1. The Development of Language
Chapter 9
Language and Communication

2. How do we develop the ability to communicate?
Module Objectives:
What are the elements of speech?
How do children develop speech?
How do children learn the meaning of words?

3. Infants begin making sounds at birth
Infants begin making sounds at birth. They cry, coo, and laugh…but in the first year they don’t really do much talking
It could be argued that infants DO communicate with others, but do not have language

4. What is Language?
Think about your language…maybe you even speak more than one! What makes a language?
This is a broad concept…language is a system that relates sounds or gestures to meaning.
Language is expressed through speech, writing and gesture.

5. There are four distinct elements to language
-Phonology refers to the sounds of a language
Semantics is the study of words and their meaning
Grammar refers to the rules used to describe the structure of a language
Which involves syntax or rules that specify how words are combined to form sentences
Pragmatics is the study of how people use language to communicate effectively

6. Children must learn to hear the differences in speech sounds and how to produce them; they must learn the meaning of words and rules for combining them into sentences and they must learn effective ways to talk with others

7. Phonemes The basic building blocks of language
The unique sounds that can be joined to create words
The sound of “p” in pin, pet, and pat
The sound of “b” in bed, bat, and bird
Infants can distinguish many of these sounds, some of them as early as 1 month after birth
Can discriminate sounds they have never heard before such as phonemes from a foreign language
English employs just 40 phonemes while other languages have as many as 85 or as few as 15.
Newborns are biologically capable of hearing the entire range of phonemes in all languages worldwide. But as babies grow and are more exposed to an particular language, they only notice the linguistic distinctions that are meaningful in that environment. Specialization in one language increases while the potential to hear other language sounds is lost.
Infants can learn that sucking can turn on a tape that emits a sound. Within a few minutes, 1-month-olds can learn the relationship between sucking and the sound. They will suck rapidly to hear a tape that consists of nothing more than the sound of “p – puh”. After a few minutes, infants habituate to the sound (decrease sucking). But, if the tape is changed to a different sound – the sound of “b – buh” infants will suck rapidly (dishabituate). So, they can tell the difference between puh and buh.

8. The language environment for infants is not solely auditory
The language environment for infants is not solely auditory. Much language exposure comes from face-to-face interaction with adults

9. Infants use many tools to identity words in speech
Infants use many tools to identity words in speech. They don’t understand the meaning of the word yet, but they can recognize a word as a distinct configuration of sounds

10. Parents and adults help infants master language sounds by talking in a distinctive style
Think on your own…
In what distinctive way do adults talk to infants? How can this help infants master the language?

11. Language development
Infants are equipped for language even before birth, partly due to brain readiness, partly because of auditory experiences in the uterus
Children around the world have the same sequence of early language development
Newborns prefer to hear speech over other sounds- they prefer to listen to “baby talk”- the high pitched, simplified and repetitive was adults speak to infants
The sound of a human voice, whether familiar or strange always fascinates infants
The most impressive accomplishment of humans- it differentiates our species from all others

12. Adults Use Infant-Directed Speech
Adults speak slowly and with exaggerated changes in pitch and loudness and elongated pauses between utterances
Also known as parentese, motherese, or child-directed speech
Infant-direct speech may attract infants’ attention more than adult-directed speech because its slower pace and accentuated changes provide the infant with more salient language cues
Helps infants perceive the sounds that are fundamental to their language
Think about trying to understand someone speaking a foreign language – it is much easier to understand the language when it is spoken slowly and carefully
Infant-directed speech:
Characterized by short, simple sentences and it typically refers to concrete objects in a baby’s environment
Pitch becomes higher, the range of frequencies increases, and intonation is more varied
There is a repetition of words
Topics are restricted to items that are assumed to be comprehensible to infants
By the end of the firs year, ID speech changes. It takes on more adult-like qualities. Sentences become longer and more complex – the individual words are spoken slowly and deliberately
When talking to girls, adults use more words like doggie and blankie whereas with boys, adults use more words like dog and blanket. Girls hear twice as many diminutives. The use of diminutives decreases with age but still remains higher fro girls than boys. Boys tend to hear firmer, clearer language whereas girls tend to hear warmer language.

13. When talking to girls, adults use more words like “doggie” and “blankie” whereas with boys, adults use more words like “dog” and “blanket”. Girls hear twice as many diminutives.

14. What about children who cannot hear?
If infant-directed speech helps infants perceive sounds that are essential to the development of their language…
What about children who cannot hear?

