Development of Language Flashcards
Language Development
a critical feature of what it means to be human is the creative and flexible use of one or more of a variety of languages and other symbols. the enormous power of language comes from generativity - the fact that a finite set of words can be used to generate an infinite number of sentences.
Language use requires comprehension, which refers to understanding what others say (or sign/write), and production, which refers to actually speaking (or signing/writing).
Acquiring a language involves the complex systems of phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics that govern its sounds, meaning, grammar, and use.
- phonological development: the mastery of the sound system of their language
- phonemes: units of sound in speech; a change in phoneme changes the meaning of a word. for example, “rake” and “lake” differentiate by one phoneme (/r/ vs. /l/)., but the words have different meanings.
- morphemes: smallest units of meaning; morphemes, alone or in combination, constitute words. the word “dog” contains one morpheme, “dogs” contains two morphemes (one designating a familiar furry entity (dog) and the second indicating the plural (-s)).
- semantic development: learning the system for expressing meaning in a language, including words and morphemes
- syntactic development; entails learning how words and morphemes are combined
- syntax; rules in a language that specific how words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.) can be combined
- pragmatic development; acquiring an understanding of how language is typically used
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What is Required for Language?
Language ability is species-specific; only humans acquire language in the normal course of development. the first prerequisite for its full-fledged development is a human brain. furthermore, it is species-unviersal; language learning is achievable by typically developing infants across the globe. researchers have succeeded in teaching nonhuman animals remarkable symbolic skills but not full-fledged language.
for example, Kaminski, Call, and Fischer (2004) found that Rico, a border collie, knew more than 200 words and could learn and remember new words using the some of the same kind of processes that toddlers use.
even their most basic linguistic achievements come only after a great deal of concentrated human effort, whereas human children master the rudiments of their language with little explicit teaching.
The early years constitute a critical period for language acquisition; many aspects of language are more difficult to acquire thereafter (sometime between age 5 and puberty)
A second prerequisite for language development is exposure to language. much of the language babies hear takes the form of infant-directed speech (IDS), which is characterised by a higher-than-normal pitch; extreme shifts in intonation; a warm, affectionate tone; and exaggerated facial expressions.
The Process of Language Acquisition
Speech Perception
The basis for very early language learning is prosody, the characteristic rhythmic and intonation patterns with which a language is spoken. Differences in prosody are in large part responsible for why languages sound so different from one another.
Infants have remarkable speech-perception abilities. like adults, they exhibit categorical perception of speech sounds, perceiving physically similar sounds as belonging to discrete categories. the voice onset time (VOT) involves the length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating.
Word Segmentation:
Preparation for Production:
Infants begin to babble at around 7 months of age, either repeating syllables (“bababa”) or, if exposed to sign language, using repetitive hand movements. gradually, vocal babbling begins to sound more like the baby’s native language.
First Words:
infants begin to recognise highly familiar words at about 6mths of age.
infants begin to produce words at about 1yr old. they initially say just one word at a time (phase known as the holophrastic period) and often make overextension errors, using a particular word in a broader context than is appropriate. infants make use of a variety of strategies to figure out what new words mean the process of rapidly learning a new word simply from hearing the contrastive use of a familiar and the unfamiliar word is known as fast mapping.
Putting Words Together:
by the end of their 2nd year, most toddlers produce short sentences. the length and complexity of their utterances gradually increase, and toddlers spontaneously practice their emerging linguistic skills. the strategy of using grammatical structure of whole sentences to figure out meaning is known as syntactic bootstrapping. telegraphic speech is known as a term to describe children’s first sentences that are generally two-word utterances.
in the early preschool years, children exhibit generalisation, extending such patterns as “add-s to make plural” to novel nouns, and making overregularisation errors (speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular).
children develop their burgeoning language skills as they go from collective monologues (a conversation between children that involves a series of non sequiturs, the content of each child’s turn having little or nothing to do with what the other child has just said) to sustained conversation, improving their abilities to tell coherent narratives about their past experiences and to listen and respond to and converse with others.
Theoretical Issues in Language Development
Chomsky and the Nativist View:
nativists, such as the influential linguist Noam Chomsky, posit innate knowledge of Universal Grammar, the set of highly abstract rules common to all languages. they believe that language learning is supported by language-specific skills.
the modularity hypothesis is the idea that the human brain contains an innate, self-contained language module that is separate from other aspects of cognitive functioning.
theorists focused on social interaction emphasise the communicative context of language development and use. they emphasise the impressive degree to which infants and young children exploit a host of pragmatic cues to figure out what others are saying.
other perspectives argue that language can develop in the absence of innate knowledge and that language learning requires powerful general-purpose cognitive mechanisms. connectionist models have been used to support this view.
connectionism is a type of information-processing approach that emphasises the simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected processing units.
Nonlinguistic Symbols and Development
Using Symbols as Information:
Symbolic artifacts like maps or models require dual representation (symbolic artifacts must be represented in two ways at the same time - both as a real object and as a symbol for something other than itself). to use them, children must represent mentally both the object itself as well as its symbolic relation to what it stands for. toddlers become increasingly skillful at achieving dual representation and using symbolic artifacts as a source of information.
Drawing and Writing:
drawing and writing are popular symoblic activities. young children’s early scribbling quickly gives way to the intention to draw pictures of something, with a favourite theme being representations of the human figure. early attempts to writing, while illegible, contain some characteristics of mature writing systems.
