In the Beginning: Communication Development from Birth to 2 Years

It is important to highlight again the impact of the home environment and home language on the developing child. Of course, the impact of these for the child begins before birth, and you should recognize that the first two years are critical for language acquisition.

The language one speaks and the variation of the language one speaks are not products of biology. They are products of environment.

There are seven major variables that influence the acquisition of language and language behaviors: (1) race and ethnicity; (2) social class, education and occupation; (3) region; (4) gender; (5) situation or context; (6) peer group association or identification; and (7) first-language community or culture.

Low-income households not only are disadvantaged in terms of wealth, but also are impoverished in terms of the opportunities that children need for optimal growth and development.

1. One way to define poverty is through the use of the poverty threshold. The U.S. Census Bureau uses income before taxes to establish thresholds that are based on family size and composition.

2. At least 20% of children under 18 are affected by poverty and single women raising children are the most vulnerable group that struggle to stay out of poverty.

A person’s socioeconomic status (SES) includes family income, parental education and occupation of the parents. It also includes other types of capital, such as “human, social-cultural, social-political, financial/material, and environmental/natural.”

1. Human capital involves parents’ investment in their children, which is influenced by their culture and is affected by parental and societal beliefs about age, gender, and birth order.

2. Variations in financial/material capital include instances when families transfer money between members in the form of gifts, lands and inheritances according to the nature of their familial and cultural relationships.

3. Social-cultural capital is a topic that has been debated in the literature since the 1950s in the form of “culture of poverty.” There is a spectrum of beliefs regarding this.

4. Social-political capital is the reality of being a member of a society. A family’s SES places them in relationship to other families, community organizations, and agencies, creating limited and relatively defined sphere of influence and access.

5. Factors such as climate, geographic constraints, pollution, chronic poverty, and limited employment opportunities are examples of how the environment functions as a form of capital.

Socioeconomic status (SES) is based on family income, parental education, and the occupation of the parents. As related to child development, SES is likely to be a strong factor in all aspects of the child’s life. When children are raised in impoverished circumstances, many factors related to health, safety and education affect their health safety, and welfare, and also put them at risk for language and learning difficulties. See list of factors on p. 118.

1. Practitioners who work in early childhood environments benefit from being aware of and responsive to the needs of children from low-SES households.

Research shows that much is going on prior to birth related to communication between a mother and her baby. Especially in the last trimester, the fetus is taking in information through listening, tasting, and moving.

Before the child sends intentional messages, she communicates. Human beings communicate even when they do not intend to communicate.

Infant-directed singing occurs in all human cultures and is considered a universal caregiving behavior. Songs between mothers and their infants allow several aspects of human development to occur: conveyance of emotional information, synchronization of mother/infant emotional states, establishment of a secure relationship between mother/infant, contribution to language acquisition.

Characteristics of rhymes serve to capture and hold the attention of children, provide prolonged joint interaction, develop coordination of the rhymes with accompanying gestures, contribute to the social relationship of the participants and focus infants on the variation in word structure to create new meanings.

Experiences with stories provide a framework for children’s future ability to tell stories and to listen effectively to more complex stories as they grow.

There are two essential components of preverbal behavior during infant’s first year, which account for contingent responding that becomes linked successively and allows for mutual reciprocity and understanding.

1. Contingent responding includes:

   1. Caregiver’s interest in and intuitive adaptations of his communications to the infant’s abilities.

   2. Infant’s corresponding interaction through motor activity and demonstration of feelings, such as smiling, laughing or cooing.

2. Research has shown that contingency enhances language development of infants and is important for the infant’s development of self-awareness and efficacy.

Joint reference suggests that a caregiver and child are focusing on the same object or event at the same time. Joint attention and joint reference are a basis for shared experiences and is a necessary aspect of infant development, including language acquisition.

4. There are four phases in the development of joint reference (Table 4.1, p. 126).

Many researchers believe that the unique characteristics of infant-directed speech, or parentese, facilitate the acquisition of language. See Figure 4.2 on p. 128 for characteristics of parentese.

1. A mother’s individually distinctive pitch patterns, or signature tunes, may be used along with other aspects of maternal speech to facilitate infants’ processing of speech and to scaffold early learning.

2. Although parents across the globe engage infants in social verbal interactions, socialization practices are culturally embedded. Therefore, some differences in early dialogues between parent and child occur.

3. Infants not only prefer speech over other kinds of sounds, but also prefer motherese to adult speech.

Simply hearing language is not enough. The child’s communicative interactions with his caregivers facilitate language acquisition and overall language development.

1. Expansions are a response to a child’s utterance in which the caregiver does not change the order of the words in the child’s utterance, and she maintains what she believes is the child’s communicative intent, but she expands the utterance into a complete form.

2. Extensions are a response to a child’s utterance in which the caregiver is providing not only a more syntactically accurate model, but also additional semantic information.