15. Deaf Children About 1 in every 1,000 American infants is born deaf
Over 90% of deaf children have hearing parents
These children are often delayed in language and complex make-believe play
Deaf children with hearing parents:
These children are often delayed in language and complex make-believe play
They, during middle childhood, may achieve poorly in school and may be deficient in social skills
Hearing parents are less positive, less effective at joint attention and turn-taking, and more directive and intrusive
Deaf children with deaf parents escape these difficulties!!
Early child-parent communication seems to be key
Deaf parents know they must wait for the child to turn to them in order to communicate
Hearing parents tend to gesture when the child’s attention is direct elsewhere
Deaf children need models to create a natural language-learning environment
Mommy
Daddy
Baby

16. Deaf infants and toddlers seem to master sign language in much the same way and at about the same pace that hearing children master spoken language.
Deaf 10-month-olds often “babble” in signs: they produce signs that are meaningless but resemble the tempo and duration of real signs

17. Deaf Children
Compared to hearing children, babbling of deaf children is delayed
However, if they are exposed to sign language development will be right on schedule with normal-hearing children’s speech development
Hearing “dog”, infants in the middle of the first year of life may first say “dod” then “gog” before finally saying “dog” correctly
The same gradual progression will occur with sign language – infants will make mistakes at first before making the correct sign for dog
Deaf children display their own form of babbling – Infants who cannot hear and who are exposed to sign language babble with their hands instead of their voices
Regardless of hearing or deaf, babbling progresses from the sounds that are simplest to the more complex.
At about 6 months, babbling begins to take on characteristics of the native language. Even untrained listeners can distinguish between babbling infants who have been raised in cultures in which French, Arabic, or Cantonese languages were spoken.
Until about 6 months, deaf children will produce the prelinguistic sounds just like hearing children. At about 6 months, deaf children will stop doing things like making raspberries, cooing, etc…

18. Speech Production
At 2 months, infants begin making sounds that are language-based
Starts with cooing
They begin by producing vowel-like sounds, such as “ooooo” and “ahhhh”
At 5 to 6 months, infants begin making speech-like sound that have no meaning
Cooing turns into babbling
Prior to producing speech, infants’ vocal tracts are prepared for speech through crying, sneezing, sighing, burping, and lip-smacking
Infants are sensitive to prosody – the characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonation patterns, etc… with which a language is spoken
In English, normal sentences start with a rise in pitch and then the pitch falls toward the end of the sentence. In English, we also have questions which start out with a flat pitch and then it rises at the end of the sentence.
Babies that are exposed to a language with different patterns of intonation (such as Japanese and French) reflect their language’s intonation in their babbling. So, babbling is influenced by the characteristics of the speech they hear.

19. “Baby Talk”
Babbling is the extended repetition of certain single syllables, such as “ma-ma-ma, da-da-da, ba-ba-ba” that begins at 6-7 months of age.
Babbling is experience-expectant learning
All babies babble
All babies gesture
The sounds they make are similar no matter what language their parents speak

20. “Babbling”
Over the next few months, babbling incorporates sounds from their native language.
Even untrained listeners can distinguish between babbling infants who have been raised in cultures in which French, Arabic, or Cantonese languages were spoken.
Many cultures assign important meanings to the sounds babies babble:
“ma-ma-ma”, “da-da-da” and “pa-pa-pa” are usually taken to apply to significant people in the infant’s life

21. First Words
Infants first recognize words, then they begin to comprehend words
At about 4 ½ months of age, infants will listen longer to a tape repeating their own name than to a tape of different but similar name
At about 7-8 months of age, infants readily learn to recognize new words and remember them for weeks
At 6 months – if an infant hears either “mommy” or “daddy”, they look toward the appropriate person.
Infants gradually come to understand the meaning of less frequently heard words – their pace is going to vary child to child. At about 10 months, children understand about 11 to 154 even though they may not be able to say these words

22. At 6 months – if an infant hears either “mommy” or “daddy”, they look toward the appropriate person.

23. By their 1st birthday, infants usually say their first words, usually an extension of babbling.
By the age of 2 most children have a vocabulary of a few hundred words, and by age 6 the vocabulary includes over 10,000 words!

