Lecture 3 - Language Development Flashcards
What is Halliday (1975)’s function of language?
7
- first 4 = physical, social and emotional needs
- last 3 = relate to env
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First 4: Physical, social and emotional needs
- Instrumental - to express needs
- Regulatory - influence others behaiour
- Interactional - social relationships
- Personal - express identity
Last 3 relate to the environment
- Representational - exchange information
- Heuristic - learn about the environment
- Imaginative - explore the imagination
What are the 4 skills required for communication *** phonoloy - morph master structure context
- Produce basic sounds
- phonology - Understand meanings
- Morphology - Master structure
- Syntax - rules - Appreciate Context
- Pragmatics - social conventions
What are the 4 phases of spoken language development?
- pre-linguistic stage
- Pre-linguistic Stage
- perception and production - First Words
- Further Words
- Grammar
Outline perception in the pre-linguistic phase when born
- Cat in the hat
- Born with innate abilities
- Can recognise mums voice (Cat in the Hat) - DeCasper and Spence 91986)
- Discriminate all speech sounds
Outline perception in the pre-linguistic phase at 1-2 months
- intonation
- Attend to individual letter sounds - syllables and words
- Sound-to-mouth match - perception (distress if not matched)
- Intonation, pattern & stress
- prefer positive tone
- prefer musical patterns of intonation
Outline production in the pre-linguistic phase at birth
- types of crying - Dunstan (5 types)
- Communicate through crying
- Dunstan (photgraphic memory of sounds) argued this is the types of cries, that differ in sounds:
1. Hungry
2. Tired
3. discomfort
4. Gas
5. Burp
Outline Outline production in the pre-linguistic phase in babies
5 things
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- Cooing (1-2 months) - practice sounds and move mouth
- Vocal Play - can control speech muscles, to explore
- Consonants (6-7 months) - similar to cooing, just different sounds
- Babbling - one syllable (Canonical/ reduplicated)
- exploratory process, every baby does it, even deaf children - Gestural language
Outline pre-linguistic interactions in new borns
- proto conversations
- Motherese
- interactions crucial for language development
- pragmatics, joing attention, turn taking
•not speaking over baby important for later conversations - Protoconversations - when baby stops feeding, mother makes a nonverbal action, then baby will feed again
- Motherese - exaggerating words, high pitches. Infants more likely to respond to high pitches. Help acquire language as they are exposed to exaggerated forms.
- Fitting language around the baby - teaches them conventions of language and turn taking
Outline pre-linguistic interactions in 9/10 months
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Communication: 9/10 months
- Meaningful gestures
•copying is important for bonding
- babbling changes - becomes more conversational/ intonations
- Comprehension (better than production)
- Triadic interactions occuring between mum, child and object
Outline pre-linguistic interactions - receptive language
- Word growth from 10 months to 13 months
10 months = 30 words
13 months = 100 words
Outline first words: 1-2 years old
- meaning to the baby
- word = sound used to consistently represent something
- Comprehension preceeds production
- Phonologically consistent forms (meaning to the baby) - e.g. vroom= car
- First conventional word at around 1 year - usually something they interact with (a noun)
Outline further words
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- Intially slow: 1-3 words per month
- 10 months: 30 words, related to the context the child is in
- 18-24 months: 10-20 words per week
How does this explosion in vocabulary happen?
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Gopnik & Meltzoff (1987)
- Naming insight = realising everything has their own name - constantly asking: whats that?
- Categorisation = learn you can categorise everything. Finding out that ‘balls’ can include footballs, baseballs etc
(Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1987)
Outline further words by 6 years old
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vocab = 15,000
- Middle childhood = 10,000 a year
- Categories, plurals, suffixes
- underextention -> overextention
Outline Underextension and overextension
Underextension = only apply a word to one object within a category
- e.g. a cup only applys to my special cup
- e.g. kitty only applys to my cat
Overextention = using one word for an entire categore
- e.g. Calling a dog, horse and cat a kitty because they have 4 legs
naming things is very important as adults correct and guide the child as the try to name things
Outline Grammar - Morphology & syntax
- Holophrases
- Grammar exlosion
Holophrases (precursors to sentences) = occur around 12-18 months
- First sentence = short, inconsistent, just copying
- e.g. “i tried”
- Grammar explosion: 24mo 4-5 sentences
- 30 months: 8-10 sentences
Over-regularisations of the rule: e.g. teeths
Outline later grammar (3-4 years)
- Complex
- audience
Complex sentences
- variations
- tenses
- ambiguity - sentences that could mean two things: the shooting of the hunters was awful
- conversation
- audience - adapt to who they are talking to
- persuasion
Outline grammar at 8-9
*****
8-9 years: understand relationship between morphologically related words: enables vast and rapid vocab expansion
Outline methods to stimulating childrens language development
- Talk and listen to child - with child, not at child
- encourage conversations
- Ask open-ended questions
- name things int he environment - look a cow
- Answer their questions
- check you understood their intended meaning
- Read to them
- Model good language
Outline Zeedyk (2008)*** -Buggy
The direction buggy’s face is important for intellectual and cognitive development
- mother speech drops by half when buggy is forward facing
How do children learn a language?
