Chapter 9 - Language Development Flashcards
LANGUAGE
LANGUAGE is a symbolic system which allows to (1) express abstract ideas, desires and emotions, (2) pass on a cultures’ knowledge, values and beliefs and (3) mediate human activities and relationships.
Language skills that children develop include analysis of linguistic sounds, articulation skills, acquisition of vocabulary, acquisition of social communication rules - all these aspects are regulated by 5 systems of rules:
1) PHONOLOGY;
2) MORPHOLOGY;
3) SYNTAX;
4) SEMANTICS;
5) PRAGMATICS.
PHONOLOGY
PHONOLOGY is the SOUND system of a language, which includes the sounds that are used and how they may be combined - a PHONEME is the basic unit of sound in a language.
PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT is the process through which children learn to segment strings o speech sounds into meaningful units of language - it requires mastering the pronunciation of the separate words of a language.
MORPHOLOGY
MORPHOLOGY is the rule system that governs HOW WORDS ARE FORMED in a language - a MORPHEME is a minimal unit of meaning.
SYNTAX
SYNTAX is the rule system that governs HOW WORDS ARE COMBINED to form meaningful sentences - the term syntax is often used interchangeably with the term grammar.
GRAMMAR - or syntax - DEVELOPMENT is the process through which children understand the rules about how words are arranged in a sentence.
SEMANTICS
SEMANTICS refers to the meaning of words and sentences.
SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT is the process through which children learn the meaning of words and word combinations, which involves learning the association between a word and its referent - it is what makes language “symbolic”. It is evident in children’s VOCABULARY SPURT, which begins at 18 months of age - between 18 months and 6 years of age, young children learn approximately one new word every waking hour. This is possible because of FAST MAPPING, a learning mechanism that exploits the child’s ability to make an initial connection between a word and its referent after only limited exposure to the word.
PRAGMATICS
PRAGMATICS involve the appropriate use of language in different contexts.
PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT is the process of learning the social and cultural conventions that govern how language is used in particular contexts. Children learn for what purposes it is used and how context influences the interpretation of meaning.
FIRST VOCALIZATIONS
Long before infants speak recognisable words, they produce a number of VOCALIZATIONS, which allow them to practice sound production, to communicate, and to attract attention. Infants all over the world follow a similar path:
1) CRYING, even from birth, which signals distress;
2) COOING, after the first month, which signals pleasure;
3) BABBLING, after the first 6 months, which consists of strings of consonant-vowel combinations, such as ba, ba, ba, ba.
GESTURES
Infants start using gestures at about 8 to 12 months of age - before verbal communication is achieved. GESTURES are nonverbal means of communication reflecting social conventions. The brain mechanisms that support the use of gestures seem to be related to those that support speech and language.
POINTING, one of the most common gestures, follows a universal developmental sequence - from pointing without checking on adult gaze to pointing while looking back and forth between an object and the adult. Pointing is a key aspect of the development of joint attention and an important index of the social aspects of language - failure to engage in pointing also characterizes many autistic children.
There are two types of gestures:
1) DEICTIC /dàitik/ GESTURES, which express a communicative intention and represent an attempt to direct others’ attention to the environment - they emerge at about 10 months of age.
2) REPRESENTATIONAL GESTURES, which emerge along with the first verbal skills and reflect symbolic thinking.
RECOGNITION of LANGUAGE SOUNDS
At birth, children show a preference for speech over other kinds of sounds - which has been assessed with the preference paradigm - and can differentiate between two sounds that are distinct PHONEMES in any language. But after 6 months, infants get even better at perceiving the changes in sounds from their “own” language, and gradually lose the ability to recognize differences in phonemes that are not important in their own language.
Infants begin to detect word boundaries by 8 months of age.
FIRST WORDS, common MISTAKES and TELEGRAPHIC SPEECH
Infants understand words before they can produce or speak them, and the infant’s first spoken word usually doesn’t occur until 13 months of age. Children’s RECEPTIVE VOCABULARY considerably exceeds their SPOKEN VOCABULARY, meaning that they understand many more words than those they can produce.
There are wide variations in the rates at which young children acquire new words, but a VOCABULARY SPURT, a rapid increase in vocabulary extension, begins at approximately 18 months of age. In many different languages, the first 100 words a child learns are nouns, followed by verbs and adjectives.
“No” is among the earliest and most frequently used words - it is easy to pronounce, and it is a way in which children can impose their will and play with their independence.
The most common mistakes children make when producing their first words are:
1) OVEREXTENSION, the tendency to apply a single word to several referents with a common feature - a child might call ‘dog’ any animal with four legs;
2) UNDEREXTENSION, the tendency to apply a word too narrowly - a child might calls ‘dog’ only her family’s dog;
3) OVERLAPPING, the tendency to apply the same word to two referents that share a similar outcome - a child might use the verb ‘open’ to refer to both a door and to the turning the lights on.
