1. Language and Symbolic Development

2. Symbols Systems for representing and conveying information 1 thing is used to stand for something else e.g. numbers, pictures, maps, language “Dog” =

3. What makes something a language?

4. Sound transfer? Meaning?

5. Components of Language Phonemes Phonological Development: learning about the sound system of a language Semantics Semantic Development: learning about expressing meaning Grammar Syntactic Development: learning rules for combining words Pragmatics Pragmatic Development: learning how language is used

6. Language Language Comprehension  Understanding what others say (or certain aspects) Language Production  Actual speaking (or manually producing) those aspects Language comprehension precedes production!

7. Language Comprehension Precedes Production Recognize their own name at 4.5 months When they hear “Mommy” or “Daddy” they look towards the correct person at 6 months 12 - 14 month olds listen longer to sentences with normal word order rather than scrambled order 13 - 15 month olds appreciate that word combinations carry meaning beyond the individual words e.g. “She’s kissing the keys” (vs. ball)

8. Understanding Word Combinations

9. Language Development Cooing “stage” (begins 6 - 8 weeks) produce simple speech sounds (gooo, aaahh) and vocal gymnastics (smacks, clicks, bubbles) Improved motor control of vocalizations Imitate sounds of their partners, high pitched for Mom and lower for Dads Will imitate speech sounds they hear from a tape

10. Language Development Babbling “stage” (begins 6 - 10 months) produce vowel consonant syllables in repetition (bababa) Babble only a limited set of sounds, some not in their native language Gradually it takes on the sounds, rhythm and intonation patterns of the language they hear around them Adults can pick out the babbling of an infant from their own language from infants in other languages Deaf infants exposed to sign language manually babble –Video!

11. Language Development Holophrastic Period (begins 10-15 months) One-word utterances that express a “whole phrase” e.g “Drink”, “up” First words include mostly nouns (dada, ball, juice), frequent events or routines (bye-bye, night-night), some modifiers (mine, all gone, uh-oh) Overextensions sometimes occur (e.g. dog for other animals, daddy for all men) probably due to their limited vocabulary rather than a lack of knowledge

12. Language Development Telegraphic Speech (begins end of 2nd year ~24 mths) Begin to combine words into simple “sentences” Often 2 word utterances (only essential elements like in telegrams) e.g. more juice, hurt knee, eat cookie gradually child begins to add first person pronouns, verb endings, plurals e.g. “I eating cookies” then functions words etc. a, the, of, in… Practice on their own “Crib-talk” Evidence for internalized grammatical rules: –Consistent word order (never “cookie eat”) –Overregularization errors (goed, foots, mans) –Application of rules to novel words (e.g. The Wug test) »Video!