spent the first three or four years of his life point in front of the TV limited exposure to the outside world but lots of listening to the television and he ended up with his language considerably delayed with an unusually monotonous intonation pattern and a limited vocabulary so the speech therapists got to him and did some fantastic work with him but what the this case study demonstrates really is the the importance of interaction that having a language acquisition device in itself is not necessarily going to result influence language okay CLD Theory number three is cognitive theory and here we have Jean Piaget a Swiss Swiss psychologist and if you want to summarize cognitive theory in three words it's the idea of that language tracks thought so your thinking level your thought processes are the most important thing your thinking is a precursor to your ability to articulate in language and he suggested that therefore the children have to go through these predictable stages of cognitive development and here are these stages the first two years of your life are the sensory motor stage where it's all about movement and the senses and any language that the child produces is bound to be sort of day Optical it's bound in the here and now and it's usually about kind of concrete objects and things right in front of them so that's the sensory motor stage and then you move into the pre-operational stage which is kind of two years old right through into sort of early primary skills six or seven years old where asking questions becomes an important element an imagination and playing games is important as well you then move into What's called the concrete operational stage from six or seven years old really right through to the beginning of secondary school where you get more of a capacity for organization categorization so more abstract level of thinking concrete operational and then finally his fourth stage is formal operational okay so just piaga focuses on the need for conceptual understanding to be present before language can reflect it so in this when you've got some a transcript in front of you look out for certain specific grammatical features which might give you a clue as to the cognitive level of the child for example is this child able to use comparative or superlative adjectives uh if they do then obvious shows that they are able to understand concepts of size and scale is the child able to use the passive voice can they say things like the ball was kicked by Boy rather than the boy kick the balls can they do subordination in complex sentences so can they produce complex sentences and if they can they must suggest that maybe this is a child who's moving into the concrete operational stage okay so in terms of evaluation of this it's certainly possible looking at early children's language to link their conceptual developments to their linguistic development and certainly in the early stages it's good to point out about things like object permanence object permanence is the idea that a child begins to understand abstract ideas I.E they understand that an object is permanent even though it's not in your sight so once you've understood object permanence then you can talk about what's going on next door even though you can't see what's going on next door and you can talk about what happened yesterday even though it's obviously not in front of you what happened yesterday okay but as the child gets older it does become harder to make clear links between cognitive level and language and indeed some Studies have focused on children who have learned speak fluently despite having a relatively low cognitive level so-called cocktail party chatterers in the words of Gene HSN who can construct very Advanced sophisticated levels of language but talk nonsense Theory number four is social interactionism so here this is the work of Jerome brunett who coins the idea of child's directed speech he basically rejected chomsky's language acquisition device and he really focused on the importance of the children's interaction with caregivers and he's saying that's the key to language development so for this if you've got a transcript you're looking at the interaction between the child and uh and the people around them and in response to chomsky's Lad he came up with his own funny acronym lass that's the language acquisition support system which refers to that special kind of social act that caregivers do in order to break down language for the child's directed speech so Bruno suggested that the way in which carers sort of questioned and encourage and support the child through these special scaffolding techniques these are the really important things that enable children to gradually develop their speech okay so here you're looking at transcripts the interactions between the children and people around them um okay but in terms of evaluation well obviously look out for child director speech features there are a whole list of them they're listed in the textbook I've just put three in here so repetition of key Lexus by adults uh simplification of certain sentence constructions and over articulation of certain phonemes are all good examples of child directed speech um but in terms of evaluating you could draw attention to the sort of cross-cultural research that's being done which uh and which says that children of all backgrounds and languages tend to progress through similar stages predictably so if that's the case this sort of challenges the idea that being exposed to child-directed speech is so important okay and in fact there are some cultures like the famous cluelessly tribe which is again mentioned in the AQA textbook the colludi tribe in Papua New Guinea north of Australia who don't appear to use CDs at all they completely ignore their younger children yet those youngsters seem to develop language at exactly the same rate as elsewhere so it does rather draw into it into question