EDPI 344

 Class Activity  Language Evaluation  Language Development  Group Work

 Receptive: receiving input with the senses and giving meaning to the sensory input.  Expressive: involves sending messages and translating thoughts, ideas and signals into vocal or motor expression (oral and written).  Inner language: thinking, planning, and cognition.

 Speech difficulties such as articulation disorders are the most common deficit in children.  Language is related with social, cognitive and academic skills.  Language Assessment is important for placing and classifying students, develop IEPs, and to evaluate progress.

ComponentReceptive LanguageExpressive Language PhonologyDiscrimination of speech sounds Articulating speech sounds Morphology and syntax Understanding grammatical structure of language Using grammar in words and sentences Semantics and pragmatics Understanding word meanings and contextual cues Using word meanings and using language in context * p. 244

 Phonology: GFTA  Morphology and Syntax: TACL MLU  Semantics and Pragmatics: PPVT  Comprehensive Measures of Language: TOLD

 What elements of language would you prioritize in order to design an accurate measure of language development sensitive enough to differences in cultural background? Bank word (Phonology, Morphology – Syntax, Semantics – Pragmatics)

 Learning the language’s sounds and sound patterns, its specific words, and the ways in which the language allows words to be combined  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—a process described as generativity

 Phonological development: The acquisition of knowledge about phonemes, the elementary units of sound that distinguish meaning.  Semantic development: Learning the system for expressing meaning in a language, beginning with morphemes, the smallest unit of meaning in a language  Syntactic development: Learning the syntax or rules for combining words  Pragmatic development: Acquiring knowledge of how language is used, which includes understanding a variety of conversational conventions

 Language is a species-specific behavior: Only humans acquire a communication system with the complexity, structure, and generativity of language  Language is also species-universal: Virtually all humans develop language  Although some nonhuman primates have been trained to use signs or other symbols after concentrated effect by humans, there appears to be little evidence that they have acquired syntax

 Studies of individuals with brain damage resulting in aphasia provide evidence of specialization for language within the left hemisphere Damage to Broca’s area, near the motor cortex, is associated with difficulties in producing speech Damage to Wernicke’s area, which is near the auditory cortex, is linked to difficulties with meaning Language processing involves a substantial degree of functional localization in the brain –The left hemisphere shows some specialization for language in infancy, although the degree of hemispheric specialization for language increases with age

 To learn language, children must also be exposed to other people using language—spoken or signed  Sometime between age 5 and puberty, language acquisition becomes much more difficult and ultimately less successful Difficulties feral children have in acquiring language in adolescence Comparisons of the effects of brain damage suffered at different ages on language Language capabilities of bilingual adults who acquired their second language at different ages  Knowledge of the fine points of English grammar, for example, was related to the age at which individuals were exposed to English, but not to the total length of their exposure to the language

 Performance on a test of English grammar by adults originally from Korea and China was directly related to the age at which they came to the United States and were exposed to English  The scores of adults who emigrated before the age of 7 are indistinguishable from those of native English speakers

 The distinctive mode of speech that adults adopt when talking to babies and very young children It is common throughout the world, but it is not universal Its characteristics include a warm and affectionate tone, high pitch, extreme intonation, and slower speech accompanied by exaggerated facial expressions

 Infants know a great deal about language long before their first linguistic productions  Fetuses appear to be sensitive to prosody, the characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonational patterns, and so forth with which a language is spoken Variations in prosody are in large part responsible for why languages sound so different from one another, and why speakers of the same language can sound so distinctive

 Infants are born with the ability to discriminate between speech sounds in any language This capacity primes them to start learning any language in the world  Beginning at around 7 months, however, infants gradually begin to specialize, retaining sensitivity to sounds they hear and losing the capacity to discriminate among sounds to which they are not exposed By the end of the first year of life, infants’ speech perception is similar to that of their parents

 At around 6 to 8 weeks of age, infants begin producing drawn out vowel sounds  As the repertoire of sounds they can produce expands, infants become increasingly aware that their vocalizations elicit responses from others and they begin to engage in dialogues of reciprocal sounds with their parents

 Sometime between 6 and 10 months of age, infants begin to babble by repeating strings of sounds comprising a consonant followed by a vowel  A key component of the development of babbling is receiving feedback about the sounds one is producing Congenitally deaf babies’ vocal babbling occurs late and is very limited, unless they are exposed to sign language, in which case they produce repetitions of hand movements that are components of ASL signs in a manner analogous to vocal babbling among hearing infants  As infants’ babbling becomes more varied, it conforms more to the sounds, rhythm, and intonation patterns of the language they hear daily

 Most infants produce their first words between months of age First words typically include names for people, objects, and events from everyday life  The period of one-word utterances is referred to as the holophrastic period, because the child typically expresses a “whole phrase” with a single word  Overextension, using a given word in a broader context than is appropriate, represents an effort to communicate despite a limited vocabulary

 On average, American children say their first word at around 13 months, experience a vocabulary spurt at around 19 months, and begin to produce simple sentences at around 24 months  However, there is great variability in when different children achieve each of these milestones

 A spurt in vocabulary growth typically occurs at around 19 months, although there is great variability.  The rate of vocabulary development is influenced by the sheer amount of talk that they hear Caregivers play an important role in word learning by placing stress on new words and saying them in the final position in a sentence, by labeling objects that are already in the child’s attention, and by playing naming games Repeating words also helps children acquire them

 Most children begin to combine words into simple sentences by the end of their second year  Children’s first sentences are two-word utterances that have been described as telegraphic speech because nonessential elements are missing Word order is preserved in early sentences, indicating children’s understanding of syntax  Once children are capable of producing four-word sentences, generally at around 2½ years of age, they begin to produce sentences containing more than one clause

 The strongest support for the idea that young children are learning grammatical rules comes from their production of word endings  Further evidence is provided by overregularization, speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular  Parents play a role in children’s grammatical development by modeling correct grammar and expanding incomplete utterances However, parents are more likely to correct factually inaccurate statements than grammatically incorrect ones