Studied by 1 person
Paper 1 Section B
Why do children and humans in general use language to communicate?
To convey needs and get needs met
Sense of belonging/community - social beings
To survive
To express internal thoughts and feelings
To build and develop relationships
What things help or speed up a child’s language development?
Exposure to language - family, siblings
TV
Visual cues - like pointing out things, body language
Conversations
Exposure to different phonetic systems
Reading books
Correcting mistakes
Labelling things
Baby talk? not using baby talk?
What barriers might a child face when learning language?
Pronunciation
Identifying grammar patterns etc
Neglect
Physical issue hearing or issue
No interaction
No praise or no positive reinforcement
Fear or getting it wrong
Exposure to incorrect/inappropriate language
Genie - case study
13yr old girl had been completely neglected
No toys or clothes in house
House in corner of garden where she stayed
Father ordered his wife and son to never talk to her
Harnessed in potty seat for 12.5 yrs
Neighbours didn’t know girl existed
Effects on Genie afterwards
Could hardly walk
Pronouns and question words never came into her vocab
Grammar was never learnt by her
Eventually she stopped talking altogether, she was non-verbal
Nature vs Nurture debate
Nature - what you naturally inherit by genetics and what you already know. Pre-determined abilities of learning and understanding language.
Nurture - Interaction between each other to learn language and grammar. Use environment around you to learn more language.
Purposes of Children’s communication
Michael Halliday’s 7 functions of language (1975)
Instrumental
Language is used to fulfil a speaker’s need
e.g. I want
Regulatory
Language used to influence the behaviour of others
Persuading/commanding/requesting other people to do as you want
e.g. ‘daddy push’ - child on a swing
Representational
Language used to communicate information
Relaying or requesting information
e.g. I got a new doll
Interactional
Language used to develop social relationships and ease interaction
The phatic dimension of talk e.g. hello
Personal
Language used to express personal preferences/the speaker’s identity
Conveys attitudes and expresses feelings
Heuristic
Language used to learn and explore the environment
May be questions or answers or the kind of running commentary that accompanies child’s play
Imaginative
Language used to explore the imagination
May accompany play
Also jokes and songs etc
Which of the Halliday’s function are practical?
Instrumental
Regulatory
Representational
Which of the Halliday’s functions are social?
Interactional
Personal
Which of the Halliday’s functions are for learning?
Heuristic
Imaginative
What are the 2 types of the stages of language development?
Pre-verbal stages of speech development
Verbal stages of speech development
Pre-verbal stages of speech development
At these stages, phonology (sound) is the most important aspect of a child’s communication, before they begin to verbalise (make sounds resembling words).
What are the 4 stages of pre-verbal speech development?
Vegetative
Cooing
Babbling
Proto-word
Vegetative stage
A child gets valuable vocal practise through crying at times of hunger/pain.
At first the crying is a reflex action, and involuntary, though gradually over several months babies begin to learn their noises entail a response.
What age is the vegetative stage?
From birth to 4 weeks
Cooing stage
Involves the articulation of mainly vowel sounds, often isolated (one syllable).
Lacks ‘adult’ intonation (usually monotone).
Sounds tend to be ‘coo’ or ‘goo’
Vocal play - experimenting with sounds
What age is the cooing stage?
4-7 weeks
Babbling stage
More advanced ‘sound making’ and greater range of sounds (more consonants now).
Consonant/vowel reduplication - bababa, dadada
Sometimes the consonant varies - bada, gaba (variegated babbling).
What age is the babbling stage?
6-12 months
Proto-word stage
Babbling starts to resemble adult language - word-like vocalisations, which lead to the child’s first words, although they may not be understandable.
Meanings begin to emerge e.g. using ‘mmmm’ to mean ‘give me that’. Often only understood by the child’s carers.
What age is the proto-word stage?
9-12 months
What things help a child to develop language faster and what language does the child understand before they can make the sounds?
Teaching children different sounds (phonology) in their communication before they can verbalise (make sounds resembling words).