the importance of social interactions Theory number five is the structuralist approach for this one I don't have a particular theorist but according to this Theory the child passes through certain stages of language usage doesn't matter which language that you're speaking doesn't matter where in the world you are children tend to go through predictable phases of language usage and here they are first of all you've got your pre-verbal stage in the first year of your life initially you're crying then you're cooing which is a bit more controlled because what you're doing is you're letting out vowel sounds from the back of your mouth and then you're babbling so Babble and feature of bubbling is that it's a combination of vowels and consonants there are two kinds of babbling there's reduplicated bubbling which comes first which is the repetition of the same consonant and the same vowel again and again and then there's variegated bubbling which has consonants and vowels but different sounds those are pre-verbal stage features notice that none of this is actually to do with semantics and meanings and it's basically about the child giving a good workout to the mouth in order to try and get there get your tongue around the 44 phonemes of English the pre-verbal stage you then move into the holophastic stage this is one word utterances uh just because a child is saying one word doesn't necessarily mean that they're just labeling something it may be that there's one word utterances stand for an entire sentence okay so sausage the child cries which could mean could you get me another sausage please so it could be a request to an adult so this holophastic stage usually happens at about a year and it goes on for something like six months we then logically enough go into the two word stage and here this is important in terms of grammar because the word order here starts to follow the conventional English syntactical patterns in a way it's the beginning of grammar and various linguists have categorized these patterns I've put down here Roger Brown so he did some research ages ago in the 1970s which seems to suggest eight categories of two word Essences I've put three down there agent plus action as in Daddy go action plus location as in run garden and possessor plus possession as in granny gloves so once you get to round about two years old you're starting to go all telegraphic this is where you omit grammatical Lexus so grammar words like connectives and prepositions and definite article and in-depth and article and Primary Auxiliary verbs so you miss those minor words out and your language tends to be dominated by lexical Lexis I'm meaning words like nouns adjectives verbs adverbs and that's interesting from a nativist point of view because that's kind of seems to imply that a child has a kind of natural filter where they're filtering out some of these words that they're hearing because statistically the most common words that children will be hearing will be grammar words there'll be words and two so these are not the first words that children say the children the first words of children say are lexical pieces of lexical Lexus so that's the telegraphic stage which can last something like a year before you end up in the post-telegraphic stage so that is Theory number five the structuralist approach and when you've got a transcript in the exam be prepared to be labeling what level do you think that child has probably reached without being too dogmatic about it because obviously you've only got a very limited amount of data but don't so don't try and sound too certain about it Right theory number six is the functional approach this is Michael Halliday as in we're all going on a Michael Halliday and he did research with his son and looking at the different purposes of the language behind his son's language so he identified seven different functions that might be served when a child uses language in their very early years and for him the purposes the functions the motivations behind the language are the most important thing to look at not so much the structures more to do with what the child is trying to do with language and so he came up with these seven different functions which are absolutely crucial for you to be learning his first four functions are these so instrumental which means expressing some kind of basic need like saying me hungry regulatory which is telling somebody to do something like get sweets interactional which is kind of fatic communication that's all about establishing and keeping relationships going like love you Daddy and personal which is talking about like personal tastes like I like sausages so according to Holiday these are the sort of first four purposes that you're likely to hear in a child's speech and then later on you're going to be coming across heuristic purposes heuristic language is asking questions and finding out about the world around you so all those annoying questions that all four-year-olds say as that's heuristic language you've got imaginative language which of course in piaggio's second stage the pre-operational stage children are likely to be doing so they are playing through language and then finally you've got representational language which is all about communicating information so they're very important ones to learn holiday is not the only functional show in town because there is an alternative here John Deere which used to be quoted in the older textbooks but I haven't seen any more recent ones so this is definitely worth learning these functions are worth applying to younger children who are just going into the holophastic stage so we have labeling where a child touches a doll's eyes and says eyes we have repeating repeating what an adult has just said we have answering answering an adult's question we have requesting action unable to push a peg to a hole says oh oh while looking at a parent and we are calling shouting