Language Development Flashcards
0-3 months
- prefers sounds of familiar language
- can discriminate between syllables within words
- can discriminate mothers’ voice from others
- capable of spontaneous ohh sounds
- communicates through cries
- enjoys human voice to other sounds
- smiles at a sound of a familiar voice (0-4mon)
- quiets when held
- startles to sounds
1-4 months
- attempts to imitate some sounds
- coos back and forth with caregiver
- begins grouping language sounds in categories
Responding to own name
between 4-5 months old!
4-7 months
- attempts to respond to sounds by making sounds
- can verbalize happiness and displeasure
- capable of responding to NO
Babbling
- includes short strings of consonants (6-9mon)
- babbling appears less random and inflections become more apparent around 9-14 months!
7-12 months
- learns to wait until someone else is finished before vocalizing
- responds to simple verbal requests
- uses gestures and sounds to communicate
- capable of uttering mama and dada (8-12 mon)
- begins to understand that words can refer to physical objects
12-24 months
- begins to imitate spoken words
- first words (12-19 months)
- identifies names of familiar people, objects and body parts
- can correctly identify a picture with its spoken name
- commonly uses 2-4 word sentences (15-24 months)
- vocabulary of 200 words (16-24 months)
- a rapid increase in vocabulary around 15 months!
Beings to use combinations of words in meaningful ways
20-24 months
- telegraphic speech
- combinatory speech
2-3 years
- grammar increases
- strangers can understand most words spoken
- uses pronouns (I, you, me, we, they)
- uses some plurals
- Can say name, age and gender (29 months)
- vocabulary consists of 1000 words
3-5 years
- can ask a grammatically correct question
- inserts articles
- understands the concept of the same and different
- speaks in sentences of 5-6 words
- speaks in more complex sentences!
Communication
- much broader concept in which language is embedded
Language
- socially shared and constructed
- code for representing concepts through use of arbitrary symbols and rule governed combinations of symbols
- languages evolve and change!
Speech
- vocal/oral representation of language
- verbal means of communicating
syntax
placing/ordering of words
semantics
- meaning of words
pragmatics
social uses
phonology
sounds
Culture and Language
- Gaskins
- Process of acquiring language and process of acquiring socio-cultural knowledge are intimately tied
- children’s language is constructed in socially appropriate and culturally meaningful ways.
- Learning language takes place in everyday interactions with others. Culture plays a huge role in language development!
- Routines such as pointing, naming, play with physical objects are not common in many cultures!
- what gets reinforced is what you are exposed to (sound combinations and emphasis patterns)
Gopnik: babies as “citizens of the world”
- babies have capacity to differentiate sounds that we as adults do not!
- babies haven’t structured/organized language yet, they don’t show a preference to one language system at birth
- after six months, babies organize sounds, structure language and show a preference for there own language sounds by 9 months
9 factors influencing language learning (social interaction perspective)
- creatively constructed
- within long term relationships
- within predictable situations with people and topics
- capacity and opportunity for play
5 adults fine tune and regulating children’s interactions (occurrence of people/situations, frequency of events, co-occurrence, degree of difficulty) - Others act as if child is communicative partner
- Goals
- Universal use of language in all cultures: story telling
- variation
Language Development across age ranges
preverbal- one word- two words (telegraphic speech)- combinatory speech (narratives)
Universal language acquisition
- general pattern of language development across cultures, but variable rates of language development particularly with lexicon/vocabulary
Language and Cognition
- Role of cognition is huge in language development
- word meaning develops in conjunction with cognitive development
- reciprocal influence
- word meaning changes over time
- infants/toddlers learning what words do
Language is not just vocabulary….
it is how words are combined to express meaning!
Language is…
- a social interactive tool
- rule governed
- generative/creative
Lindfors
- child draws on making sense of social situations to construct language
- language as a way to express meaning
- child uses whatever is salient and interesting (children do not attend to all language equally)
- first words usually include: objects children act upon or familiar people
2 year old question
“what is this?”
