6. Language & Vygotsky

Stages of language development

1. Prelinguistic stage

2. One-word period

3. Two-word period

4. Multiword stage

Prelinguistic stage

(0-12 months)

• Cooing, laughing

  • importance of feeding (they need to communicate they are hungry, and take sips and breaks)

  • non-verbal communication (facial expressions)

• Babbling stage (6 months)

One-word period

(12-18 months)

• Starting with people-based terms (mama, dada, sibling’s name, etc.)

• Mastering articulation

• Holophrastic speech

  • one word has multiple meanings (and multiple categories)

  • ex. they say a word and point to what they want

Two-word period

(18-30 months)

• Stage 1 grammar

  • Telegraphic speech (meaning over grammar, meaning through syntax)

Multiword stage

(30 months & onward)

• Rapid vocabulary growth

• Stage 2 grammar

  • appropriate tenses, plurals, conjugations

  • overgeneralization before mastery (ex. say gooses instead of geese)

Lev Vygotsky

(1896-1934) understood child cognitive development through language acquisition and inner speech

• importance of community and continuous development

• Never met Piaget but was familiar with his works

Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development

Learning is divided into three sections:

• Individual learning

• Zone of proximal development (scaffolding)

• Beyond reach

Individual learning

the information a person is capable of learning on their own

Zone of proximal development (scaffolding)

the information a person is capable of learning with the help of someone else

Beyond reach

the information a person is incapable or learning, even with help from another person

Behaviorist perspective on langugage development

(B. F. Skinner) Language is learned through external stimuli

Nativist theory of language development

(Noah Chomsky) Nativist theory says that human beings are biologically pre-wired with an innate capacity for language

• language acquisition device

  • poverty of stimulus

• universal grammar

Language acquisition device

a hypothetical mental mechanism proposed by Chomsky to explain how children naturally learn and understand language so quickly

• poverty of stimulus

Poverty of stimulus

the speech children hear from adults is often broken or incomplete, yet they rapidly figure out complex rules anyway, suggesting an internal guide is working

Universal grammar

an innate, hard-wired system of underlying structural principles and parameters shared by all human languages that children “set” based on their native language

• ex. distinctions between nouns and verbs, phrase structure