foot pounds across the room and the final three would be greeting by shouting High protesting shouting when the parent attempts to put a shoe on and practicing uttering words when the personal object is not present you can see that some of these Link in with the the holiday ones um so for example requesting action is regulatory language but there that's quite a useful set of functions for children who are in that holophastic stage Theory number seven and we're coming up to nearly halfway too Theory number seven is scaffolding uh this is everyone's favorite 1930s Russian linguist vygotsky or in the words of the Beatles All You Need Is Love Yes there he is and Lev did a lot of work on learning how people learn the processes of learning and his Focus really was on the importance of doing that learning is an active proactive process it's not just passive um and he focused also on the importance of the caregiver the caregiver has been this Catalyst for Learning and he called the caregiver a mko a more knowledgeable other so a bit like social interactionism it's putting the importance on the interaction between the child and the adult and he's arguing that your mko Works through language to move the child through the zpd that's the zone of proximal development which is the area just beyond what a child is able to do already okay so as I've said that the link that supports Groomer's theory of social interactionalism we're in cinema right now folks this is the critical period hypothesis this was created by Eric lenneberg an American psychologist he coined this term critical period he thought that there was a particular window of opportunity where children are most right for learning language the synapses are working incredibly hard at that time and that actually social interaction and exposure to language were absolutely crucial for a child to be gaining for Mastery of the language and if you have some kind of strange circumstances in which the child missed this window of opportunity and it would be almost impossible for the child to become a fluent speaker in that language and of course this links in with the case the very tragic case of Genie who was found in a Los Angeles Garage in 1970 having been left isolated for something like 13 years 12 13 years with no social interaction and no talk at all so she was discovered at the age of 13 there was a lot of hot house English tutoring done with her to try and you know make sure that she could talk but despite all of that she only acquired a very very basic level of language she was able to articulate some words that was quite unable to put those words into successful Standard English syntactical structures so that is evidence that kind of supports Eric landerberg's critical period hypothesis this is the halfway mark and then number nine is the work test which was done by Jean burko Gleason decades and decades ago she did this in 1958 because she supported uh chomsky's nativist idea so she created this test uh the children and what the tasks is set up to do is to show that children actually have a much more sophisticated understanding of linguistic morphology which means the inflections that you put on the ends of words more more holiday than they had been taught explicitly so she would show them pictures of imaginary pseudo animals with made-up names and say this is a wug now there are two of them there are two and then the child would say Woods so as I say she uses pseudo words because she needs to ensure that the child has never has never been exposed to the word previously and therefore is not just remembering something in a kind of behaviorist way and what she discovered is that 76 of 45 year olds were able to deduce what the plural of the noun would be alongside other infectional endings so that seems to suggest that children understand grammatical roles and that they have this ability to transfer them to other examples so it supports chomsky's nativist Theory okay Theory number 10 this should be I'll put nine on there but it's actually ten this is the fifth phenomenon and this is the aforementioned Virgo with somebody called Roger Brown and this is about the child's ability to understand and articulate phonemes of English so the research explored the extent to which children can actually hear the correct pronunciation of words but they're not necessarily able to articulate those phonemes themselves okay so it was a 1960s uh study and there was this child who rejected the adult articulation to pronounced fish as fish because annoyingly the adult kept calling a fish a fish but the child themself couldn't pronounce fish so they kept using the word fists themselves if that makes any sense so it demonstrates that a child may be unable to articulate certain phonies even though they can differentiate in sound between different phonemes so this kind of challenges Skinner's behaviorist theory because what it suggests is that children can't simply just imitate language they have to have reached a certain developmental stage in order to do so right we're back on track with our numbers here because in the first lesson is the irf this is not the IRA this is the irf structure and this is put forward by two linguists called Sinclair and coolsard there's Sinclair IRS stands for initiation response feedback so this is looking at the sort of adjacency exchanges that people take part in in everyday conversation and there's a big feature in child directed speech where often the uh you get three parts adjacency exchanges speaker starts a conversation uh a second speaker responds and then the first beat that speaker then provides some feedback and here's an example so there is your first part what do we say to Grandma does your initiation the child says thank you for the sweets that's the response and then there's the parents feedback well done and Sam so in order for children to learn language it's not simply about learning bits