- looking for appropriate labels
3 year old question
“why?”
- working on causal relationships
- want to learn about world around them!
Parentese/Motherese
- NOT universal: not essential to language development, but provides a basis for socialization and language development in western culture.
- exaggerated intonation contours (up and down of voice)
- higher pitch
- exaggerated stress/emphasis
- omissions
- high amount of repetition
- focus on here and now
- shorter sentences
- sentences simplified
Joint construction/Shared experiences
- building on what child says/does
- tuned into one another
- joint constructions of conversations
- adults accepting, responding and supporting child’s early language
Receptive and Expressive Language (2-3 years)
- can follow two requests
- puts two words together
- simple sentences much like telegraphic speech
- asks questions
- easier to understand speech (can understand 75% of what child says)
- talk about things in past and in future
Receptive and Expressive Language (3-4 years)
- answers simple questions
- listens attentively to stories
- understands meaning of sentences
- begins to use simple grammar
- vocab expands
- sentences are more complex
- more sophisticated
- understand just about everything child says
Receptive and Expressive Language (4-5 years)
- hears and understands most of what is said at home and in school
- grammar becomes more and more like an adult
- vocab increases
- social language skills improving
- can tell little jokes/give hints!
- may be a speech sound or two that is not mastered, but have learned all the rules of language for the most part
- continuing to learn new and different ways of saying things
Lindfors (pre-verbal stage)
- signals with cries, sensitivity to sound and rhythm patterns
- Pointing
- turn taking in interactions
- gestures (points, gives)
- conventional signs around 6-7 months
- developing sound meaning patterns
- non-random vocalization patterns
- builds base of social and interactional understanding (initiating, responding, attending signaling)
Receptive language
- receptive language comes in around 9-10 months!
- developing before expressive language!
Lindfors (one word stage)
- initially only understood in context
- one word + gesture that matches
- one word: labels for items in environment
- familiar persons, animals, movement, affect words, self-objects
- heavy content words are first to be mastered (words that reflect things that child can act on, do and notice)
Holophrase
- word that stands for an entire phrase or sentence of meaning (one utterance may represent many things)
- often only those who know child can understand ( in order to understand you must look at child, context and gesture)
Lindfors (two word stage)
- telegraphic speech
- same two word order may convey different meaning
- context, body language and tone needed for interpretation
Diverse use/functions of language
- labeling (existence)
- nonexistence (all gone)
- attributes
- reoccurence (more)
- social greetings ( hi, bye bye)
Lindfors- Combinatory speech
- preschool years and kindergarten
- smoothness and fluency in sentences
- morpheme fillers present (plural, possessions, prepositions, auxiliaries)
- over extensions/over generalizations “eated”
- different kinds of questions emerge
Order in which children acquire questions
What? Where?
Why? How? When? What do?
Who? Whose?
Expressing negation
first child uses no and not at beginning of sentence
- next, inserts negative element like don’t or can’t
- can not and do not emerge as separate words
- distinction between first and third person
- combining propositions
- moving toward less reliance on here and now
Lindfors (school age years)
metalinguistic awareness
- metacognitive awareness
- greater use of language in variety of social situations
- learn to persuade, inform, entertain and seek information
- phonetic productions
- invented spellings
- increase in both oral and written language
- by 6 years old: 8-14,000 words understood
- many same words as adults, but concepts not always the same
- increase in figurative language
Pragmatics in school age years
- tone of voice, sentence length, considering needs and capacities of listener, improvement leads to better joke telling, improvement in ability to listen carefully, knowing what someone else will think is funny, remember right way to tell a joke, indirect requests, greater competence in conversations
1-2 months
- vocalizes ah, eh , uh
2-4 months
- coos and chuckles
- vocalizes in response to being talked to
- attends to voices
4-7 months
- laughs
- makes high pitched noise/squeals
- babbles
- vocalizing