Conversations between parents and their children show developmental trends.

1. The interplay of expectations and reactions between a parent and child when more than one language is being used in the home can heavily influence the language productions of the child and allow the child to adjust her own use of the languages in suitable contexts.

   1. Code mixing is the use of various combinations of words or phrases from more than one language.

2. We know that quantity and quality of language input is important, especially during infancy and the toddler years. The basic and essential ingredients are listed on p. 132-133.

3. Recent research has proved that the amount and frequency of infant-adult interactions plays a vital role in optimal development.

   1. Three key findings from the Hart and Risley study (1995):

      1. Amount of parental talk directed to their children relates to the variation in children’s IQ and language abilities.

      2. The amount of talk directed to children from birth to age 3 predicts their academic success at ages 9 and 10.

      3. Children who are advanced in language have parents who talk significantly more to them than do children who are not advanced in language.

   2. A natural language study conducted by the LENA Research Foundation used a digital language processor, which captures a full day of conversation between each child and his or her caregiver. Data available from this study confirm findings from Hart and Risley and add important insights.

      4. Figure 4.3 on p. 135 summarizes key findings from the LENA Foundation study.

      5. Researchers are also using the LENA technology to study interactional patterns of children, including children who have disabilities, and adults in a wide variety of settings.

   3. As children hear auditory information, speech and language development depends on the formation of auditory patterns through the ability to attend specifically to speech, discriminate between speech sounds, detect and generalize regular patterns in the speech of others, store and remember the sequence of speech sounds in words, discriminate between words, compare words to a model stored in memory, and make discriminations among intonation patterns.

   4. Each language is governed by phonotactic rules that allow for permissible arrangements of sounds. The auditory systems of children help them receive, perceive and store this linguistic information for interpretation and then retrieve the codes as they learn to express speech and language.

   5. Fast mapping is a process whereby children hear and understand words in the absence of direct teaching and is associated with the large vocabulary spurt that children achieve at about two years of age.

      1. The process of word comprehension has been explained as a series of steps including hearing the word (auditory cue) that activates his memory about the sounds and syllables of the word (phonological representation) stored previously. Activation then spreads from the phonological level to the word meaning (semantic) level.

      2. Not all types of words are easily fast-mapped.

   6. There is not complete agreement among language experts about how children attach meanings to words, but there are three views for our consideration that refer only to the semantics of word learning.

      1. Semantic feature hypothesis: Each word has its own set of semantic features that distinguishes it from other words. Features are perceptual characteristics such as shape and size.

      2. Functional core hypothesis: Early word meanings are learned primarily on the basis of the function of objects.

      3. Prototype hypothesis: Early word meanings are based on experiences with the object the word represents. This experience forms a model (prototype) against which the child can compare other words and the objects or actions they represent.

   7. The process of expanding and fine-tuning word meanings is called slow mapping or extended mapping.

   8. Prelinguistic vocalizations by babies occur in a predictable sequence across the first year:

      1. Reflexive cries (0-1 month)

      2. Vegetative sounds (0-1 month)

      3. Cooing (1-4 months): vowel-like sounds

      4. Differentiated crying (1-4 months)

      5. Laughing (4 months)

      6. Transitional or marginal babbling (5 months): single-syllable productions of vowel- and consonant-like sounds

      7. Reduplicated babbling (6-8 months): repeated productions of the same syllable

      8. Echolalia (8-12+ months): imitation of sounds and syllables

      9. Variegated babbling (8-12 months): productions with changes in consonant-vowel combinations

      10. Jargon babbling (8-12 months): intonational changes added to syllable productions to give impression of sentence-like behavior

      11. Vocables, phonetically consistent forms, performatives or protowords (8-12 months): productions unique to each child that are consistent patterns of sounds used in reference to particular things or situations

   9. Development of the three stages of a speech act include:

      1. Perlocutionary stage (0-8 months): infant is responding in a reflexive manner to her environment

      2. Illocutionary stage (8-12 months): gestures combined with vocalizations to express a range of specific and recognizable communicative functions

      3. Locutionary stage (12+ months): first meaningful words are produced

   10. There are documented early indicators of intentionality, which provide information about early communication skills in prelinguistic and linguistic infants and toddlers. These are gestural behaviors which emerge in an overlapping function.

       1. Deictic gestures are used to call attention to or indicate an object or event and emerge between 8 and 12 months.

       2. Representational gestures signify some features of an object or its function and are often seen in infants by about one year of age.

   11. Researchers have uncovered a developmental sequence to imitation that reflects infants’ acquisition of the understanding of another person’s goal and their ability to use trace memory and to generalize what they learn.

   12. By the time infants have reached their first year, pointing becomes a way to interact further with people, things, and events in the infants’ surroundings. There is some debate as to whether pointing at this age shows communicative intent or whether it is for the self only.

