Language: Child Language Acquisition
Child language acquisition studies how children develop spoken and written language, and A Level questions almost always provide transcript or writing data to analyse against theory, including recognised spoken stages from cooing and babbling through the holophrastic, two-word and telegraphic stages, and Roger Brown's documented order of grammatical development. The major theoretical positions are behaviourist, associated with Skinner and imitation and reinforcement; nativist, associated with Chomsky and an innate language acquisition device; cognitive, associated with Piaget; and social interactionist, associated with Bruner and Vygotsky.
Before you start
Make sure you're comfortable with these topics first:
Method
- Read the data before you think about theory. Note the child's age, the setting, who else is speaking, and what the child is trying to achieve.
- Work through the levels of language systematically: phonology, lexis, semantics, grammar and morphology, pragmatics and discourse. This stops the answer collapsing into a list of cute errors.
- Classify each feature precisely. Say consonant cluster reduction rather than mispronunciation, and overgeneralisation of the past tense morpheme rather than wrong word.
- Attach theory to evidence, never the other way round. Quote the utterance, name the feature, then say which theoretical position it supports and, crucially, where it strains.
- Analyse the caregiver as well as the child. Expansion, recast, questioning and child-directed speech features are evidence for the interactionist position and are frequently the richest part of a transcript.
- Evaluate rather than recite. A virtuous error is difficult for a strict behaviourist account because the child cannot have imitated a form no adult produces, but repeated caregiver recasts in the same transcript support an interactionist reading.
- Write in continuous prose with a line of argument about what the data shows overall, not a labelled list of features.
Worked example
Analyse this transcript. Child (2 years 4 months): 'daddy goed shop'. Adult: 'Daddy went to the shop, did he?' Child: 'daddy went shop. buy nana.' Adult: 'He bought a banana? Lucky you.' Child: 'me eat nana now.'
- Start with the stage. Two and three word utterances with function words omitted place the child in the telegraphic stage, consistent with an age of around two years four months.
- Analyse morphology in the first utterance. 'Goed' is a virtuous error: the child has applied the regular past tense morpheme -ed to an irregular verb, which shows the rule has been internalised and is being overgeneralised. This is strong evidence against a purely behaviourist account, since no adult models 'goed'.
- Analyse phonology. 'Nana' for banana shows unstressed syllable deletion, a normal and predictable simplification rather than an error of knowledge.
- Analyse the caregiver's turns. The adult does not correct explicitly; she recasts the utterance into the adult form and expands it with the preposition and article, then converts it into a question that invites another turn. This is child-directed speech functioning as scaffolding.
- Trace the effect across the transcript. In the child's next turn 'goed' has become 'went', so the recast appears to have been taken up immediately. Note the limit of that claim: a single transcript cannot show whether the correction is stable.
- Bring in theory with evaluation. The uptake supports Bruner's language acquisition support system and Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, since the adult supplies the form just beyond the child's current production. The presence of the rule-governed error still supports Chomsky's argument that the child is generating grammar rather than copying it, so the transcript is best read as evidence that innate capacity and interactional support are not alternatives.
- Finish with pragmatics. 'Me eat nana now' uses the object pronoun for the subject and no auxiliary, but it succeeds pragmatically as a request, which illustrates Halliday's instrumental function and shows communicative competence running ahead of grammatical accuracy.
Practice questions
Try each question, then tap to reveal the answer.
Q1Define a virtuous error and explain why it matters theoretically.Show answer
Answer: An error produced by correctly applying a regular rule to an irregular form, such as runned or mouses. It matters because the child cannot have imitated it from adult speech, which is evidence that they are generating language from internalised rules rather than copying.
Q2Name the stage in which function words are systematically omitted, and give an approximate age range.Show answer
Answer: The telegraphic stage, roughly from around two years to two and a half, in which utterances keep content words and drop determiners, auxiliaries and prepositions.
Q3Identify the phonological process in 'gog' for dog and in 'nana' for banana.Show answer
Answer: 'Gog' shows assimilation, where the first consonant is pulled towards the place of articulation of the second. 'Nana' shows deletion of the unstressed initial syllable.
Q4Distinguish a recast from an expansion in caregiver speech.Show answer
Answer: An expansion fills out the child's utterance into a fuller grammatical form while keeping the meaning, for example 'doggy run' becoming 'the doggy is running'. A recast rephrases the utterance, often adding new information or changing the structure, for example into a question.
Q5Explain how a transcript could be used as evidence against Skinner's account.Show answer
Answer: By identifying forms the child produces that no adult in the transcript models, such as overgeneralised past tenses or novel word combinations, and by showing that explicit correction and reinforcement are rare while the child's grammar develops anyway.
Q6Give two of Halliday's functions of language and an example utterance for each.Show answer
Answer: Instrumental, used to fulfil a need, as in 'want juice'. Regulatory, used to influence others' behaviour, as in 'you sit here'. Others include interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative and representational.
Q7Why should an answer analysing children's writing not simply list spelling errors?Show answer
Answer: The marks come from explaining what the errors reveal about the writer's developing system, for example phonetic spelling showing sound to symbol mapping, or overgeneralised rules such as adding a silent e. A list without that explanation shows no linguistic analysis.
Exam-style questions
Written in the style of a English exam paper, with a full mark scheme.
Text A is a transcript of Maya, aged 2 years 7 months, playing with her father. Maya: 'two sheeps'. Father: 'yes, two sheep'. Maya: 'two sheeps in a field. they eated the grass'. Father: 'they ate all of it, didn't they'. Maya: 'they ate it all up'. Analyse how Text A illustrates children's language development, referring to relevant theories and research.
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Evaluate the view that social interaction is the single most important factor in a child's language development.
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See real English past-paper questions, with official mark schemes →
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