Child Language Acquisition

Sensorimotor

Preoperational

Concrete operational

Formal operational

Instrumental: "I want pizza."

Regulatory: "Don't touch my blanket!"

Interactional: "Can I have a turn after you?"

Personal: "I have a dog!"

Heuristic: "Why does it rain, mommy?"

Imaginative: "You are the queen and I'm the princess."

Representational: "My mommy has blue eyes and likes Lifetime movies."

Suggests that language acquisition is an innate faculty

Children do not simply copy the language that they hear around them.

Children are born with the Universal Grammar wired into their brains. This grammar offers a certain limited number of possibilities - for example, the word order of a typical sentence. 

As one of the pioneers of Behaviorism, he accounted for language development by means of environmental influence.

Skinner argued that children learn language based on behaviorist reinforcement principles by associating words with meanings.

For example, when the child says ‘milk’ and the mother will smile and give her some as a result, the child will find this outcome rewarding, enhancing the child's language development 

suggests that the language behaviour of adults when talking to children (known by several names by most easily referred to as child-directed speech or CDS) is specially adapted to support the acquisition process

Developed the LASS (Language Acquisition Support System)

In his research he found that the turn-taking structure of conversation is developed through non-verbal communication long before actual words are uttered.

Bernstein makes a correlation between social class and language.

He reports that in the working class, you don't often find elaborated code, whereas in the middle class you find the use of both the restricted and elaborated codes.

His research argues that the working class have access only to restricted codes,