Language development

Language development

1. Framework:

   • Animal language learning: - Language is a species-specific behaviour and therefore only humans acquire language. - Language is species-universal and hence all humans acquire language.
     • - Limitations: - Highly abnormal environmental conditions, relatively cognitive impairment, critical period?
       • - No other animal develops a language similar to the human language. Not even chimpanzees or gorillas cans develop human-like language ( koko)
   • Components of language: - Langauge comprehension- Refers to understanding what others say (sign/write) - Language production: Refers to actually speaking (signing/writing) to others.
     • Learning language requires the dolling competencies: - Phonological development - Semantic development - Syntactic development - Pragmatic development.
       • Generative power of language. Using the finite set of words in our vocabulary, we can put together an infinite number of sentences and express an infinite number of ideas.

2. Framework: The components of language

   • Phonemes: - The individual elements of sound that make up words, sounds distinguish meaning. -English uses around 40 different phonemes (depending on the dialect). And different languages use different set of phonemes. - Phonological development is the acquisition of the sound system of the language the child is exposed to. - Prosody- The particular rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody and intonation pattern used when speaking a language.
   • Morpheme: Words are composed of 1 or more morpheme, which is the smaller part of a word with meaning. - Morphological rules: a set of rules that specifies how morphemes combine to form words. - Semantic development is the acquisition of meaning in a language, including lexical development.
   • Syntax: A set of rules that specifies how words can be combined to form sentences. In English word order also determines meaning, whereas in German word order is free. - Synactic development is the acquisition of the grammar of a language, which includes word order; subject-verb agreement; case marking.
   • Pragmatic development: The acquisition of how a language is used in a particular society. Sarcasms, irony, commands, voice change, etc. Form part of the pragmatic of a language.

3. Framework: Overview of stages of language development:

   • 0 month- cry
     • -5-8 months: early sounds-babbling. The child starts producing the sounds of language.
       • 1-5 month: Early perception. Babies can discriminate between sounds.
         • 5-8 months: early sounds- babbling. The child starts producing the sounds of language.
           • 10 months: Understand about 30 words.
             • 14-16 months: One word stage. The child starts producing words. The spoken vocabulary is around 50 words.
               • 18-24 months: two word stage. The child starts producing two word sentences.
                 • 24 months: children’s spoken vocabulary is around 320 words.
                   • 30 months: children have a vocabulary of about 600 words,
                     • 36 months onwards: grammar explosion. Children around the age of three rapidly add inflections to many words . They also start using more function words to create more complex sentences.
                       • By 5 or 6 years: Children have a vocabulary of 15,000 words, which means that children learn about 10 new words a day from the age of around 3.
                         • Educated adults have around 40-50 thousand words vocabulary.

4. Early language acquisition (Babies) -role of Infant-directed talk/speech

   • children need to be exposed to language: Infant-directed talk
     • Previously reffered to as 'motherese', not used in all cultures, helps to emphasise word and phrase boundaries making it easier for the baby to segment words from continuous speech.
     • Werker, Pegg & McLeod (1994): Infants prefer IDT than any other, Chinese and American infants both listened to a Catonese-speakign Chinese when talking to either a baby or adult friend. Babies prefer to listen to a mother talking to baby even if speaking a different language than to the same mother talking to a friend.
     • IDT is not only important for social interaction and keeping the child's attention but also plays a role in word identification.
   • Babbling and the importance of social interaction
     • Language production: Babbling -Babbling is well-established by 6-10 months, stages of development have been found cross-linguistically. - Babbling follows the speech rhythms of the ambient language (adults could recognise whether baby babble is french etc) -Imitation is crucial, deaf babies do not babble sound (silent babbling).
     • Importance of social interaction- The speaker's gaze tends to focus on the objects they are talking about and th baby gaze follows it. -Focusing on the same object provides referential information. -Adults provide cues to attract attention and motivate learning. - Social interaction has the purpose of communication. - Only being exposed to raw auditory information is not sufficient for perceptual learning of phonology.
   • The role of word learning
     • - Babies not long learn sounds but also words. - lexical development is linked to conceptual development. - Fast mapping is the process of rapidly learning a new words simply from the contrastive use of familiar and unfamiliar word.
     • The whole-object assumption- leads children to expect a mover word to refer to a whole object, not a part. - The mutual exclusivity assumption- leads children to expect that a given entity will have only one name.
     • Pragmatic cues in word learning- displease looking at the wrong thing, infer the object that elicits the smile is that word.

5. Theories:

   • The role of input: Cameran-Faulkner et al (2003)- Babies hear an average of 5,000-7,000 utterances a day, 1/3 are questions, more than half began with one of 52 frequent constructions.
     • Hart & Risley (1995)- Showed that socioeconomic background provided different experience to the babies (USA)- High SES: 487 utterances per hour, lower SES- 178 utterances. By age 4 High- 44 million, low- 12 million.
   • Chomsky and the nativist view: Language is too complex to be learn only from experience, must be pre-worded in brain. Born with Special neural architecture- universal grammar. (Berko-1958- aug)
     • Dead children not exposed to sign language were able to create their own sign language.