Chapter 9 - Language Development Flashcards

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1
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LANGUAGE

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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.

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2
Q

PHONOLOGY

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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.

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3
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MORPHOLOGY

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MORPHOLOGY is the rule system that governs HOW WORDS ARE FORMED in a language - a MORPHEME is a minimal unit of meaning.

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4
Q

SYNTAX

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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.

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5
Q

SEMANTICS

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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.

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6
Q

PRAGMATICS

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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.

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7
Q

FIRST VOCALIZATIONS

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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.

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8
Q

GESTURES

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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.

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9
Q

RECOGNITION of LANGUAGE SOUNDS

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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.

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10
Q

FIRST WORDS, common MISTAKES and TELEGRAPHIC SPEECH

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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.

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11
Q

BILINGUALISM

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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.

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12
Q

THEORIES of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

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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.

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13
Q

LEARNING THEORIES of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

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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.

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14
Q

BIOLOGICAL, nativist THEORIES of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

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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.

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15
Q

SOCIAL and CULTURAL EXPLANATIONS of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

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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.

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16
Q

MODERN APPROACH to LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

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Still to this day, not all mechanisms of children’s acquisition of language are fully understood. Research tells us that language development typically appears around the same age with low variability - still, language environments to which infants are exposed to differ significantly across cultures in amount of child-directed speech and active teaching.
Thus, it is important not to take an unbalanced approach on the nature- nurture debate and acknowledge that two factors that are essential in typical language development are:
1) Human biological structures and processes;
2) Active participation in a language-using community.

17
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CHILD-DIRECTED SPEECH or BABY TALK

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CHILD-DIRECTED SPEECH, or BABY TALK, is a specific way of talking to children that adults adopt - in several cultures, but not all - which is characterised by high pitched voice, a simplified vocabulary and frequent reformulation of what children say. It has the important function of capturing the infant’s attention and maintaining communication.

18
Q

Transitions from NON-VERBAL to VERBAL communication.

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Transition from NON-VERBAL to VERBAL communication occurs through:

1) Increased intentionality - repeated association between communicative behaviour (such as smiling) and environmental responses lead to intentional pursue of communication;
2) More flexible attention, which allows to include environmental objects into communication;
3) Acquisition of symbolic representation, which triggers the shift towards verbal communication.

19
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PRIMARY INTERSUBJECTIVITY and SECONDARY INTERSUBJECTIVITY

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Verbal communication develops from PRIMARY SUBJECTIVITY, which occurs in the first 6 months of life, to SECONDARY SUBJECTIVITY, which develops around the 10th month.
PRIMARY SUBJECTIVITY consists of well organised, reciprocal social interactions in which interlocutors are able to recognise and share the emotional state of the other.
SECONDARY SUBJECTIVITY, in which infant and caregiver communicate with each other about the external world - JOINT ATTENTION, in which the adult follows the infant’s gaze to ensure that they share the same conversational topic, is an example of such communication.

20
Q

SOCIAL REFERENCING

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SOCIAL REFERENCING is a form of SECONDARY SUBJECTIVITY in which children look at their caregiver for an indication of how they should feel or act in an unfamiliar situation - It helps babies to interpret and emotionally respond to an unusual event. It requires both MOTOR and COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT- (1) it becomes a common means of communication as soon as babies begin to move about on their own, and (2)cognitive development is essential since it requires the ability to combine separate objects, people and information.
Because of this phenomenon, the caregiver’s reaction to a situation influences the infant’s behaviour- this has been shown in numerous studies, such as in VISUAL CLIFF studies: infants are more likely to ignore the perceived danger of the cliff if a caregiver, on the other side, encourages them with positive social cues.
It develops before ATTACHMENT does, so it can be seen as its precursor.
Social referencing develops during infancy but it is a lifelong lasting social phenomenon.

21
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STAGES of LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

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Language developments follow an universal path:

1) PRELINGUISTIC development, which takes place in the first year of life. Important form of nonverbal communication are SOCIAL REFERENCING and JOINT ATTENTION;
2) Word learning - or SEMANTIC - development which begins in the second year and reaches its peak at 18 months in a VOCABULARY SPURT;
3) SYNTACTIC development, which begins at 20 months of age;
4) Acquisition of extensive discourse and use of PRAGMATICS, at around 5 years of age.