Language Development

Language Development

1. Language Development stages

   • Crying (0-4 months)
     • Cooing/babbling (4-12 months)
       • Initial words (12-18 months)
         • Two word sentences (18-36 months)
           • Short Sentence (2.5 - 5 years)
             • Adult usage (5+ years)
   • Children also use body gestures to communicate at an early age

2. Components of Language

   • Phoneme
     • Morpheme
       • Word
         • Phrase
           • Sentence

3. Phonological Development

   • sounds of a language
   • Babbling
     • subset of language sounds
     • initially universal, then specific
     • Social construct

4. Atypical Language Development

   • Language impaired if delayed significantly
   • intervention is a priority
   • deaf babbling happens through hand gestures
   • Apraxia
     • the inability to say what you brain is trying to say
   • Critical period for children to start t develop the ability to speak

5. What is Language

   • Arbitrariness: words do not sound like what they actually mean
   • Productivity: can produce communications that are unique
   • Semanticity: meaning of the word you said
   • Displacement: talking about the past, present, and future
   • Duality: sounds of the language and its meaning

6. Phonological Development

   • Reflective/vegatative sounds (0-2 months): crying as a reaction
   • Cooing (2-4 months): making pleasant noises
   • Vocal Play (4-6 months): transition between cooing and true babbling
   • Babbling (6- 12 months): consonant vowel pattern are repeated
   • Jargon (9-18 months): string of sounds filled with intonation and rhythms
   • (19-24 months): possess between 10-20 consonants and learn new words
   • (25-36 months): increase the # of language sounds = increased vocabulary
   • (3-4 years): almost all vowels are mastered

7. Morophological Development

   • Free morphemes stand alone
   • Bound morphemes attach to free morphemes
   • children learn rules for attaching morphemes

8. Syntactic Development

   • Start to learn grammar
   • Syntax: rules of grammar
   • words order play a important role in the meaning of a sentence
   • Negatives: children initially attach words of negotiation to positive sentences
   • Passive sentence: no word order

9. Semantic Development

   • Word meaning
   • Hippocampus start to develop
   • Children at 18 months start to learn a lot of words

10. Theories of language development

    • Learning theory
      • Operant conditioning (Skinner)
        • Good behaviour vs bad behaviour
    • Chomsky
      • Chomsky rejected the idea that Language Development was solely driven by the environment
        • exposed to language through their environment
    • Nativist
      • koko the gorilla - signing to humans; required a lot of teaching
    • Social Interactionist
      • Emphasizes on social environment
        • children do not learn extra languages through passive learning

11. Critical Period

    • Lenneberg proposed this
    • Children need to be exposed to language frequently
    • Language deprivation = non-optimal language development