Practising the use of vocal cords
Conventions of speech (intonation, turn-taking)
Experimenting sounds
Fulfils basic survival needs
Enables muscular development and control that enables production of sounds
Supports pragmatic development - social interaction
Verbal stages of speech development
Lexis, semantics and grammar develop and a child gradually learns to combine words to form increasingly long, meaningful stretches of language (different types of sentence).
As a child moves into the later stages, he or she will learn the pragmatic functions of language e.g. implied meaning.
What are the 4 stages of verbal speech development?
1-word (holophrastic) stage
2-word stage
Telegraphic stage
Post-telegraphic stage
1-word stage
Children start using words at about 1 year. By 18 months they will say about 50 words and understand about 250 words.
The majority of these tend to be proper or concrete nouns.
Child will often use 1 word for a full sentence e.g. ‘cake’ for ‘give me the cake please’. These utterances are known as holophrases and will be understood via the context.
What age is the 1-word stage?
12-18 months
2-word stage
Baby starts to string words together in twos. This is the beginning of syntax, a vital move to communicate fully.
e.g. ‘build tower’
Child lacks the syntactic elements necessary to make meaning explicit.
Words are in the same order as adult speech
What age is the 2-word stage?
18-24 months
Telegraphic stage
3 or more words are combined into utterances resembling short sentences e.g. ‘daddy swing me’.
This stage is called telegraphic stage because utterances resemble an adult telegram, where all but the key words are omitted (removed).
What age is the telegraphic stage?
24-26 months
Post-telegraphic stage
Child’s grasp of English grammar becomes more sophisticated e.g. get to grips with possessive, plural and present/past verb endings.
Take long time to master and many virtuous error will be present initially.
Sentence length is built up
Function words such as pronouns, prepositions and auxiliary verbs are used.
What age is the post-telegraphic stage?
over 36 months
What is a virtuous error?
A mistake in a child’s speech which demonstrates understanding of grammatical rules e.g. ‘I falled over’
What is phonemic expansion?
Initially child increases the variety of sounds they are able to produce
What is phonemic contraction?
The number of sounds are then reduced, to only what the baby needs for their language
What are the different sections of children’s language development?
Phonological development
Lexical development
Semantic development
Grammatical development
Pragmatic development
Phonological development
Development of sounds
Human language development is a physical as well as an intellectual process.
Phonetics
Study of how speech sounds are made, transmitted and received
Phonology
Study of the sound systems of language
Phoneme
The smallest possible unit of sound
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
An alphabet containing the sounds rather than the letters of language.
How are consonant sounds made?
Consonants are sounds produced when the vocal tract is either blocked or so restricted that there is audible friction
The production of consonant sounds are affected by what 3 key areas?
Manner of articulation
Place of articulation
Voice
Manner of articulation
how the airflow is controlled
Place of articulation
where the sound occurs e.g. use of lips/teeth/roof of mouth etc. or a combination
Voice
If the sound is voiced/unvoiced (whether or not the vocal cords are engaged/vibrating
Consonants of Received Pronunciation showing place and manner of articulation.
The voiced phoneme is on the right and the unvoiced phoneme is on the left in each cell.
Plosives
Created when airflow is blocked for a brief time (also called ‘stops’)
Fricatives
Created when airflow is only partially blocked and the air moves through the mouth in a steady stream
Affricates
A brief blockage is combined with an obstructed release of air (putting plosives and fricatives together)
Nasals
Created when the airflow is forced through the nasal cavity
Approximants
Similar to vowel sounds
Laterals
Created by placing tongue on the ridge of the teeth and the air moving down the side of the mouth
Vowels
Sounds that are made with no closure to the vocal tract or audible friction - air escapes in a relatively unimpeded way through the mouth or nose.
What are the two main types of vowels?
Monophthongs
Diphthongs
Monophthongs
Vowels with a single perceived auditory quality
Diphthongs
Vowels where there is a perceptible change in quality during a syllable. They use two symbols to show the starting and finishing points of the sound.
Phonological errors
When babies are first experimenting with sounds and learning phonemes, they apply a ‘trail and error’ approach and make mistakes.