of Lexis and then stringing them together into bits of into sentences it's also about these ritualistic discourse structures that habitually we use all of the time such as this IR pack and it demonstrates how questioning and evaluating are really important aspects of child directed speech so that's number 11 IRS structure with simpler and cool file we're now into number 12 and this is about early words right the first words that children are likely to be uttering this is research done by Catherine Nelson against quite old it's from the 1970s but she grew together into four categories the early words used by children she found that something like 60 of the first words used by children in the holophastic stage when the one years old are maiming words so they tend to be concrete objects 60 percent the second biggest category is verbs to dinner actions or sometimes location words such as up and down so nouns verbs and then third you've got modifiers which means adjectives like nice and then finally you've got personal or social words that make up about eight percent of the sample these look at the kind of ritualistic formulaic collocations that we say to children all the time things like all gone now or night night bedtime Etc so that's quite a handy thing to remember about when if you got in the exam you've got a transcript of a child who is in this holophastic stage yeah are they following the kind of patterns that Catherine Nelson was suggesting the characteristic of those first words uh the thing to say about first words is that the early vocabulary tends to be lexical Lexus rather than grammatical Lexus so by lexical Lexus I mean things like verbs nouns adjectives and adverbs things that have semantic meaning and it doesn't tend to be grammatical words like verb or hand here is a 13th research piece of research piece of theory about CLD this is to do with semantic development this is put forward by Eve Clark um she focused on the way that children attribute meaning to lexical choices and she identified the following features which are characteristic of early children's cinematics first of all you've got over extension so overextension is where Richard might use a word to refer to several different but related things so cat for any animal that's got four legs that's an example of overextension um and there was another research called rascala who divided over extension further into two subcategories first of all you've got the more straightforward categorical overextension where a word is used to refer to things in a similar category so the word car is used to describe all vehicles and then you've got the more subtle analogical over extension where people are scratching their heads around the shell thinking what do they mean so this is where a word is used to refer to something not in the same category but the child is making some kind of physical or functional link so for example they might be picking up a and calling it a bath because it's a container so it's more subtle and I suppose in a way it kind of gives supporting evidence to nativism you know chomsky's idea that children are they might have very very limited vocabulary but their thinking skills are actually very developed the other elements on there which you can't see on the bottom of the slide is under extension so under extension is where a child uses a word to narrowly so they might use the word shoes to refer to their own dirty trainers but they won't use the word shoes to refer to any other kind of Footwear that's in the house so number 13 is about children's semantic developments number 14 is further about lexical development and this is work done by Gene Aitchison who claimed that there are actually three stages three broad stages in children's lexical development the first stage she calls labeling so this is that very simple process where a child makes a sound to an object they're able to call something by its kind of standard name she calls this labeling she then has another category which she calls Packaging this is where a charm begins to understand the range of meanings so they've got this word bottle and they begin to understand that bottles can have different shapes and sizes they've got a similar function but they've got different shapes and sizes so she's calling this packaging and then finally the more the more subtle and extensive use of vocabulary is Network building where the child makes connections between words they understand antonyms which are opposites like some cold good and bad or synonyms so words that have very similar meanings and so when the child is building vocabulary Network building that leads to an understanding of the difference between hyper Nims and hyponyms hypernems that's h-y-p-e-r those are broad umbrella terms like furniture for example is a hyperlink whereas hyponin h-y-p-o and that's annoying h-y-p-o these are the more specific things within the glory H Iconium so chair still table those are examples of opening so if a child is beginning to understand these more subtle relationships between things according to teenagers and she's Network building right we're now on to grammatical development we're on the last throes of uh these theories this is Roger Brown did research way back again in the 1970s and he hinted in 1973 study suggested that actually children learn to use inflections in a predictable audience not just random okay which again needs further Evidence which supports the nativist idea it's not just about copying and random it's actually very predictable the stages that children go through and here are the stages of of grammar look at the top two there so the first most common inflectional ending that children are able to do in a standard way is the ing ending it's the progressive form of the verb 0 nasal ing sounds children are most likely to do that and the second most common one is the call of s as it works you've then got these middle