Tuesday, 17 March 2015

Child Language Acquisition - Phonology

Basics of Phonology

Place of articulation: Where in the mouth you are putting your tongue in order to control air flow.

Manner of articulation: How you shape the sound.

Plosive: Can only make the sound one. It explodes from your mouth. e.g. 'p', 'b' etc.

Fricative: Keep making the sound constantly. e.g. 's', 'r' 'f'

Nasal: Keep making noises with the mouth shut e.g. 'm'

Affricative: Starts like a fricative and then ends like a plosive. e.g. 'ch'

Voicing: Whether or not you engage the vocal chords.

Babbling and Patterns

There are two types of babbling:

1) Reduplicated - Some consonant-vowel structures repeated
AND
2) Varriegated - Combinations of difference consonant-vowel structures

Simplification 

Children simplify pronunciation when speaking in three ways:

1) Substitution - fricatives are swapped for plosives and voiced for unvoiced. e.g. zebra - debra
2) Deletion:
    • Final consonant dropped e.g. cat - ca
    • Unstressed syllables e.g. banana - nana
    • Reduced consonant clusters e.g. snake - nake
3) Reduplication - different sounds in the word become the same e.g. dog - gog

Lexical-Semantic

First Word Categories:

• Entities - Names of people, food, humans, clothes, vehicles, animals, toys, other objects e.t.c.
• Properties - All gone, hot, more, dirty, here, there e.t.c.
• Actions - Up, sit, see, eat e.t.c.
• Personal-Social - hello, bye, no, yes, please, thank you, ta e.t.c.

Development of word classes ordered by size of groups:
- Nouns (concrete)
- Verbs (dynamic)
- Adjectives

Underextension - Giving a word a narrower meaning than it has in adult language e.g. calling a family cat 'cat' but not applying it to all other cats.

Overextension - A word is given a broader, more general meaning e.g. all four legged animals become 'dog'.

• Overextension is seen more frequently than underextension.
• As child's vocabulary grows, overextension narrows and underextension widens.
• Children understand words in advance of being able to produce them correctly. e.g. Fis Phenomenon.

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