24. The Importance of Symbols
Children begin using gestures, which are symbols shortly before their first birthday.
Gestures and words convey a message equally well…sometimes gestures pave the way for language
In one study, 50% of all objects were referred to first by gesture and, about 3 months later, by word (Iverson & Meadow, 2005)

25. After children know that objects have names, a gesture is a convenient substitute for pronouns like “it” or “that” and often cause the adult to say the object’s name

26. Names for everything!
Once an infant’s vocabulary reaches about 50 words it suddenly begins to build rapidly, at a rate of words per month, mostly nouns.
This language spurt occurs around 18 months and is sometimes called the Naming explosion.

27. Productive Vocabulary
Early productive vocabularies of children in the US include names for people, objects, and events from the child’s everyday life.
Frequent events or routines are also labeled, such as “up” or “bye-bye”
Nouns predominate the early productive vocabularies of children

28. The rate of children’s vocabulary development is influenced by the amount of talk they are exposed to The more speech that is addressed to a toddler, the more rapidly the toddler will learn new words

29. Word Comprehension
Fast Mapping is the process of rapidly learning a new word simply from the contrastive use of a familiar word and an unfamiliar word
The children’s ability to connect new words to familiar words so rapidly that they cannot be considering all possible meaning for the new word

30. Example of Fast Mapping
In a preschool classroom, an experimenter drew a child’s attention to two blocks – asking the child to “get the celadon block not the blue one”
From this simple contrast, the child inferred that the name of the color of the requested object was “celadon”
After a single exposure to this novel word, about half the children showed some knowledge of it a week later by correctly picking the celadon color child from a bunch of paint chips

31. Give Fast-Mapping a try…
Answer the following questions on you own.

32. Snurks are covered with garslim. Garslim is like __________?
This is a snurk. It walks on its flaxes. How many flaxes does a snurk have?
Snurks have twice as many flaxes as ampolinks. Where are the amopolinlks?
Snurks are covered with garslim. Garslim is like __________?
Like dogs, snurks can wag their pangeers. Where is the pangeer?
Do you think snurks can bispooche? Why or why not?
This is an exercise in fast mapping. They have to complete the questions quickly without talking to anyone.
The first four questions should be easy to answer. The last question is designed to be impossible to answer without further information.
These questions put you back in toddlers shoes listening to adults speak. Like toddlers, you all must rely on context to comprehend the strange vocabulary to describe the snurk. In absence of adequate context, comprehension is impossible (as in question 5).

33. These questions put you back in toddlers shoes listening to adults speak. Like toddlers, you all must rely on context to comprehend the strange vocabulary to describe the snurk.
In absence of adequate context, comprehension is impossible (as you experienced in question #5).

34. Early Errors in Language
One common inaccuracy is underextension –using a word too narrowly.
Using the word “cat” to refer only to the family cat
Using the word “ball” to refer only to a favorite toy ball
When toddlers start learning language they make certain mistakes

35. Sarah refers to the blanket she sleeps with as “blankie”
Sarah refers to the blanket she sleeps with as “blankie”. When Aunt Ethel gives her a new blanket Sarah refuses to call the new one a “blankie” – she restricts that word only to her original blanket.

36. Overextension
The use a given word in a broader context than is appropriate
Common between 1 and 3 years of age
More common than Underextension
Toddlers will apply the new word to a group of similar experiences
“Open” – for opening a door, peeling fruit, or undoing shoelaces
Overextension is more common than underextension
Reflects their sensitivity to categorization
Toddlers will apply the new word to a group of similar experiences
Open – for opening a door, peeling fruit, or undoing shoelaces
Children overextend because they have not acquired another suitable word or because they have difficulty remembering a more suitable word
Children overextend more words in production than in comprehension – they may refer to buses, trains, trucks as cars but will point to the correct object when given the correct name (comprehension precedes production)

37. Language Errors
Children overextend because they have not acquired another suitable word or because they have difficulty remembering a more suitable word
Examples:
Ball referring to ball, balloon, marble, egg, or apple
Moon referring to moon, half-moon shaped lemon slice, or half a Cheerio
Car referring to a car, bus, truck, or tractor
Daddy referring to dad or any man
Doggie referring to dog or any four-legged animal

38. Making Sentences
Most children begin to combine words into simple sentences by 18 to 24 months of age
Children’s first sentences are two-word combinations referred to as Telegraphic speech
Words directly relevant to meaning
Words not critical to the meaning are left out – similar to the way telegrams were written such as:
Function words: a, the in
Auxiliary words: is, was, will be
Word endings: plurals, possessives, verb tenses
Telegraphic speech: Two-word utterances
Usually deals with everyday events, things, people or activities
Word order usually conforms to what the child hears
Words not critical to the meaning are left out – similar to the way telegrams were written

