Question

Dig deep into your understanding of the world to answer.

1. Briefly describe typical linguistic development path through age 3. (stage by stage). Please add examples of utterances from the book and from your own observations if applicable.
2. Discuss why TV speech—in place of caretaker speech, such as motherese--doesn’t work as an adequate input for language acquisition.
3. Define “overgeneralization” in children’s speech, give examples, and explain why this happens.
4. Discuss main characteristics of motherese and its significance, or a lack thereof, in first language acquisition.
5. “If children could count on ….. the world would never tell them they were wrong” This concept is called “lack of negative feedback,” one of the backbone’s of Chomsky's assertion that language is innate. Please explain how he used this to support his theory of language acquisition that turned the behaviorist model upside down.
6. “Indeed, if children are blinkered to look for only a small number of phrase types, they automatically gain the ability to produce an infinite number of sentences.” How so? Explain this mechanism as plainly as possible, using examples when needed.

Answer 1

The answers are:

1) The typical linguistic development path:

a) The prelinguistic stage: This is the stage before the child actually starts talking. Language here is through gestures, eye contacts, babbling, cooing and crying. For example, the child learns to say mamamama for Mom.

b) The holophrase or one-word sentence: Here the child is around 10 to 13 months. The child can utter single words or half phrases, and the caregiver generally can interprete the context. For example, the child points at the television and says, "T", the caregiver gets it that the child wants the television to be switched on.

c) The two-word sentence: The child at this stage is around 18 months. The language now comprises of sentences which consists of a noun or a verb with a modifier. For example, at a zoo the child would look at a tiger and say, "Tiger big".

d) Multiple word stage: The child reaches this stage at around two- two and a half years. The child now uses simple grammar in the speeches making language clearer to others too. For example, the child would now say. "Tiger is big".

e) More complex grammatical structures: The child at this stage is around two and a half to three years old. The language now gets better and the child is able to use complex grammar in their speech. For example, " I don't want milk."

2) TV speech does not work as an adequate input for language acquisition because our brain is most receptive to learning a new language during childhood and language is learned through face to face communication. Children learn language through interactions and therefore television watching, story reading to them, etc are not very instrumental in development of speech. Videos in any form can never replace person to person interaction for teaching language or communication.

3) Overgeneralization in speech is the process of extending the application of a rule to items that are excluded from it in the language norm. For example, when a child learns that adding "ed" generally makes a word past tense, the child tends to add "ed" even after words that change forms in past tense, such as, forget gets overgeneralized to forgeted or write gets overgeneralized to writed, etc. This happens because the child's brain tends to apply any new piece of information on everything else he/she is exposed to.

4) The main characteristics of motherse include simplified grammar, exaggerated speech melody, diminutive forms of words and highly repetitive style. It is significant because it helps children identify where words begin and end and provides them with clues needed to help them develop language skills. Lack of motherese would result in late speech development of the child and the child may not be able to understand his/her surroundings well.