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.
Berko and Brown (1960)
Brown spoke to a child who referred to a ‘fis’ meaning ‘fish’. Brown replied using ‘fis’ and the child corrected him again by saying ‘fis’. Finally, Brown reverted to ‘fish’ to which the child responded ‘yes, fis’. This shows that children do not hear themselves in the same way that they hear others and no amount of correction will change this.
Wells (1987)
Wells showed that the rate of language development at 30 months is related to the proportion of mothers speech to the child during shared activities such as joint book reading, play or sharing household chores
Snow and Ferguson (1977)
Found a connection between expansion/recasts and syntactic development. The more expansions and recasts that are used, the more advanced syntactic development
What are the 3 models of CDS
- Elicit: works to draw some language out of the child (ask questions; talk; share stories)
- Elaborate: help develop the range of language a child uses by asking further questions about how, where, when, why and model such structures for them
- Elucidate: help make a child’s language clearer by asking more precise questions about events and their feelings about them
What is the telegraphic stage?
- 24-30 months
- using 3 or more words at the basis of their first sentence
- the words that are used more frequently are:
1) auxiliary verbs (be/do/have)
2) articles (a/some)
3) conjunctions (and/but/so)
4) prepositions
What are virtuous errors
It is evident that children make mistakes, but they are not lazy errors, they are based on sound logic, where children are ‘overgeneralising’ the rules of grammar and lexical formation, e.g. ‘I runned’, ‘there was three mans’ etc.
What did Jean Berko do?
- in the 1950s, she carried out an experiment on children’s -s plural
- she found that when faced with a picture of an imaginary animal called a ‘wug’, children tended to create the plural ‘wugs’ when asked to complete the statement ‘this is a wug. Now there are two…’
- 4-5 year olds were tested and 76% formed the regular -s plural and 97% of 5-7 year olds did the same
- them major finding of the wug test was that even very young children have already internalised systematic aspects of the linguistic system that enable them to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms of words that they have never heard before
- it was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted ternera Lis able rules from the language around them
What happens in the post-telegraphic stage?
- as children pass through the telegraphic stage at around 3 years old, the missing function words begin to appear in the right places and more complex grammatical structures are used
- passive voice, different tenses, aspects and clause structures become apparent
- the length of sentences develop, particularly through the use of co-ordinating conjunctions
- expressing conditions with subordinating conjunctions
- use of time connections
- casual connections are acquired
What is pragmatic development?
- it involves children’s acquisition of communicative competences: learning how to use language to communicate and understand others appropriately and effectively in a widening range of social contexts and activities (Hymes, 1972)
- they are redefined and developed over time allowing the child to engage in a constantly broadening range of social activities
