Michael Halliday’s Functions

Michael Halliday developed the seven functions of language that outline how people use language for various purposes.

Practical Functions

Instrumental: to express needs e.g “want food“

Regulatory: to tell others what to do e.g “daddy push“

Social Functions

Interactional: to make contact with others and form relationships e.g “hi“ and “how are you?“

Personal: to express personal feelings, opinions, and identity e.g “I am“

Learning Functions

Imaginative: to tell stories and jokes

Representational: to convey facts and information e.g “I got a new doll“

Heuristic: to gain knowledge of the environment

Noam Chomsky’s Innateness Theory (1965)

Chomsky believed children had an inherited ability to learn language as soon as they are born. This is due to something he coined as the language acquisition device (LAD) which already has predisposed information, particularly about grammar and sentence structure.

Evidence to support this theory includes errors by children with past tense verbs.

• Many children will add ‘-ed‘ to any verb e.g “I drawed“ v.s “I drew“ to make it past tense, even if it is incorrect, which shows they are not imitating their caregivers when they use past tense verbs. They understand that adding ‘-ed‘ to a present tense verb will make it past tense, but that it is not the case for all past tense verbs. These are known as virtuous errors

However, critics do not agree with the innateness theory as it is proven that children don’t just have the LAD alone, but they need imitation to understand basic social interactions such as turn-taking.

• natural predisposition

• grammar

• underlying principles

• over-generalisation

• child applying rules by themselves

• never looked at a child’s desire to learn, desire to communicate

B. F. Skinner’s Behaviourist Theory (1957)

Skinner believed that children learn language through imitation and reinforcement. Children will imitate from their parents and other caregivers and it is important that they are rewarded.

Another researcher Katherine Nelson (1973) found that if parents were more rewarding and accepting, their childrens’ vocabulary would advance more quickly than those children who’s mothers kept correcting them.

• Brown, Cazden, and Bellugi (1969) found that parents are more likely to respond to a child’s utterances if they are true rather than correcting them

  • Child: there doggie

    Parent: Yes, it’s a dog!

  • v.s

    Parent: No, there is a dog.

However, it can be argued the behaviourist theory is not true thanks to Berko and Brown (1960). Their study is known as the ‘fis‘ phenomenon.

Brown spoke to a child who said “fis“ instead of “fish“. When Brown corrected him, the child repeated the word back but in the same way he knew (“fis“). When Brown said “fis“, the child repeated it. When Brown said the word again but correctly (“fish“), the child responded with “fis“ as always.

This shows that children phonologically develop differently and hear themselves differently, meaning no repetition of the correct word will change this until they develop their ability to pronounce the more difficult consonant clusters.

• operant conditioning

• praise and reward

• child-directed speech

• habit-forming behaviour

• positive reinforcement

• recasting

• rules can’t be learned by imitation alone

• virtuous errors

• all children go through the same sequence of steps regardless of behaviourism

• developmental milestones remain unaffected

• children can’t repeat what an adult says sometimes

• critical period theory

Case Study: Genie Wiley (1970)

Genie Wiley was discovered in 1970 at the age of 13 by a social worker and is classified as a ‘feral child‘. Her parents had locked her in a bedroom, isolated and abused for almost her whole life, often tied to a potty chair.

Genie had been deprived of all social interaction; her father only barked and growled at her rather than spoke to her.

By the time she was put into rehabilitation, she spent many years learning how to walk, use the toilet, and eventually speak. However, she only managed two to three-word sentences like “father hit leg“ and “Genie hurt“ four years after she started rehabilitation.

This proved the critical period hypothesis that is part of the behaviourist theory which states that if children do not acquire language and all its conventions before the age of 7, they will never catch up. Genie, who was never treated properly and not exposed to language, will rarely speak normally even in her later years.

Jerome Bruner’s Interactionist Theory (1983)

Bruner believed that language can only be learned through interaction with others. Child-directed speech is important in aiding a child’s language acquisition development.

In response to Chomsky’s LAD, Bruner developed the language acquisition support system (LASS) which is a a support system that helps children acquire language and become sociable. This support system includes parents and other caregivers such as teachers.

The LASS is very important during the critical period (2 years to 5 years).

However, the theory can be debunked by Piaget’s cognitive stages as he saw that children pass through the same stages in the same order. It can also be argued that not all parents will adopt child-directed speech, which goes against the LASS.

• Vygotsky

  • zone of proximal development

  • more-knowledgeable other

  • desire to interact, desire to be social

• Bruner

  • LASS

  • scaffolding

• turn-taking

• enjoyment

• CDS techniques

  • prosodic features

    • intonation

    • higher volume

    • higher pitch

    • slower pace

    • more pauses

    • upward inflection

  • paralinguistic features

  • lexis and semantics

    • semantic simplification

    • concrete nouns

    • deixis

    • few pronouns

  • grammar

  • diminutives

  • accommodation

  • repetition

  • imperatives

  • closed questions, tag questions

  • heuristic learning environment

  • third-person pronouns

  • recasting

  • high-frequency words

• encouragement, praise

• child asking questions — desire to learn, desire to be social

CRUTTENDEN (1979)