Acquisition: When I was a child, I spoke like a child

1. what is developmental psycholinguistics?

It is the study of infants and children’s ability to learn and process the language.

It examines how speech emerge overtime and how children go about constructing the complex structures of their mother tongue.

2. Do children who do not speak yet communicate?

• Yes they do. They can communicate throughout in the first few months, is a kind of language without speech, because the child communicates different types of discomfort without using normal speech sounds. Crying helps the child learn how to produce linguistic sounds.

3. What is iconic crying?• It is a direct and transparent link between the

physical sound and its communicative intent.• It is when the baby cries. • For example when the baby needs some milk ,

the cry is directly related to the child’s sense of discomfort. The cries are associated with its needs.

4. What is symbolic crying of a child?

• It is when the baby cries to elicit attention and not to express discomfort.

• There is a significant transformation from using sounds as an iconic to using it as a symbolic .

5. How could you explain babbling? How is it divided?

• It is the natural tendency of children of this age to burst out in strings or consonants – vowels syllable clusters. It is a kind of vocalic play.

• It’s divided in two, marginal babbling and canonical babbling.• Canonical babbling = it emerges at around 8n months. During

the canonical stage, the babbling involves reduplicated sounds containing alternations of vowels and consonants (e.g.; baba or bobo, da da da da" or "ma ma ma ma").

• Marginal babbling = an early stage similar to cooing when infants produce a few and somewhat random, consonants. It consists of a mix of syllables, such as "ka-da-bu-ba-mi-doy-doy-doy“.

6. What are idiomorphs? Any examples?

• They are words that children invent when they first catch on to the magical notion that certain sounds have a unique reference.

• For example:• Ka ka as the word for milk• Doggie as the word for dog• Kitty as the word for cat

7. What is the holophrastic stage?• Stage where the child learns to use words in a meaningful

way while using single words in a meaningful manner to represent an entire phrase or sentence.

• It is accompanied with the intonational, gestural and contextual clues.

• For example: • “Milk?” is often used as the truncated form of “DO you

have any milk? But given the appropriate context, “Milk!” is just as obviously an abbreviated version of “I’d like some milk”.

8. Explain transformational generative grammar; TG.

• Chomsky’s model of grammar which posits a set of grammatical rules, or ‘transformations’, which operate on phrase structures to generate all and only the sentences of a language.

• It has been involved most centrally with the study of sentences.

9. Is language innate?

• Yes, it is. Because every humans have innate areas of their brain genetically programmed to help them in every activity.

10. What does the text say about childish creativity?

• Children from about 2-4 years old, produce all kinds of expressions which they rarely heard in their environment. Also, they are not only active and creative participants in their acquisition of their mother tongue, they are remarkably sensitive to the subtle but inherent grammatical characteristics of the language they are learning.

• Children are creative. They are prone to come up with all kinds of words and produce all kind of expressions which they have never heard in their mono or bilingual environment

11. Write the stages of linguistic development.

• According to Brown’s colleagues, Edward Klima and Ursula Bellugi, proved that children learn English producing two types of WH questions before they eventually come up with the correct adult version. They identified three distinct stages:

• STAGE 1• (use of WH word but no auxiliary verb employed) What Daddy going? Why you laughing? Where Mommy go?• STAGE 2• (use of WH word and auxiliary verb after subject) Where she will go? Why Doggy can’t see? Why you don’t know?• SATAGE 3• (use of WH word and auxiliary verb before subject) Where will she go? Why can’t Doggy see? Why don’t you know?

• All children begin with Stage 1 utterances before proceeding to Stage 2 examples several months later. Eventually they end up with the linguistically appropriate target examples at Stage 3.

• No matter how precocious the children are, that is, no matter how fast their rate of progress through these stages, they do not skip over any of them; no child goes from Stage 1 immediately to Stage 3 without at least some examples of Stage 2 structure.