Child Language Development

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