Linguistic Development Research Paper Page 27
ADVERTISEMENT
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
3711 DEVELOPMENTAL THEORIES
27
Empirical evidence from tape recordings of interactions between mother and child showed something
altogether different taking place. It was found that mothers did not shape their children’s grammar.
In actual fact they seldom even corrected ungrammatical speech. They also made no attempt to
reward grammatical speech.
What parents did respond to in a child’s speech was truth and falsehood. Falsehoods were refuted
and truths were agreed with. Such findings thus gave no support to reinforcement or conditioning
in the process of syntactic acquisition. Still less for phonological and morphological acquisition.
Having said that – such pressures are present (enough) to shape the child’s language. It must be
there to some extent otherwise there would be no pressure for the child to develop anything more
than was required to have their needs attended to by mother.
It should be said that mere imitation of a parent’s speech is not enough to account for the endless
creativity of a child. A simple mathematical calculation would illustrate the probabilities of ever
reproducing a sentence twice in conversation as microscopic. If an average sentence is 15 words
long, and if there were 20 words which would make sense at each point, then the number of possible
20
sentences that could be uttered in a given situation are 15
= 332525673000000000000000, i.e.
VERY large. It was also demonstrated that the babies could not be imitating the adults since more
often than not they were using languages that followed different grammatical rules to those of adults.
11.1
Baby Talk Register
It was found that the mean length of utterance (MLU) was shorter between mother and child than
between adults. The pitch of the utterance was also higher and key words were also emphasized
more often. the length and complexity of the utterance was adjusted to the development of the
child.
From the age of 2 onwards (at the end of the telegraphic stage) the complexity of parental speech
increases. But even by age 5 there are still differences between Baby Talk Register (BTR) speech
and and inter-adult speech. It has also been noticed that children of age 4 are similarly able to
modify their speech for younger siblings.
The Motherese Hypothesis states that the special properties of the mother’s speech play a causal
role in the child’s acquisition of language. One of the main controversies that arose was on the exact
nature of how BTR is able to catalyse Language acquisition.
Useful data have not yet been gathered to settle the dispute over whether the MLU has any significant
effect on the development. Many studies contradict each other. Several theories argue about the
optimum MLU. It is thought by one that an MLU from the parent which is slightly longer than
the child, but not too long, is best for development. Several results seem to indicate that particular
word orderings accelerate language acquisition. For instance the use of auxiliaries at the beginning
of sentences. e.g. “have you finished?”
Other apparently beneficial techniques involve the expanding and recasting of a baby’s utterance.
Baby
Expansion
Recasting
doggy eat
doggy is eating
what is doggy eating?
daddy gone
daddy has gone
where has daddy gone?
Table 9: Expansion and Recasting – do they accelerate development?
After Chomsky’s critique of the behaviorist account of language acquisition (LA) the tide turned
ADVERTISEMENT
0 votes
Related Articles
Related forms
Related Categories
Parent category: Education