Zone of proximal development:
adults provide the scaffolding for language acquisition !
What suggests that CDS is not necessary for CLA
children across the world develop language at the same pace;
Phonological features:!
Exaggerated intonation!
- Varied, animated prosody !
- Stronger stress on key words and syllables!
- May adopt phonological simplification techniques or adopt those used by the child,
e. g. diminutive suffixes, unstressed syllable deletion and reduplicated monosyllables (mama, dada)
Diminutive suffixes
a group of letters that are added to the end of a word to show that something is smaller than things of that type usually are, for example ‘ling’ added to ‘duck’ to make ‘duckling’. Doggie, piglet
Lexical features:
Concrete nouns within the child’s local environment
- Dynamic verbs denoting common activities
- Deixis to direct the child’s attention
Grammatical features:
- Simple sentences
- Omission of auxiliary verbs
- Direct interrogatives and imperatives
- Nomination instead of pronouns
- Omission of tenses and inflexions
Discourse and pragmatic features:
Recasting of a non-standard utterance!
- Adjacency pairs and tripartite exchanges (3?)
- Model and encourage politeness
- Ask redundant questions to evoke speech!
- Expansion of a child’s utterance!
- Scaffold child’s language by reformulating their utterance
Clarke-Stewart (1973)
children whose mothers talk more have larger vocabularies !
Fernald and Mazzie (1991)
higher pitch and exaggerated intonation are perceptually effective in facilitating learning!
However- Katherine Nelson (1973)
children whose mothers corrected them during the holophrastic stage acquired language more slowly
However- Brown, Cazden and Bellugi (1969)
parents respond to the truth value of a child’s utterance rather than its grammatical correctness!
Kuhl (1992)
Swedish, English and Russian parents exaggerated the important vowel sounds, especially in minimal pairs. Babies do indeed ignore regular conversation and turn their attention towards sing-song intonation !
Chouinard and Clark (2003), links with brown Cazden etc
Adults spend more time unconsciously reformulating a child’s utterance than they do overtly correcting it!
Fivush and Schwarzmueller (1998)
found that verbalising events as they unfold is critical for long-term retention of the memory!
