Childrens Language Development Flashcards
What are the 5 stages of children’s language development?
1) Preverbal
2) Holophrastic
3) Two-word
4) Telegraphic
5) Post-telegraphic
What is the preverbal stage?
- starts at birth and lasts roughly 11 months
- during this stage babies begin to communicate soundlessly with actions e.g. hand movements.
- examples: vocal play, biological noises (coughing, burping, crying), melodic utterance (melody, rhythm and intonation develop), cooing and laughing
What is babbling?
- consonant and vowel combinations ‘ma’, ‘da’.
- bilabial (lips coming together) sounds most common
- when these sounds are repeated = reduplicated monosyllable
- exercises and experiments with articulators
- phonemic contraction
What is the holophrastic stage?
-usually between 12-18 months
- child conveys meaningful utterances that are usually 1-word utterances
- it is a significant stage because they’re deliberately conveying meaning through lexical choices
How did Katherine Nelson (1973) classify a child’s first word?
1) naming things
2) actions/events
3) personal/social
4) modifying things
What is overextension and what 2 groups can it be categorised into?
- a child uses a more specific word to label a more general noun (e.g. calling all men ‘daddy’)
- analogical: making links between different objects according similar properties or use e.g. calling a scarf ‘cat’ as it has similar properties
- categorical: a child refers to all objects within the same category with the same name e.g. calling all animals ‘cat’
What is under extension?
Where a child uses a more general word that only applies to a very specific thing e.g. only a red apple is an apple, not a green apple
Why is the holophrastic stage critical?
- children are developing grammar through through their use of a single word and the adults expansion of that word
- this one word stage is also an important step in building confidence and self-esteem
- children are developing their phonological awareness and articulation skills
What is the 2-word stage?
- 18-24 months: at this stage syntax comes into play and the child is likely to combine words into a range of patterns to create mini sentences
- this stage largely revolves around nouns, as they make up the largest % of their vocabulary (these nouns are often pivot words)
Definition of child-directed speech
The specialised register of speech that adults and older children use when talking to young children. It is simplified and often more grammatically correct than adult-directed speech
Examples of CDS
- more pronounced intonation that draws attention to key morphemes or lexemes
- more obvious lip and mouth movement
- higher pitch and exaggerated intonation and stress
- simplified vocab/ grammar
- actions that accompany speech
- Echoing/repetition
- use of expansions/ re-casting
The relation of socio-economic status to CDS
- high-socio-economic status mothers use longer utterances and a greater range of different words when they talk to their children that low-SES mothers and, in turn, their children have larger vocabularies
- low SES mothers are found to talk less and use less varied vocab during interaction with their children than high-SES mothers
- it is estimated that children from the high-SES families they observed heard approximately 11,000 utterances in a day, compared to 700 utterances for the children from low SES families
Clarke-Stewart (1973)
Found that children whose mothers talk more have LARGER vocabularies
Katherine Nelson (1973)
Found that children at the holophrastic stage who mothers corrected them on word choice and pronunciation actually advanced more slowly than those whose mothers were generally accepting
Brown, Cazden and Bellugi (1969)
Found that parents often respond to the truth value of what their child is saying, rather than its grammatical correctness.