Deletion
The omission of consonants often at the end
e.g. ba(ll) and cu(p)
Substitution
Substituting one phoneme for another
Occurs especially with production of harder sounds which develop later
e.g. the ‘sh’ in ‘ship’ replaced with ‘sip’
Addition
Addition of an extra vowel sound to the end of a word, creating a CVCV pattern
e.g. ‘dog’ becomes ‘doggie’
Assimilation
A sound segment (consonant or vowel) will be made more similar to or sometimes exactly the same as another near-by sound.
e.g. ‘bub’ instead of ‘bus’
Reduplication
Repetition of a whole syllable, usually the first CV syllable
e.g. ‘choo-choo’
Consonant cluster reductions
*don’t think about how it’s spelt
Consonant cluster reductions can be difficult for children to articulate, so they often reduce them to smaller units i.e. a single consonant sound
e.g. ‘snow’ becomes ‘no’
Deletion of unstressed syllables
Omitting the opening syllables in multi-syllabic words (shows a child’s preference for CVCV structures.
e.g. ‘nana’ for ‘banana’
Phonological errors tend to reflect…
the limitations of physical rather than intellectual development. They may not show misunderstanding or meaning.
Ease of articulation
Some sounds are easier to make/produce than others
Perceptual discriminability
Ability to hear the difference between sounds.
We are able to perceive the difference BEFORE we are physically able to make the different sounds.
Perceptual narrowing
Our exposure to a set of sounds shapes our perceptual ability
Berko and Brown (1960) - The Fis Phenomenon
This theory relates to phonological development.
The verbal exchange below between adult and child appeared in research conducted by Berko and Brown in the 1960s. A child was asked to name an object - an inflatable toy fish.
Adult: what’s that
Child: a fis
Adult: is this your fis
Child (getting angry): no a fis
Adult: is this your fish
Child: yes my fis
What does this demonstrate about children’s phonological development?
A child’s comprehension is often in advance of their physiological capacity to produce a sound.
The child above knows that the word should be pronounced ‘fish’ and can hear the distinction even though they can’t pronounce it themselves.
Lexical development
development of words/vocabulary
Katherine Nelson’s categorisation of ‘first words’ (1973)
Observed that children’s early words tended to fall in 4 predictable patterns:
Naming things/people (she suggested this accounts for 60% of first words)
Actions/events
Describing/modifying things
Personal/social things
What have Bloom (2004) argued?
The frequency of nouns may just reflect the high proportion of nouns in the English Lexicon since nouns outnumber verbs 5:1
What else is likely to influence the first words a child learns?
Who cares for them
Location
Where they spend their time
Family set up
What is the theory for semantic development?
Jean Aitchison’s ‘building meanings’ theory
What is Jean Aitchison’s ‘building meanings’ theory?
Identified a model of 3 stages in children’s acquisition of words and their meanings
What are the 3 stages?
Labelling
Packaging
Network building
Labelling
Linking words to the objects to which they refer, understanding that things can be labelled
Packaging
Exploring the labels and to what they apply. Much like phonological development, a ‘trail and error’ approach, experimenting with newly acquired labels.
Network building
Making connections between words, understanding similarities and opposites in meanings e.g. understanding categories and hierarchies. Exploring a semantic field
Network building uses…
Hyponymy, hypernym and hyponyms
Hyponymy
The hierarchical structure that exists between lexical items
Hypernym
A word with a broad meaning constituting a category into which words with more specific meanings fall
Hyponym
A word of more specific meaning rather than a general term applicable to it.
Semantic errors
Over-extension and under-extension
Over-extension
An error that occurs when a word is extended to other objects and given a broader, more general meaning than it should have
Under-extension
An error that occurs when a child restricts the things a word refers to e.g. using white only to describe snow
Who identified some typical patterns of over-extension?
Leslie Rescorla 1980
What are the 3 types of over-extension?
Categorical
Analogical
Mismatch/predicate statements
Categorical
A word from one clear category is extended to other members
Analogical
A word for one object is extended to another object no tin the same clear category, but which bears some similarities
Mismatch/predicate statements
Statements that convey some sort of abstract information.
May appear as a complete mislabelling
