Language development

Question 1

what are five kinds of linguistic knowledge?

Answer 1

• learn to discriminate and produce the sounds of a language
• to combine these appropriately to form words
• to understand that words convey meaning
• to use the rules for combining words into meaningful phrases and sentences
• to figure out how to communicate effectivley

Question 2

how do we help children to learn language?

Answer 2

• turn-talking (leave a space between talking)
• motherese/child-directed speech (talking in a baby voice)
• few direct corrections or grammar (give negative feedback/recasts/expanding the sentence so it’s grammatically correct)
• conversations (not TV)

Question 3

what are the stages of language development

Answer 3

• pre linguistic stage: 0-12 months
• one word stage: 12-18 months
• telegraphic speech: 18-24 months
• nursery/preschool developments: 24 months-5years
• school age developments: 5 years+

Question 4

outline the pre-linguistic period

Answer 4

• 3 days old: prefer mother’s voice
• first month: prefer native language
• within 2 months: recognise the same phonemes if spoken by different people
• early: discriminate non-native phonemes: this disappears with exposure to 1 language
• infants respond to/repeat intonational cues
• 7-9 months: good parsing of the speech stream

Question 5

outline pre-linguistic vocalisations

Answer 5

• 2months old: cooking (ooooh)
• 4-6months old: babbling (deaf infants manual babbling)
• 6-10months old: canonical babbling (dadada)
• 10-12months old: modulated babbling (different sounds in different contexts, e.g mmm to ask for something vs aaah when handling toys)
• up to 6 months: dead and hearing infants have the same language
• comprehension develops before speech (they understand words before they can speak it)

Question 6

outline one-word stage

Answer 6

• babies use single words whereas adults would use sentences
• first words around 12 months
• first words are usually restricted by production limitations e.g repetitive, shortened, or distorted
• cultural differences in first words

Question 7

outline telegraphic period (18-24 months)

Answer 7

• strings of two or more words appear
• these strings contain only keywords (e.g kick ball gone)
• supplemented by gesture and international cues
• children monitor others’ responses to these short utterances and corrected there if needed
• word order preserved
• not a universal feature (e.g Russian, where more stress is placed on grammatical markers than in English)

Question 8

explain the vocabulary growth between 18-24 months

Answer 8

• 200 words by 2nd birthday; mostly object names
• the ability to categorically link new words
• quick learning of referent-label pairs
• overextension errors (e.g doggie for all animals)
• underextension (e.g doggie for their dog only)

Question 9

how do infants know what words mean?

Answer 9

• social and contextual cues, e.g new label likely to refer to the new object
• from processing contrasts: object-scope constraint (new label refers to a whole object, not part of it). mutual exclusivity (if this is a dog, it is not also a cat)
• from syntactical cues: e.g where in a sentence a new label occurs (bootstrapping)

Question 10

outline nursery/preschool developments (2.5-5 years)

Answer 10

• grammatical development
• asking questions, producing negative sentences, producing complex sentences
• semantic development: passive constructions difficult to start with
• development of pragmatics: referential communication skills (generate clear messages, clarify, adjust….)

Question 11

outline the school-age developments

Answer 11

syntactic development:
- 9 years: overregularisations corrected
- complex passive sentences understood (8-9 years)
vocabulary development:
- 6 years: understand 10,000 words
- 10 years: understand 40,000 words (at all ages use much fewer in production)
- growing morphological knowledge allows them to analyse unfamiliar words (e.g hopelessness)
- metalinguistic awareness
- further development in communication skills