AQA A Level English Language - Essay Child Language Acquisition (7702) -
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Course
Child Language Acquisition (7702)
Institution
AQA
High mark essay analysing the importance of the stages of CLA and what they reveal about the nature of child language acquisition. It is based on the Joey Data Set.
CLA 30 Marker
“The stages of child language development reveal a great deal about the nature of
child language acquisition”
Referring to Data Set 1 in detail, and to relevant ideas from language study, evaluate this
view of children’s language development. [30 marks]
The stages of CLA present an interesting insight when considering how children acquire
language. There are numerous stage examples to look into that suggest that stages are an
important element in the debate, from the way children use language with intent (Halliday) to
how they begin to form a strong understanding of complex grammatical and function rules
(Bellugi, Piaget.) Ultimately, stages hint more that there must be an innate capacity to
acquire language as well as a formula for cognitive development otherwise children would
not follow similar patterns. However, I use the evaluative ‘similar’ as it is important to not
generalize; this does not portray an exact model for every individual. It is crucial to not
discredit other arguments and to consider that Interaction directly influences whether
children reach various stages.
The first stage example to co sider are the pre-verbal ways children communicate and the
grammatical stages associated with child development. These begin with cooing/babbling
stage that occur in new-born babies; this stage strongly hints that children have an innate
desire to communicate with others; consequently, they use their biology to produce sounds
that may communicate distress or happiness. This idea is developed further on with the
emergence of the holophrastic and two-word stages where children typically use language to
convey basic needs, the language of survival. An example in the transcript would be “More
juice” which informs the parent of the child’s desire. These two words although being short,
have a semantic relation showing an advancement in language skills compared to
babbling/cooing. The final stages here are the telegraphic and post telegraphic: both long
utterances occurring at around ages 3-4, with telegraphic speech being less functionally
complete. Often at these two stages children miss out determiners, auxiliaries and modals
e.g. “Andrew want ball.” That example demonstrates that children at this stage tend to have
inflectional morphology (as proposed by brown) and rather use short semantically related
words to demonstrate purpose and meaning. Interestingly, it also demonstrates how children
do not learn the societal skill of politeness until later (omission of please.) An example in the
transcript would be: “Look at my knee. I felled over in the playground.” At 40 months the
child is quite advanced in showing telegraphic speech, they demonstrate the overextension
of a learnt grammatical rule e.g. ‘felled’ although this does not necessarily discredit their
utterance. These stages demonstrate how the speed at which our cognitive abilities develop
directly influences the speed of our acquisition. Faster cognitive development also allows us
to produce longer utterances and explore wider language functions e.g. syntactical functions.
Generally, most children follow these stages, hinting that the nature must be innate to an
extent. However, children that skip or advance through stages prove otherwise – these
children may just be more cognitively developed, although this does insinuate that stages do
not present an exact model to acquisition.
When considering stages, stages of phonological development amongst children is an
important reference point. Children seem to be especially designed to listen to language,
speech is picked up as far back as in the womb and children tend to turn to sources of
sound. A study also concluded that children could discern rhythms of familiar and unfamiliar
nursery rhymes. This all points to the nature being more innate as even when they are
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