By the time children are 18 to 24 months of age, they usually utter two-word messages to communicate. These utterances mark the beginning of the development of TELEGRAPHIC SPEECH, the use of short and precise words without grammatical markers such as articles, auxiliary verbs, and other connectives.
BILINGUALISM
For many years, it was claimed that if individuals did not learn a second language prior to puberty, they would never reach proficiency - but modern research shows that sensitive periods of learning vary across different language systems, thus:
1) For adolescents and adults, new vocabulary is easier to learn than new sounds or new grammar rules;
2) Children tend to learn a second language slower than adults do, but their final proficiency level is usually higher, especially the accuracy of their pronunciation - native-like accents are best learned before age 12.
THEORIES of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Throughout the past century, two major theoretical positions tried to explain how children acquire language:
1) BIOLOGICAL, nativist THEORIES, such as CHOMSKY’s;
2) LEARNING THEORIES, which focus on environmental influences and are rooted in BEHAVIOURISM.
More recently, SOCIAL and CULTURAL EXPLANATIONS of language acquisition - such as BRUNER’s - have tried to emphasize that both biology and experience contribute to language development.
LEARNING THEORIES of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
According to LEARNING THEORIES of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, language is nothing more than a complex, learned skill.
In support of the nurture side of the debate, a dramatic case study evidenced how exposure to a stimulating environment is essential for language development. GENIE, a girl who was kept captive by her parents till the age of 12, despite of years of therapy and rehabilitation following her release, never developed typical linguistic skills because she was under-stimulated in sensitive periods of language development. This story shows that participation in a normal social environment is essential to the process of language acquisition - early deprivation has wide-ranging effects on all domains of development.
The extreme learning hypothesis, rooted in BEHAVIOURISM, maintains that the environment surrounding the infant is the only source of language acquisition - learning a language is a gradual, CONTINUOUS process which occurs through three processes:
1) CLASSICAL CONDITIONING - the meaning of words are learned through repeated experience of word-referent associations;
2) OPERANT CONDITIONING - the production of words is learned via positive or negative reinforcements from the environment which model the child’s responses;
3) ABSTRACT MODELING or IMITATION - by imitating specific words or sentences, children learn to abstract the underlying linguistic rules and apply them to other words or sentences.
The behavioral view of language learning has several problems:
1) It does not account for the CREATIVITY of language - it does not explain how people create novel sentences;
2) Children learn the syntax of their native language even if they are not reinforced for doing so - feedback received from other people on their early utterances provides insufficient information to induce the rules of grammar.
For these reasons, the behavioral view is no longer considered a viable explanation of how children acquire language.
BIOLOGICAL, nativist THEORIES of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Some language scholars view the remarkable similarities in how children acquire language all over the world, despite the vast variation in linguistic input they receive, as strong evidence that language has a biological basis.
The biological basis of language were discovered when two brain regions involved in language were identified:
1) BROCA’s AREA, a region located in the left frontal lobe of the brain involved in speech production and grammatical processing;
2) WERNICKE’s AREA, a region located in the left temporal lobe involved in speech production and grammatical processing.
It is important to notice that this is just the prototypical organisation of brain areas, which shows variability and plasticity - children suffering early damage of either hemisphere can still develop typical linguistic skills.
CHOMSKY proposed that humans are biologically prewired to learn language - he argues that children are born with a LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE (LAD) which enables the child to detect certain features and rules of language, including phonology, syntax, and semantic - in other words, he posits that our brain is hardwired to attend to language and its rules. Chomsky’s LAD is a theoretical construct, not a physical part of the brain - still, this theory can account for the universal stages of language development that infants all over the world experience: as children mature and interact with the environment, maturation of the LAD enables them to use increasingly complex language forms.
Nevertheless, this theory seems to imply that linguistic input provided by adults is irrelevant to language production, which is not the case.
SOCIAL and CULTURAL EXPLANATIONS of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
SOCIOCULTURAL approaches to the debate of language acquisition -such as VYGOTSKY’s and BRUNER’s - have tried to improve Chomsky’s LAD by including environmental factors.
BRUNER proposed the concept of LASS - the LANGUAGE ACQUISITION SUPPORT SYSTEM - whose development is both hardwired in the brain and shaped by experience - that is, children acquire language in the process of using it in a particular socio-cultural environment.
Bruner maintains that the earliest social structures for language development involve recurrent social non-verbal activities called FORMATS, which act as precursors of language - so, the mechanisms through which language develops are finely-tuned and well-timed social interactions, such as play. This idea is supported by the STILL FACE PARADIGM, in which infants experience distress if expectations of typical social interaction are not met.
According to this view CULTURE is relevant for it influences whether and how particular objects become a focus of the caregiver-child interaction.