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They dont set out to learn it, they just observe the movements of faces and voices and gradually reproduce these
Outline Nativsit theories for how children learn language
- A child is born with everything they will need for language
- Born with ability to learn rules for word order speaking
- We cant pick up all these rules and vocab from just observing
- And that parents dont always speak in full grammatically correct, advanced language
- Language Acquisition Drive (LAD)
- Cross culturally similar but wide individual variation
What are the 3 nativists theories
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Chomsky, pinker, Slobin
Outline Environmental theories for how children learn language**
- Through imitating something, that gets reinforced by parents
- Motherese/ parentese
- Parents correct factual erros but not grammatical errors
Outline limitations of environment theories
X - children say words they cant have ever heard - i goed over there
X - if childs mistake is funny/ cute, we may not punish it, so they could say it again
X - Motherese not in all cultures/ mothers (depressed)
X - over-regulation errors - parents dont do them
Outline cognitive theories of language acquisition
- Brain areas
- **** twins
- They try and locate where this LAD is in the brain
- Several regions important: left hem: brocas/ wernickes
- Also found that vocab was more similar in MZ twins - no difference in grammatically skills
Outline the interactional approach for developing language
- Genes + environment
- We do have a strong biological predisposition to develop language - but need the environment to help us
- if a brain area associated with language is damaged, other areas take back over
Outline a limitation of nativist theories
** - language destroyed
- Language is not destroyed if there is lesions - shows that there is not one single LAD
Outline individual differences in typically developing children**
First word?
style
Rate:
- 25% complex sentences at 30 months
- First word: 8-18 months
X - But even at 3 years, some aren’t making simple sentences
Style:
- Expressive/ holistic style (me, you) vs referential style (nouns/ objects)
- different sytles result from different combinations of genes and environmennt
- Style of parent/ child - eg. shy child
What are the 4 categories of language impairment
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- Social/ env depreivation (Genie)
- eg. mother depressed, socio/economic status - Cognitive language impairment
- Physiological impairment
- Communication Problems
Outline the case of genie*****
Extreme neglect and abuse from father (from 20 months)
- no apparent cognitive impairment - just for sentences/ grammar
- found emotionally disturbed, malnourished, completely mute
- Susan Curtiss was the researcher
Outline Genies development in receiving language
- immediately responded to others speech
- After 11 - understood words, but not grammatical sentence structure
- Developed a large vocabulary but couldnt learn grammar/ sentences/ syntax
- Parts of her brain responsible for grammar was not stimulated, so they died off
- Eventually got some grammatical knowledge, but now much. She had missed the critical period
Outline Genies development in producing language
- Produced any sound sequwnce
- Spoke spontaneously after about 5 months
- 3-4 word sentences, plurals, possessives
- Never reached normal levels of using language - issues with intonation, tenses and word order
- better development on IQ than language
Outline Lenneberg (1967) - critical period
compared childrens vs adults with lesions
- Children can recover language skills after lesions, but adults were worse at recovery
- downs syndrome older children were worse
- there is also a Critical period for learning a second language, in which it is easier
- In deprivation cases, better off if found before age 7
What are the limitations of comparisons made from genies case?
X - single case study
X - Not clear how much language she had been exposed to
X - Uncertain exactly when she was deprived of language
X - Cant be sure she didnt have learning difficulties
X - psychological trauma - managed to recover, but children dont always do
Outline cognitive impairment, the second category of language impairment
6 impairments
- Phonological dyslexia - difficulties with patterns of speech sounds
- Verbal dyspraxia/ developmental apraxia - difficulties with how brain communications with speech muscles
- Dysathria - neurological disturbances with using tounge/ lips etc
- Semantic pragmatic disorder/ high functioning autism - problems with perceptive/ expressive language/ conversational skills
- ASD/ ASperger’s syndrom - trouble with irony/ sarcasm/ metaphors - non-verbal signals too
- Selective mutism
Outline deveopment dyslexia as a cognitive language impairment
- one of most common developmental disorder
- fail to attain language skills of reading, writing and spelling despite conventional classroom experience
- not related to childs intelligence
- Abnormalities in visual AND auditory processing - cant match speech and sound
- Subtle speech impairments:
• Mislabelling, mispronounciation, word-finding, limited verbal memory - of sequences of words
• limited processing speed - takes age to link BBC to a tV channel
Outline specific language impairment as a cognitive language impairment
Problems only in language domain
- Some kids will progress to a normal capacity = delay
- Some will never acquire normal skills for some underlying reason = disorder
- 3 forms:
1. Problems with comprehension + Expresion
2. Problems with comprehension only
3. Problems with expression only
Outline Selective mutism as a cognitive language impairment
- persistent silence in certain situations
- NOT Shyness
- psychological
- more common if bilingual/ or have other SLI
- may talk openly/ freely at home, but freeze in social situations
What are some of the causes of selective mutism
- Genetic predispositions for anxiety
- Sleep problems
- temperemant related?
- Not linked to abuse/ trauma
Outline Physiological impairment to language impairment
- Deafness
- Articulation difficulties
- Aphasia (brain damage)
- Paralysis
Outline deafness as a physiological impairment to language impairment
- Hearing loss impairs acquistion of oral language
- Degree of loss of hearing, related to degree of loss of comprehension
- Common features:
•Syntax and morphology delayed
• Intepret sentences based on word order
•Omit function words
• use mostly nouns with a few verbs (impacts academics)
Outline Communication problems as a language impairment
When things go wrong in: • muscles • conversation rules • meaning •language - fairly easy to overcome these issues
