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
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.