39. “More cookie”, “Mommy go”, “Daddy juice”, “Sue dogs”
These sentences are brief and to the point, containing only vital information
“More cookie”, “Mommy go”, “Daddy juice”, “Sue dogs”

40. By about 2 ½ years of age, children have the ability to produce more complex sentences (four or more words per sentence).
The longer sentences are filled with grammatical morphemes (words or endings of words that make sentences more grammatical).
A 1 ½-year-old might say “kick ball” but a 3-year-old would be more likely to say “I am kicking the ball”

41. Overregularization
Speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular.
Applying rules to words that are exceptions to the rule
This leads young children to talk about foots, tooths, sleeps, sheeps and mouses.
Although technically wrong, Overregularization is a sign of verbal sophistication because it shows children are applying the rules to grammar.

42. Between 3 and 6 Years of Age
Children learn to use negation
“That isn’t a butterfly”
Children learn to use embedded sentences
“Jennifer thinks that Bill took the book”
Children begin to comprehend passive voice as opposed to active voice
“The ball was kicked by the girl” as opposed to “The girl kicked the ball”
By the time most children enter kindergarten, they use most of the grammatical forms of their native language with great skill

43. The development of language in children is amazing, but how do they do it?
There are several theories that attempt to explain how we develop language

44. Infants Are Conditioned to Speak
Behaviorist’s believe that all learning is acquired step-by-step, through associations and reinforcements
According to this view, the reinforcement of the quantity and quality of talking to child affect rate of language development.
When a 6 month-old says, “ma-ma-ma” they are showered with attention and praise. This is exactly what the baby wants and will make the sounds again to get the same rewards.

45. Say Ma-Ma…..
Children who are spoken to more and praised by caregivers tend to develop language faster.
Parents are great intuitive teachers- we name items for infants and praise infants when they repeat our words.
For instance, parents typically name each object when they talk to their child, “Here is your bottle”, “There is your foot”, “You want your juice?”
Parents name the object and speak clearly and slowly, often using baby talk to capture the infant’s interest (Gogate et al., 2000).

47. What Do the Linguist’s say?
Noam Chomsky believes language is a product of biology and is too complex to be mastered so early and easily by conditioning.
Chomsky noted that children worldwide learn the rudiments of grammar at approximately the same age because the human brain is equipped with a language device.
including intonations and structure of language

48. Our Brain is Specialized for Language
LAD (language acquisition device) is an area of our brain which facilitates the development of language.
Chomsky believes that the LAD facilitates language and enables children to derive the rules of grammar from everyday speech, regardless of the native language.
Language is experience-expectant, words are expected by the developing brain-Chomsky believes that children are pre-wired for language

49. Think about a successful conversation
What factors influence effective communication?

50. Using Language to Communicate
For effective oral communication:
People should take turns, alternating as speaker and listener
A speaker’s remarks should relate to the topic and be understandable to the listener
A listener should play attention and let the speaker know if his or her remarks do not make sense

51. Taking Turns
Soon after 1-year-olds begin to speak, parents encourage their children to participate in conversational turn-taking
By age 2, spontaneous turn-taking is common in conversations between children and adults
By age 3, children have progressed to the point that if a listener fails to reply promptly, the child repeats his or her remark in order to elicit a response

52. Taking Turns Parent: Can you see the bird? Infant (cooing): oooooh
Parent: It is a pretty bird.
Infant: oooooh
Parent: You’re right, it’s a cardinal.
Parents having a conversation with a 6-week-old infant still involve taking turns. To help children along, parents often carry both sides of the conversation to demonstrate how the roles of speaker and listener alternate.
Parents having a conversation with a 6-week-old infant still involves taking turns. To help children along, parents often carry both sides of the conversation to demonstrate how the roles of speaker and listener alternate.
Parents try to get the infant to fit into the conversation. Using scaffolding

53. Initiating a Conversation
The first attempt to deliberately communicate typically emerges at 10 months
Usually by touching or pointing to an object while simultaneously looking at another person
At 1 year, infants begin to use speech to communicate and often initiate conversations with adults
First conversation are about themselves but this rapidly expands to include objects in their world
By preschool, children begin to adult their messages to match the listener and the context
School-age children speak differently to adults and peers
Preschool children give more elaborate messages to listeners who are unfamiliar with a topic than to listeners who are familiar with it

54. Click on the picture for an interesting article on language development

55. How Do Our Emotions Develop?
What’s Next?
How Do Our Emotions Develop?