Lecture 15 - Language development in later childhood Flashcards
things that happen in language development in later childhood
- start mastering that last few sounds in production
- it’s a long time before some syntactic constructions are understood (ask vs. promise)
• distinguishing between: I asked him to clean his room vs. I promised him to clean his room - peer interactions start happening more and more often, and these things shape their language and they get better at interacting with peers
- developing narrative skills
- developing literacy
Peer Interactions
- they are a trial-by-fire form of communicative competence
- learn things fast cause you get a lot of feedback (maybe negative)
- in-group language: adolescent register
- playing with language (humor, sound play)
adolescent register
- particular mode of speech that adolescents use with each other
- “like”, “y’know”
- Various slang terms
- either get abandoned or absorbed into general use
Fun with language
Ely & McCabe (1994)
- about 25% of kindergarteners’ speech involved language play
- playing with sound
- Riddles:
- word games capitalizing on ambiguity (phonological, morphological, semantic, lexical)
- “Knock knock. Who’s there? Lettuce. Lettuce who? Lettuce in!”
- solving riddles correlates with reading ability
Verbal Humor
• Part of socializaion into community
• Develops with age
– Young: scatalogical (potty humor)
– Mid-childhood: more complex, e.g. puns/jokes
– Adolescence: as sarcastic and ironic as adults
• Varies from culture to culture
– Teasing
– AA: ‘your mama’ statements (ritualized verbal game)
Gendered Speech
- Starts differentiating around age 2, 3
- The only biological components:
• voice deepening (adolescence)
• higher incidence of dyslexia in men (maybe socially conditioned: boys think reading is “girly”) - everything else socially conditioned
Gendered Speech in Adults: Males
- males have larger vocal cords = larger surfaces vibrate more slowly = low PITCH
- Males have longer vocal tracts = low FORMANTS (resonances that make vowels)
fundamental frequency of U.S. adults
males 120Hz; females: 200Hz
***This discrepancy differs by culture: suggests that certain aspects of gendered speech are learned
Gendered Speech in Children
- until ~ 13 years, no difference in PITCH
- as early as 4, differences in FORMANTS
- adult listeners can identify child gender about change at 4 years old (because they appear to be using formants)
why are formants different?
the bigger the instrument the lower the pitch (differences in vocal tract size)
children are selectively imitating gendered speech patterns
Gendered speech/language within social constructs
• unwittingly enforced by teachers, parents
- behavior X is okay for boy, not girl (or vice versa)
• identify with same-gender peers
- girls seek affiliation, boys seek power and autonomy (in suburbia) - AA city girls show more balanced pattern - compete (allegedly male_ as well as cooperate
• in narratives, girls are more likey to quote others
- a lot of attention to language, more literacy later - gender variability in attudes toward literacy (reading is 'girly')
extended discourse
talking about stuff that is not just in “the here and now”
early on, lots of language is about immediate context
in school years, more need to have decontextualized language ( the “tell” part of “show and tell”)
key development in literacy skills (written language is always decontextualized)
explanations, descriptions, encouraged in the classroom
paradigmatic extended discourse
logical writing
classroom writing
narrative discourse
more natural, in social settings
story telling
focus on human intentions within the story
- story (usually about past events)
- at least two clauses about a single event
things that change with age about narratives
- changes in length (become longer with age)
- changes in structure
- age 4: “leapfrog” narratives (no train of thought)
- between 4 and 8: chronological narratives (and then….and then…)
- Age 8+: more classic narrative (high point analysis)
• build up to high point/climax
• also, lots of evaluation (how narrator feels about events)
Narratives across cultures
• amount of evaluation in african american communities
topic focused narratives
white kids use this
single person/event
beginning, middle, end
topic associated narratives
one form AA (african American) kids use
kids who use this in classroom are discouraged by teachers: “stick with the topic!”
feel angry that teacher wasn’t interested
explanations
parents can convey info about how the world works
“well santa comes over night and leaves presents…ect…”
in the classroom
teachers try to elicit extended discourse
must be clear about reference (he, she, it): clarity
want them to take into account listener’s knowledge
Cameron and Wang 1999
do kids take listener’s knowledge into account?
“tell a story to an adult using a picture book”
either in person or on the phone
if kids take listeners knowledge into account they should use more verbal cues when talking on the phone
“referential communication” experiment
on the phone, kids told longer stories, more corrections (for listener comprehension) than in person
metalinguistic awareness
- conscious awareness of language structure
- influenced by: cognitive development and exposure to literacy and language instruction
-
phonological awareness
the conscious understanding that words are made up of smaller units (syllables, phonemes)
- ages 3-8
- age 5: knowing that cat and hat rhyme
- age 8: knowing that giant and jail are spelled differently
- seen in verbal play (pig Latin, rhyming)
achievements in Phonological awareness
- compare sounds in diff words
- separate out first sounds
- segment out word elements
achievements in phonological awareness varies with language being learned, literacy, writing system
big doll –> dog bill
bed farm —> fed barm
lone fish
dog bed»_space; bog ded is easer than dog bed»_space; beg-dod
figuring out d | og in English (onset rime structure) is an achievement
what’s harder is figuring out that d | o | g (3 phonemes)
- may be less linguistically “natural” for English speakers than onset-rime
metasemantic awareness
develops by about age 10
know what “word” means
can provide definitions for words: part of standard operating procedure for classrooms
metasyntactic awareness
know correct syntax
know subj/obj/verb categories
does anyone really have it?
kids can correct errors, but usually focus on semantics over syntax:
- "The baby eated the typewriter"
- Noo the baby eated the banana!
at age 5, they can often name the subject
may require explicit instruction
even all that instruction might not be giving your the right awareness: adults sometimes hypercorrect: “The answer is obvious to you and I”
referential indadequcy
was that sufficient to pick out which referent? (“put the cell phone in my hand” and holds out both hands)
5 and under: blame listener
by age 8 they assign fault (correctly) to the speaker
comprehensibility
was that understandable given the ppl that i’m talking to
social/politeness rules
what are explicitly the rules for a given situation?
get it by late childhood/early adolescence
adolescents sometimes violate deliberately