       1. Halliday concluded that nonlinguistic utterances may be used to convey four identifiable communicative intents: satisfy wants and needs (instrumental), control the behavior of others (regulatory), interact with others (interactional), and express an emotion or interest (personal).

       2. The term protodeclaratives describes when a child points to the objects or events of focus by the child and adult.

       3. The term protoimperative references the gestures used by the child to control or manipulate the behaviors of others.

   13. The child’s first words are used in reference to things that matter most in her own world. She names people, objects, and actions that are of immediate interest. Children also use social greetings or request simple actions. Children in the first-word stage must use the same words to express many different functions.

       1. Overextension and underextension are common characteristics in the language of young children.

   14. One way to classify nonlinguistic utterances and single-word utterances is by function.

       4. Halliday expanded his list of early communicative functions to capture the functions of single words (Table 4.5, p. 161).

       5. Dore called the single-word stage primitive speech acts (PSA). A PSA might be a word, a change in prosodic pattern or a gesture. Dore found that children could use these communication skills for a variety of functions (Table 4.6, p. 162).

   15. Words can be categorized in other ways besides function.

       1. Bloom suggested that early words are of two basic types:

          1. Substantive words refer to objects or events that have perceptual or functional features in common. Agents refer to things that cause action, whereas objects refer to things receiving action.

          2. Relational words reflect the child’s understanding of object permanence and causality, as they refer to actions or states of being that can affect a variety of categories. These most typically refer to the appearance or the disappearance of objects or to the location of objects.

       2. Nelson interpreted early vocabulary from a grammatical function: nominal, action words, modifiers, personal-social words and functional words.

       3. Early words of children are predominantly nouns.

   16. A presupposition is an assumption the speaker makes concerning what the listener knows about the subject of the conversation. The child in the single-word stage is just beginning to develop presuppositional skills, which continue to develop throughout the preschool and school age years.

   17. By the time the child is 18 months old, she is demonstrating some of the basic rules of turn taking in her conversations with other people, including turn taking, assuming knowledge and taking into account a partner’s perspective.

   18. Roger Brown developed a specific stage model. Brown’s stages of syntactic development are widely used by language experts to describe the development of grammar.

       1. Brown tracked syntactic development of English by measuring the average number of units of meaning expressed in utterances across a sample of language.

          1. A morpheme constitutes each unit of meaning. Types of morphemes include free morphemes and bound morphemes (derivational or inflectional).

       2. Mean length of utterance (MLU) is a calculation of the average number of morphemes a child produces in a representative sample of utterance. To determine the MLU, count the morphemes in each utterance, add the total number of morphemes and divide by the number of utterances in the sample.

   19. Brown’s Early Stage 1 occurs in 12- to 22-month-olds with an average MLU of 1.0-1.5.

       1. In this stage, children use one-word utterances, so only one morpheme is used at a time. Whole words are not combined with bound morphemes at this stage.

       2. According to some observers, children may go through a transitional stage between single-word and multiple-word productions.

   20. Brown’s Late Stage 1 occurs in 22- to 26-month-olds with an average MLU of 1.5-2.0.

       1. We know that the child typically begins to put two words together between the ages of 18-24 months.

       2. These 2-word combinations represent the beginning of syntax.

          1. The child discovers and applies rules for putting words together in a manner that creates meaning greater than the added meanings of the words along, which is the definition of a

       3. The significance of two-word utterances can be examined and described on three levels: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic.

          1. There are at least two ways to describe syntax in two-word utterances.

             1. One approach suggests that the child may choose two words from four basic sentence constructions: subject, verb, object and adverbial. These options allow the child to produce clause-like utterances with subjects and predicates as well as phrase-like constructions that include modifications of a subject or predicate.

             2. Another approach suggests that the child uses a primitive form of grammar called pivot-open grammar with open words and pivot words. This approach has been criticized because it does not take into account the meanings of the child’s productions.

                • One of Bloom’s primary contentions of this approach is that it does not take communicative context into account allow one cannot determine how a child is using language unless one. Using context to help determine the meanings or a child’s utterances is referred to as rich interpretation.

             3. Researchers who suggest that early two-word utterances reflect the child’s understanding of meaning relations and rules for word order refer to the rules used at this juncture in development as semantic-syntactic rules. Other experts have proposed several semantic classification systems they believe will more adequately describe children’s two-word combinations (Table 4.9, p. 172), and other researchers have identified additional two-term relations.

             4. The functions or intentions identified from Halliday’s work are now combined and modified into at least three new functions: pragmatic, mathetic and A child at this stage abides by some of the basic rules of conversation.

          2. There is evidence that the child will begin to produce 3- and 4-word combinations at approximately 24 months.

       4. For as long as people have systematically studied language and language development, there have been questions about the relationship between comprehension and production. There is appealing logic in the assumption that comprehension must precede production, and many linguists have held that view. Others are not sure that the relationship is this simple.