ones that come a bit later you've got the possessive s like Teddy's chair you've got the use of Articles [Music] and you've got the past tense form of the verb kicked and then find the final lot of uh for mascular inflections that children tend to master come later they have things like the third person singular S as in she loves me yeah yeah with the S and the under there which is not plural that's a third person present simple singular form and then finally the auxiliary verb which is a tricky little beast the verb to be because it changes according to the number of the pronoun as in first person I am second person you are third person who she or is is so because it's so changeable presumably that's the reason why this that comes later on and another researcher called katamba found that actually there was very little connection between the the order in which these children are learning these inflections and the order that they are hearing them in adults speech so again it's further evidence that supports the idea that children have some kind of language mechanism that's inside them our last three are to do with one particular research called Osceola blue who did research you'll never guess it yes in the 1960s and the 1970s about grammatical development and uh she looked first of all at pronoun development and she discovered that children actually developed their use of pronouns in predictable stages and here they are the first stage is basically a child ignores using a pronoun and sensibly they nominalize instead which means using a name rather than a pronoun so Sam give Daddy cake and that's sensible because of course pronouns are difficult things they're completely deactical they depend on the context they also depend upon the speaker the relationship with the speaker to The Listener as well so they are difficult things so first of all the child uses a name rather than a pronoun but according to Bellucci in the second stage then the child will start to use pronouns they'll start to use subjects and object pronouns but they won't be able to consistently apply this in a standard way so they'll say things like and all two-year-olds do this me give cake to Daddy whereas instead of using the first person singular subject they're using the first person singular object form of the pronoun and then the third stage is moving towards Standard English where the child is beginning to apply subjects and object pronouns like I gave the cake to him okay so pronouns are really useful things to look in on on transcription the exam as are negative sentences where you're negating a positive statement again this is research done by USI and she discovered that children develop their use of negative sentence constructions in predictable stages the first stage the child will just tend to put a negating adverb at the beginning of an utterance so they'll just say something like no juice when they say I don't want any juice the second stage is where the child starts to use no or not kind of in the middle of the phrase or the clause in front of the verb so the negating word is moving to the right sort of place in the statement as in I'm not like it notice that it's not Standard English at this point but the negating word is moving to the right area and then thirdly the child becomes starts to use the more standard form where they're integrating into the negating sentence things like the primary item mode or auxiliary verbs like she can't do it or I didn't see okay so Bellucci says there are three stages that children go to in negating sentences and the last the very last one that I can give you of these 18 clz theorists is stages in questions where Ursula Bellucci had discovered that children actually go through interrogative the formation of questions in predictable stages as well initially children just use Rising intonation go walk and in fact there is some evidence to suggest that even at the holophrastic stage in one word offenses children are doing fancy things with their International patterns in order to do things like s questions stage two would be the inclusion of using interrogative pronouns these are your wh words like what who where and remember how that links in was John piaggio's pre-operational stage two where he's saying that children have this heuristic tendency to be asking questions about the things around them and then finally stage three children start to do things like these subject verb inversion and they start to use auxiliary verbs whether that be Primary Auxiliary or modal auxiliary herb so they're starting to say things like can you see it and what's money doing so according to Ursula Bellucci children tend to go threes to three stages of interrogative development we have come to the end of our Mammoth video now what you need to do is you need to stop the video get a piece of paper write down as many of those theories and ideas as you can these are absolutely crucial for you getting a decent mark on your CLD English language a level essay question in the exam on the AQA one that we do half of the marks come for your ao2 so it's pretty important here they are again behaviorism nativism Noam Chomsky cognitive theory social interactionism Jerome Bruner structuralism a functional Theory Michael Halliday and John Doe scaffolding degosky critical period hypothesis Eric landerberg the work task Gene burko IRS sorry the fist phenomena we're going brown irf structure Sinclair and coolsard early Lexus Nelson semantic development e-clark lexical development Gene hson grammatical development Roger Brown and then those three ones by Ursula Bellucci which are about the children's development of pronouns negatives and interrogatives learn all of this stuff and you're putting yourself in a really good position to do well in the exam I'm gonna leave it there I am going to make another CLD uh video which is about speech so that will be coming your way fairly soon goodbye