Child language acquisition: stages, data and theory

Learning objectives

Describe the stages of spoken acquisition — pre-verbal cooing and babbling, the holophrastic stage, the two-word stage, the telegraphic stage and post-telegraphic speech — and place a child in the right stage from a transcript

Analyse phonological development in child data, identifying deletion, substitution, assimilation, cluster reduction and reduplication, and explain why some sounds are acquired late

Analyse lexical, semantic and grammatical development through overextension, underextension, inflection, negation, question formation and the virtuous errors caused by overgeneralising a rule, and comment on mean length of utterance

Evaluate the behaviourist, nativist, cognitive and social interactionist accounts of acquisition against the evidence in a transcript, and use Halliday's functions to describe what a child is using language to do

Analyse the caregiver's contribution in a transcript, identifying child-directed speech, expansion, recasting, questioning and scaffolding, and explain the role each plays

(Background only, not examined on 9093) Describe the course of literacy development in reading and writing and explain how it differs from the acquisition of speech