CLA Notes Further Research

• Children’s ability to pronounce words and to use the English sound system develops much slower than comprehension: a one-year-old child, for example, can recognise perhaps 50 words but pronounce only about 3 consonants and a vowel.
•  Children’s acquisition of phonology is gradual and occurs step by step:  they start with a restricted set of words and gradually increase their repertoire, just as they start with one-word utterances and slowly build up longer sentences.   
• One feature of child language aquisition is that children master language by making mistakes until they fully aquire the skills.
• REDUBLICATION - something which caregivers often hear around the second year. Turning words like 'water', 'bottle' and 'window' into WO-WO, BO-BO and MU-MU. CRYSTAL ssuggests that the repetition and simplified pronunciation in these words helps children to recognise and learn bit by bit.
•  CONSONANT CLUSTERS - caregivers notice around the age of four. When children fail to speak words with several consonants next to each other. 
•  INTONATION - one of the first strategies to be used to make up for a lack of grammar. children of about 12 months quickly pick up the formal patterns of intonation (e.g rising intonation to form a question). However it still take until the early teens to grasp all the meanings behind these patterns. SHOWN BY ALLAN CRUTTENDEN who found that adults could judge how voice affects meaning whereas seven year olds were hardly able to do this at all. Intonation is important because it gives a listener clues to the meanings of a speaker’s message.
•  MISMATCH - choosing an unrelated meaning (labelling a phone as a tractor)
•  SEMANTIC ERRORS show that children do not learn a word complete with meaning (as we might when learning a different language) but actively negotiate it's usage through trail, error and observation.