COMM 522 Exam 1

Phonological Development

• Pre-speech Vocalizations: Infants begin with vegetative sounds (burps, gurgles) and crying. In the expansion stage at about 8 weeks, they start making cooing sounds and experimenting with prosody, showcasing early social smiles and turn-taking.

• Vocal Play (16 weeks): At this stage, infants experience laughter and begin vocal play, involving squeals and shrieks.

• Babbling Initiation: By 36 weeks, the babbling phase begins, characterized by marginal and canonical babbling, which includes repeated syllable sets (e.g., CVCV patterns like "Mana").

• Variegated Babbling (48 weeks): Non-reduplicated babbling emerges, showcasing diverse syllable combinations while infants begin to tune their prosody. Despite recognizing familiar words, they struggle to produce accurate pronunciations.

• End of Babbling Stage (52 weeks): By this time, babbling drifts towards native speech sounds, with the creation of "proto-words" that hold meaning (e.g., "Yum" for food). Infants can discriminate phonemes but face challenges with minimal pairs up to 18 months. The first words typically use CV structure and involve front sounds (e.g., alveolars).

• Phoneme Acquisition:

  • 2-3 Years: Children acquire phonemes like p, b, m, n, and wh.

  • 3-6 Years: Additional acquisition includes t, k, g, f, u, t, y, d, z, and g.

  • 5-8 Years: Affricates, glides are acquired.

Lexical Development

• Nature of First Words: First words (around 10-15 months) symbolize arbitrary sounds representing meanings. A word's referring meaning gets integrated into the mental lexicon alongside production, syntactic class, and definitions.

• Elements of First Words: Words are often context-bound, meaning they apply only in specific situations. A child's first word (like "more") might connect words to particular contexts, typically representing nouns.

• Vocabulary Growth: Children acquire their first 50 words around 15-24 months, primarily nouns with some modifiers, reflecting their daily experiences with familiar people and objects.

  • Input quantity and quality, variety, and pragmatic usage influence vocabulary growth. Some children may highlight more social expressions, while others lean towards less social usage, producing varied rates of lexical acquisition.

• Word Learning Process: Children comprehend names as early as 5 months, learning through a process involving identification, segmentation, and mapping. They utilize statistical cues from continuous speech, aided by child-directed speech (CDS) prosody.

Word Relationships and Extensions

• Indeterminacy Problem: Children utilize mapping strategies like the whole-object assumption—assuming a word represents an entire object—and the mutual exclusivity assumption, figuring out mappings through the elimination process of familiar vs. new words.

• Word Extensions: Children exhibit proper extensions (e.g., recognizing a Border Collie as a dog), under-extensions (considering their specific dog as the only dog), and over-extensions (generalizing all four-legged animals as dogs). Issues with these extensions signify natural vocabulary growth challenges.

Morpho-syntactical Development

• Basic Morphology: Morphology divides into free (independent) and bound (attached to other morphemes) morphemes, detailing inflectional morphemes and their roles in language, such as plurals and tenses.

• Basic Syntax: Syntax refers to grammatical rules allowing for productive language. Sentences typically involve subject-verb-object structures.

• Sentence Development: Early utterances include vertical constructions (single-word phrases) and unanalysed word combos. Transitioning to productive systems involves structured phases, including two-word combinations that represent agent-action and agent-object expressions.

• Complex Sentences: As children reach about 2-3 years, they begin using three-word combinations, leading to telegraphic speech where non-critical grammatical elements may be omitted.

Communicative Development

• Linguistic vs. Communicative Competence: Linguistic competence involves the quality of meaningful production and comprehension, while communicative competence relates to the appropriate use of utterances, which includes pragmatics, discourse, and sociolinguistics.

• Development of Pragmatics: Pragmatic development involves understanding the varying content, function, and effect of utterances, framed by the Speech Act Theory, which discusses the illocutionary force, location of an utterance (form), and the perlocutionary effect (intended outcome).

• Discourse Development: Effective communication requires children to learn conversational rules, as outlined in Grice's Conversational Maxims, which focus on quality, quantity, relation, and manner in conversational exchanges.

• Grice's Maxims:

  • Quality: Be truthful.

  • Quantity: Provide just enough information.

  • Relation: Stay relevant.

  • Manner: Be clear and concise.